Friday, September 13, 2013

Middle-Aged Unemployed White-Collar Worker

August 2013, New York Times: In September 2012, just before his 57th birthday, John Fugazzie worked as a manager for the A&P supermarket chain making $125,000 a year. The very next month he was laid off --- and in the 10 months since then, he still has no job. That is "news".

Middle-aged and older people who had worked all their lives, but lost jobs in the Great Recession and its aftermath, have not been able to get back to work. Many of them worry that they never will, in part because of discrimination by employers against older workers.

The re-employment rate for 55- to 64-year-olds is 47 percent; but the longer one is unemployed (especially for older workers), the less likely they will every be rehired.

In October of 2008 I worked as a bartender at a Las Vegas casino making $30,000 a year before I was laid off. It's been almost 5 years since that time, when I too once looked for work without any results. What are the chances that someone like myself (58-years-old with a GED) could ever find work again while competing with a college-educated 21-year-old for a job at Walmart?

It's "news" today in the New York Times that a white-collar worker like John Fugazzie is still unemployed after being laid off 10 months ago in 2012; but I suppose that for older blue-collar workers like myself who were laid off in the earlier years of the Great Recession, that is the "norm" --- and is to be expected.

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