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Monday, Oct 6, 2008
Sure, there are jobs to be found in the so-called economic recovery. You want extra cheese with that, sir?
Feb 3, 2004 | Valerie Chau, 46, earned $70,000 a year as a Java programmer before she was laid off in November 2001. Since then, she's been unable to find a new coding job, and her unemployment ran out at the end of 2003.
"I am one of the many middle-aged people who has just been thrown out. No one will hire you," says the mother of three boys, ages 9, 13 and 15.
The 5-foot-3, small-boned woman is now working as a courier, slinging packages that weigh as much as 65 pounds.
"I'm not a gym person with muscles, so I have to use my back," says Chau, who delivers packages in the San Diego area in a Subaru with 95,000 miles on the odometer, bald tires and shot brakes.
"I don't have a pension. I don't have medical care, and I'm not as young as I used to be," she says. "But my brain is very functional. I'm a software engineer, a book reader, a nerd. I'm a sit-down type of person. I'm not a lifting type of person. But I will do anything."
Chau isn't the only one.
Chad Pratt, 42, a software engineer who just a few years ago made $89,000 a year, moved back in with his mother in Syracuse, N.Y., when his last programming job ended in October 2002. While he continues to send out his résumé, he's taken a part-time gig washing dishes at a pizza joint for $5.15 an hour. "I may get to deliver pizzas," he wrote in an e-mail. "That would be a big step up."
He recently received a paycheck for $126. "You gotta believe I'm not just sitting here washing dishes," he says on his cellphone. "I'm trying to think of some way I can sell Web-enabled services to their pizza place."
As the jobless recovery putters on, the jobs that are being created aren't the kind that match the résumés of these professional software programmers. A recent study by researchers at the Economic Policy Institute found that two years after the recession officially ended in November 2001, what little job growth there has been has primarily been in low-paying jobs.
"We're not really having good job growth, and where growth is occurring it's not in good jobs," says Jeff Chapman, co-author of the study. Data compiled by the researchers shows that in 48 out of 50 states, low-paying "McJobs" are where the opportunities are, instead of jobs that come with an ergonomic office chair, health benefits and a 401K.
"We've really spent a pretty considerable period of time with a very slack labor market," says Lori Kletzer, an economist at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "So far, the economy has been recovering on the output measure, but there's not a parallel sense of recovery on the employment side. I think the next six months are important because this is the critical time to see if the recovery is strong enough to generate jobs."
In the meantime, the ranks of the long-term unemployed in the U.S. are growing, and their benefits are running out. In January of 2004, an estimated 375,000 unemployed workers in the U.S. reached the end of their regular state unemployment benefits, without qualifying for any further temporary federal assistance, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
As unemployment assistance goes away that means dishwashing and pizza delivery for the likes of Pratt and Chau, while they wait and wait and wait for the better-paid work to come back.
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