The BLS released their displaced workers survey and the results paint a dark and foreboding picture for the American worker. Of the people who lost their jobs through offshore outsourcing, plant closures, business failures and layoffs during 2009-2011, by January 2012 only 56% of them had gotten another job. These are people who held the job they lost three years or longer and there were a whopping 6.12 million people in this category.
What's more disturbing, as if that's not enough, is the age breakdown of displaced workers who were in a job three years or longer. While the job losses seem reasonably evenly distributed, those finding other jobs appear not to be, as shown in the below four pie charts.
As we can see the older one is, the less chance of getting a new job and what a surprise in our nation of institutionalized age discrimination.
Below are the percent still counted as unemployed by age, notice the larger percentages of older workers. Bear in mind the age brackets the BLS provides are not evenly distributed and the majority of workers are between the ages 25-54.
Below are those not in the labor force of these same workers who lost their jobs. One can be not in the labor force due to retirement, stop looking for work, or plain be out of work so long one is no longer counted. How many of those 50 year olds do you believe retired after losing their jobs, their homes and their savings?
The BLS refers to people who held down the same job for three years or longer long tenured. Here is the BLS definition of displaced workers:
Displaced workers are defined as persons 20 years of age and older who lost or left jobs because their plant or company closed or moved, there was insufficient work for them to do, or their position or shift was abolished.
Of the long term displaced workers, 30.8% report they lost their job because the place closed or was moved. A moved business these days usually means offshore outsourcing, although it could also mean to another state and no, China is not classified as the 51st...yet.
More telling is how 19% of those long term employees who were displaced were in manufacturing jobs with 70.3% of those manufacturing workers losing their jobs being in durable goods manufacturing.
Business failures were high as well, so don't assume all 30.8% of those people had their jobs offshore outsourced. The Census reports 776,000 businesses failed in 2009, or 12.5% of all firms.
People who managed to get another job didn't fare too well either, almost a third took a major pay cut.
Of the 3.0 million displaced workers who lost full-time wage and salary jobs during the 2009-11 period and were reemployed, 2.4 million had full-time wage and salary jobs in January 2012. Of these reemployed full-time workers who reported earnings on their lost job, 46 percent were earning as much or more in January 2012 as they did at their lost job. About one-third reported earnings losses of 20 percent or more.
If one adds in the short term job holders the numbers of displaced workers become even more astounding:
An additional 6.7 million persons were displaced from jobs they had held for less than 3 years (referred to as short-tenured). Combining the short- and long-tenured groups, the number of displaced workers totaled 12.9 million from 2009-11.
Another reason this survey is so devastating isthe great job slaughter was already somewhat over by January 2009 as shown by the below job tally per month chart. These statistics are only for people who lost their jobs from January 2009 until December 2011.
Another depressing statistics are of these same displaced workers who were at the job three years or longer, 60.6% got no advance notice their job was gone. Nice payback isn't it? Walk into work one day to get the infamous you're fired and walked out the door by security treatment.
Service jobs and sales people had the chance of getting a new job as a flip of a coin, around 50%. Professional workers' odds of getting a new job were around 60%.
Among the major industry groups, workers displaced from transportation and utilities (67 percent) had a reemployment rate that was higher than the overall reemployment rate for displaced workers. Workers displaced from wholesale and retail trade were the least likely to be reemployed (50 percent). (Workers were not necessarily reemployed in the same industries from which they were displaced.)
Reemployment rates differed by major occupation, but were highest for those displaced from management, professional, and related occupations and from natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations (60 percent each). They were lower for those displaced from service occupations and sales and office occupations, 50 percent and 51 percent, respectively.
This report is absolutely devastating for people have a need to work, a right to work, it's an absolute necessity to survive. Having reemployment rates at the same odds as flipping a coin is completely unacceptable and we hope you are disgusted with politicians and policy makers as we are.
Refusing to hire currently unemployed or between contracts
As long as companies keep barring the unemployed or independent contractors from getting hired and our corporate government is okay with that, there's really no hope. We need a jobs program, a massive one for profession after profession, but that's not planned by anyone (and I'm not talking only about the kind along the highway with signs). People suffered from plant closings; outsourcing; have to wait months or several years for contracts; they wanted to better themselves in school (and we are always told to do that); had to take care of sick relatives, etc. Guess what, miss one day of any job, and you're doomed to permanent underclass status. Those are garbage policies and we suffer because of them and society is suffering because of them too. No country can have this many people not using their skills and education without terrible consequences for everyone. Companies that follow such policies or aren't actively hiring the unemployed because of their status should suffer tax consequences and be treated as social pariahs. How can people complain about the economy and "lazy unemployed" when they are a main cause of so many problems? Millions of idle hands, brilliant minds, and the 1% prosper - can't last too much longer.
true and what we get instead is....
I will write up a detailed post with actual facts, but I just saw Democrats, once again, prompting foreigners to take U.S. jobs and are trying to pass legislation to increase immigration under a lie. There are hundreds of thousands of advanced STEM workers, including those with advanced, up to date skills and patent portfolios, who cannot get a job.
This article, Automated Job Rejection was actually reasonably well read and mentions the refusal to hire the unemployed. We must have over 10 articles describing this outrage.
Corruption trumps any sense of logic to these people
I got tired of trying to work out the logic of these people a long time ago. For example, these CEOs and puppets always say they can't find qualified people and our schools are terrible even when wages are decreasing (belying any supply shortage) and the very same CEOs and HR and politicians attended the same (or worse) schools. Most of the CEOs never were that bright and certainly aren't in any position to judge real brains or talent, they were just ruthless enough to climb to the top. Then, wouldn't you know it, these same people want more foreigners to go to the same schools they just criticized on student visas from China, etc. Then they claim that graduates of these same "crap" schools are so valuable now as grads that they should be allowed to stay here indefinitely lest we lose that awesome education from the very same "crap schools."
Or they can't find skilled workers here, and then hire people who literally came straight off farms overseas with no skills and who were unemployed (I guess the unemployed bar only applies to Americans). Well, keeping 27 million Americans (with that number destined to keep growing) permanently unemployed and replacing them with foreigners on visas or here illegally (or both) is destroying society, destroying fiscal revenues, putting a massive burden on public utilities, schools, law enforcement, etc. as people can't pay into the system and increasingly are locked out of contributing to their own Nation and being heard.
Those people aren't going to hold everyone keeping them locked out of society accountable? Why not, they are being screwed over by "public servants" that swore oaths and betray them daily.
I gave up the logic of it all and just view everything now as serving their paymasters in corporate boardrooms and trying to buy votes with people coming to this country. And then it makes sense.
The Right to Work
You would think it is a right to work. The last policy in the U.S. which said that jobs are a right was Humphrey-Hawkins. The 1970s. If you say work is a right, you will be confronted by the word 'opportunity'. Get a job, I got mine, you get yours. If you are not working, you are worthless, unskilled, lazy and every other adjective used to cut
of job training for the unemployed and Unemployment Insurance.
Not one of the pretenders to the throne has a clue of what to do about the unemployed.
Nothing.
Burton Leed
the two parties don't care about the unemployed
They only care about polls and whether their snow job on the American people is effective or not. Honestly, Ben Bernanke cares more about the unemployed that our politicians do. Since it's silly season I need to overview both platforms and show, x policy presented as "job creator" is actually a massive job destroyer. We know this but let's make it official.
It's positively disgusting watching these people, the only thing politicians know how to produce is spin. The corporate lobbyist agenda is already laid out and both parties will heed their demands.
In-demand skills for the Third Estate - recycling, radon testing
The latest gem. Colleges are offering skills training for the unemployed that "today's employers" want.
Oh, what skills do they supposedly want? Chemical engineering? Neuroscience? Civil engineering to fix our infrastructure? People that can destroy banking cartels and help right the wrongs? What skills do these job destroyers need that they simply can't find in the US?
So-called "non-profit institutions of higher learning" are asking people to sign up for classes at their expense (obviously some federal govt. $ going to the colleges too) for . . . recycling and landscaping and radon testing! Doesn't get any better than that.
Hey, are you 45 and long-term unemployed and "overqualified"? Do you have a BS in Electrical Engineering? Or Nuclear Engineering? Can you design nuclear reactors? Well, GE doesn't want you, you're American and might not go along with outsourcing and CEOs raping companies and nations. But your local college thinks you should pay money to learn how to test for radon. Or if you are lucky, learn landscaping (not even landscape architecture, but landscaping, at a college? anything for tuition money) and see if you'll get hired as a 50 year old woman or 60 year old man with asthma. Best of luck!
Instead of fighting for all the unemployed these schools taught and took money from and changing the national policies killing us, they see $$$$$ at every turn, even if it is making the unemployed poorer. Where's the outrage?
2012 and this our present and future - NASA engineers, veterans, the potential brains and visionaries that could cure AIDS or diabetes being told to become radon testers. Those jobs are fine, but really, is the best the Banana Republic can do for people who can do so much more for the US and the rest of the world? And how do the 97% (Third Estate numbers) really save money, pay off college and grad school debts, and send their kids to college on that?
The Third Estate keeps getting screwed over and the elites just tell us to suck it up (funny how the 3% never change, it's always the peasants that have to lower their goals).
during the Bush administration
There was a community college who received over $1 million in grants to "retrain" highly skilled engineers, computer scientists in "restaurant services". Literally they got over $1 million bucks to retrain college educated people to say "do you want fries with that".
Retraining is such bogus blow off and of course part of the Democrats "platform". It goes to show they are intent on giving away American jobs. You don't "retrain" people who already have the very skills needed so you can import foreign guest workers and offshore outsource the jobs.
It's infuriating to see that and what a racket too.
HR site spewing crap still in 2012
As has been discussed here repeatedly, the average American is being sacrificed in the name of corporate profits, and, serving their masters, HR policies. So, with just under 30 million people unemployed and people dying or going homeless as a result, we still have HR blaming the unemployed in 2012! While fellow Americans die or dip into their savings to literally survive, let's not forget the attitudes that still pervade so many offices that help kill our society. Couldn't be rampant age discrimination, mediocre managers intimidated by smarter minds, visa abuse and visa fraud by corporations, hiring people that won't make waves, nepotism, cronyism, etc. Couldn't be replacing paid talent with 30 years of experience with interns who work for free, could it? HR still believes if you are long-term unemployed, you are simply unskilled and enjoying your free 99 weeks of benefits sipping champagne and partying with the other elite 99ers. At least they say that out loud to keep their own jobs and/or HR contracts. Gosh, HR, I'm sure vets who helped defend the US would love to hear how the long-term unemployed are unskilled and lazy, considering they compose one of the largest subsets of long-term unemployed, along with those who have the most experience (i.e., those subject to age discrimination). So many in HR (with some exceptions) - laughably clueless while serving the paymasters in the boardrooms.
Here's a taste - because when those who are suffering and ignored now get back on their feet, we should never forget those who helped us and those who harmed us so that we may return the favor. Otherwise, where's the reward for all those who did look out for us?
Here you go - read some comments - it's at http://www.staffingtalk.com/unemployed-need-not-apply/