[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: Long-Term Jobless Find a Degree Just Isn't Working

Sat Mar 12 23:07:38 PST 2005

>
>Long-Term Jobless Find a Degree Just Isn't Working
>
>By Nicholas Riccardi
>Times Staff Writer
><http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jobless11mar11,0,1675228.story>
>
>March 11, 2005
>
>Dan Gillespie never thought he'd have to look so hard
>for work.
>
>When the Seattle-area resident left the Air Force in
>1980, he earned a computer science degree and enjoyed 20
>years of steady work. He saved enough money to buy his
>wife's childhood home last year.
>
>Three months later, he was laid off.
>
>Gillespie, 53, hasn't found a job since. Even the corner
>store won't hire him. He and his wife sold the house
>last month.
>
>"The computer jobs are gone," he said. "So what's next?
>We can't all move into gene splicing."
>
>Long-term unemployment, defined as joblessness for six
>months or more, is at record rates. But there's an
>additional twist: An unusually large share of those
>chronically out of work are, like Gillespie, college
>graduates.
>
>The increasing inability of educated workers to quickly
>return to the workforce reflects dramatic shifts in the
>economy, experts say. Even as overall hiring is picking
>up and economic growth remains strong, industries are
>transforming at a rapid pace as they adjust to intense
>competition, technological change and other pressures.
>
>That means skilled jobs can quickly become obsolete,
>while others are outsourced. Educated workers are
>increasingly subject to the job insecurities and
>disruptions usually plaguing blue-collar laborers, but
>various factors make it even harder for some educated
>workers to get back into the workforce quickly. Though a
>college education is still one of a worker's best
>assets, it's no guarantee that a worker's skills will
>match demands of a shifting job market.
>
>The advantages of a college degree "are being erased,"
>said Marcus Courtenay, president of a branch of the
>Communications Workers of America that represents
>technology employees in the Seattle area. "The same
>thing that happened to non- college-educated employees
>during the last recession is now happening to college-
>educated employees."
>
>Even with better-than-expected job growth, 373,000
>people with college degrees quit job hunting and dropped
>out of the labor force last month, the Labor Department
>reported Friday.
>
>The number of long-term unemployed who are college
>graduates has nearly tripled since the bursting of the
>tech bubble in 2000, statistics show. Nearly 1 in 5 of
>the long-term jobless are college graduates. If a degree
>holder loses a job, that worker is now more likely than
>a high school dropout to be chronically unemployed.
>
>That change is occurring as it is getting harder for all
>jobless to get back into the workforce.
>
>Since the 2001 recession, about one-fifth of the
>unemployed have been out of work for more than six
>months - and that proportion has steadily crept up even
>as the unemployment rate has fallen. The percentage of
>jobless who are chronically unemployed is even higher in
>California - 23.3% last month, versus 20.5% nationwide.
>
>Even with the national unemployment rate at a relatively
>low 5.4%, the share of those out of work for more than
>six months is higher now than during the early 1980s,
>when the jobless rate was in the double digits, analysts
>say. The average length of unemployment is also higher
>now than at any time other than the early 1980s.
>
>Analysts cite several reasons for the growing
>vulnerability of educated workers to long-term
>joblessness.
>
>For one, the number of college graduates has steadily
>risen over the decades. So it's natural that more will
>also lose work.
>
>Tech workers, in particular, are victims of their
>successes during the 1990s, when many high-tech
>companies went on hiring binges and wages soared.
>
>"They basically stockpiled workers," said Mark Zandi, an
>economist with Economy.com. Now those companies have
>gotten rid of their overstock.
>
>Higher pay commanded by college graduates also is a
>factor. Wage differentials between those with and
>without college degrees are at record highs. Those
>relatively well-paid professionals may take longer to
>find work because they are more reluctant to accept
>lower-paying work - although many ultimately do.
>
>Educated professionals also have assets, such as stocks
>and homes, that can help tide them over. But digging
>into those assets can be painful, as Khaled Amer
>learned.
>
>Amer's consulting business hasn't had a client since
>June. The electrical engineer hasn't found work in
>months, and as chairman of an Orange County chapter of
>the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers,
>he says he knows of hundreds of others in similar
>straits. His wife recently lost her accounting job when
>the small manufacturing firm she worked for folded.
>
>The couple are surviving by living off a home equity
>loan.
>
>"That has been a saving grace," said Amer, 46.
>
>But the Amers had been hoping their house in Irvine
>would finance their retirement.
>
>The problems of long-term unemployment are even more
>pronounced for older workers, for whom retirement issues
>loom large. The number of long-term unemployed who were
>45 or older doubled from 2000 to 2003. That comes as
>studies show that the elderly are having to work longer
>and put off retirement.
>
>John Challenger, chief executive of Chicago-based
>outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said
>older workers often face age discrimination but may also
>face a tougher time adjusting to the increasingly
>shifting skills needed in the workplace.
>
>"There are more and more specialists," Challenger said.
>"And if there are more and more specialists in an
>information economy, you get people whose skills aren't
>as portable as they used to be."
>
>Paul Kostek, an official with the IEEE, said employers
>had become pickier about what skills they wanted.
>
>"When there's a lot of people out in the marketplace,
>companies can afford to say we want someone truly with
>this experience, not someone who just says, 'Well, I've
>taken a couple of classes in this area,' " he said.
>
>Getting retrained is also increasingly difficult. Job-
>training funds have been steadily cut over the decades.
>Fields that are booming, such as nursing, can require
>years of study that some jobless cannot afford.
>
>Virginia Johnson of San Jose lost her job as a supply
>manager for a Silicon Valley firm in January 2003.
>Except for a nine-month temporary stint, she's been out
>of work since then. Among the many things she's had to
>put off is returning to school to finish her business
>degree.
>
>"Having this time off work would have been great if I'd
>had the money to go to school," said Johnson, whose
>unemployment insurance runs out next month.
>
>It's getting tougher to keep pace with the changing job
>market, analysts say. Two economists at the Federal
>Reserve Bank of New York studied job losses during the
>last three recessions and concluded that the most recent
>one, in 2001, involved "structural" changes in
>industries rather than the usual ups and downs of the
>business cycle.
>
>That means that certain jobs may never be replaced. For
>example, jobs designing computer chips may vanish
>because of fundamental changes in chip design or
>production or because the industry has shipped the jobs
>overseas, experts say. Or businesses' efforts to boost
>productivity may mean that computer programs shrink the
>number of loan officers needed to process applications
>at a bank.
>
>Erica Groshen, a co-author of the New York Fed study,
>noted that though the United States manufactures less,
>white-collar workers increasingly produce goods and
>services on Information Age assembly lines.
>
>"Instead of a room of auto workers," Groshen said,
>"you've got a room of insurance brokers."
>
>Those white-collar assembly-line workers are the most
>vulnerable to changes in the globalized economy, experts
>say. "These are the types of people who are going to
>have their jobs under the threat of outsourcing," said
>Sylvia Allegretto, an economist with the liberal
>Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
>
>Keith Michaelson feels buffeted by those changes. He
>used to be a schoolteacher in rural Michigan. When the
>local school district ran out of money, he studied
>computers and worked at a Wisconsin-based technology
>company for 10 years until it was bought out and closed.
>
>Michaelson moved to Los Angeles to work as a computer
>troubleshooter. He survived one layoff in 2001 and got a
>job at a local nonprofit. But he lost that post last
>September and has been looking for work ever since.
>
>Michaelson said he barely recognizes the job market
>nowadays. "The market changes a lot faster now than it
>used to," he said.
>
>In the meantime, Michaelson is living in a West Los
>Angeles apartment and surviving off his savings.
>"Sometimes I wonder, was it worth it for me to go to
>college or not?" he said. "I'm 45 and not working, I
>don't have much money put aside for retirementÖ. This is
>my retirement [I'm spending], and I'll be working until
>I keel over."
>
>Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
>
>
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand