It's 6 am, but we've all been up for hours around here. Steve woke up at 2 stressing out about a crisis at work. At 5, he gave up trying to sleep and just took the bus into work. I got up with him partly out of sympathy and partly out of perverse perkiness. I've got an extra hour to plan out the day.
Now that I'm home, I have to be super disciplined or the day degenerates into mindless Internet surfing. I've finally got my writing project for the year in focus. I even made a chart with goals and a status column and everything. Getting published is a huge, long shot, but I really have no alternative. So, I'm keeping at it, even as the inner demons laugh.
A few days ago, I heard about another friend who was dropping out of academia. His seven hour commute was killing him. So, he was looking into teaching at private schools in Manhattan. After a tough morning of self-doubt, I googled "private schools Manhattan teaching." After a few errant clicks, I somehow ended up at the jobs section on Craig's List.
Craig's List didn't have any jobs that I was interested in, but that didn't stop me from blowing an hour skimming ads. One woman is looking for a "humble nanny" to watch her five kids, clean, and make dinner every day between 3 and 8. Any "humble nannies" out there? The woman made sure to describe herself as a "professional mother." I bet she would be a joy to work with.
There has been a lot written about how this is a jobless recovery, ex. the Atlantic Monthly article. My friends, impractical types who majored in the liberal arts in college, have been hit especially hard. There are no editing jobs, no writing jobs, no public school jobs, no part-time jobs, no jobs for musicians, no academic jobs. Even lawyers can't find work. While Wall Street was able to pay back their TARP money last year, the
mood there is still pretty grim. Nobody is hiring, and stress levels
are high.
Joblessness is slowly grinding away on society, as people work through their savings or go on food stamps Those with jobs wake up at 2 in the morning with stress — this is not a good time to be on the job market.
Are things going to get better soon? Phone calls from friends are full of doom and gloom. Maybe things will get better when the crystallized dirt on my front lawn finally melts away and it's time to plant my tomatoes. Maybe we'll have to wait until next year.
Apt. 11d 
I’m having lunch with a friend today who has been looking for a job for over two years. She has a job, but it’s really crappy and she’d like to be a little closer geographically to her family. In a good economy, she’d have a new job by now. She started looking just before the whole thing collapsed, and applied and got interviews. Some of those jobs just dried up before the interview. And then there was a huge dry spell where almost no jobs appeared.
I was going to apply for a teaching job in an independent school. I was away for a week, but the job had only been posted the week before I left, so when I returned, it would have been two weeks. When I went back to the site to apply–gone. No mention on the school website either. I’ve seen lots of lower-level jobs in the tech field–desktop support, help desk. I’ve also seen lots of these types of jobs given fancy-sounding titles, but then when you click through to the job itself, it’s really just a support job.
And writing jobs are non-existent or are technical writing or writing articles at $5 each. Um, yeah, not gonna do that.
I’m grateful that we don’t need for me to work at the moment, but if I really wanted to or needed to, I’d probably have to take a job below my skill level.
LikeLike
If you look hard enough, you can find an up side to anything. This morning on the Today show, they were reporting that traffic accidents are down 9%. The biggest reason? Not as many people driving to work. Ouch.
LikeLike
Second biggest reason: Toyotas are now sentient.
LikeLike
As for writing projects that make money, I think the failed Letterman blackmailer was on the right track. But he got lazy and was unwilling to invest in his cover story. If he’d actually written a passable novel or screen play, instead of a very brief treatment, he might have won in court even if Letterman had still called the cops. You’d probably have to try to market it, but you’d only send out a synopsis, ideally written so as to give a clue about the blackmail-able offense in such a way that only the target would get the point, and a chapter or two of the parts without the blackmail-able stuff. Of course, this requires finding out something bad, but not widely known, done by someone with money.
LikeLike
Bert was laid off three years ago. After 18 months, he found a crummy customer service job. He was there a year. They laid off 5 people in his department the same day. He has been looking intensely since last October. Any area- he was turned down as a $9 an hour tour guide at the local science center. It’s nuts.
Our plan B is now that he is going to grad school. He’s been volunteering at the prison, and really likes it. With an MSW, there are several mid-level paying jobs there. He’ll keep up the job search between now and August. If something good comes up, we’ll take it.
I work at a school. Out of the 35 staff members, 6 of us are then only people employed in our families. We all seriously give each other advice on free and reduced lunch, food stamps, COBRA, etc. We watch unemployment and health care legislation every day and IM each other about developments.
I never thought I would be here at this stage in our lives. But we are. Some days we’re bitter. Some days we’re scared. Most days we just try to exist and keep some of our normal life for our kids.
LikeLike
I’m a former lawyer who hasn’t practiced law in 5 years, though I recently got a literary agent for an anthology I’m co-editing with a friend. Given the collapse of the legal industry, the fact that I left law relatively soon after I started, gained very little trial experience, practiced a very narrow area of law (labor), and now haven’t been employed in law for so long — I think I have a better chance at publishing a book (though the chance of getting a publishing contract is slim to none given the current state of the publishing industry) — than I would in getting another law job.
And unfortunately, we have two Toyotas.
LikeLike
Maybe it’s air pressure from the front moving through New Jersey. We were up at 4 AM as well stressing about work (although did, after an hour or so, eventually fall back to sleep). It seems kind of petty for the post-layoff survivors to be stressed about all the work they have to do, when it’s an obviously lesser concern than the alternative . . . but there you are.
I’m apparently behind on my lingo, because I can’t figure out whether a “professional mother” is a person for whom mothering is her profession (contrast with a “professional banker”) or is a person who is both a professional something and incidentally a mother (contrast with a “stay at home mother”).
LikeLike
One thing I don’t understand is all the charts that show the strip from Texas to North Dakota as relatively unaffected. It rings true to me–my firm has been struggling to find people to hire for the last few months, so the job market for software people in Austin is good–but why would the angel of death have passed over the plains?
LikeLike
Ben, I think it might have to do with the higher commodity prices (oil, corn, wheat, etc.) in 2008. Though prices have since dropped, that boost provided a bit of a buffer. Also, most of that area had little of the housing bubble problem. Also, it is very hard to get people to move to much of that area.
LikeLike
“I’m apparently behind on my lingo, because I can’t figure out whether a “professional mother” is a person for whom mothering is her profession (contrast with a “professional banker”) or is a person who is both a professional something and incidentally a mother (contrast with a “stay at home mother”).”
I expect the writer is not a native English speaker–hence the desire for a “humble” nanny. I’m thinking Saudi princess, or something along those lines.
LikeLike
“I expect the writer is not a native English speaker–hence the desire for a “humble” nanny.”
Now that I think of it, another possibility is that she is an elite from a 3rd-world country where English is spoken widely, if not exactly as we would.
LikeLike
Ben obviously has not considered the fact that people from the Midwest are simply above average, including in their fiscally wise decision-making. 😉
Seriously, tho, I think this is more about what industry you’re in than where you live, to a great extent. Portions of Chicago are seriously impacted: the portions related to law, to manufacturing, to journalism. Other portions are doing OK, those related to technology, health care, food.
I hear what Laura is saying. It’s a tough time to be making your living off the written word.
LikeLike
What strikes me is the disconnect I see between the stock market and the jobs situation/stress levels. States are universally taking dramatic and serious hits to their budget, that’s going to affect a bunch of jobs in the public sector, which in turn will have push effects on other jobs. Greece ad other European economies still seem to have various debt problems.
But, the stocks have recovered, pretty much from their October 2008 fall (though not from the slower leak preceding that). To be perfectly honest, I really fear a bubble, or a false recovery.
LikeLike
bj, completely. I’ve read a couple of different things that have said it’s a false recovery and just a new bubble.
We’ve moved the kids college funds accordingly. I think propping up the banks helped temporarily, but I worry there isn’t enough being done underneath that prop to keep them (and the economy) stable long term.
LikeLike
“But, the stocks have recovered, pretty much from their October 2008 fall (though not from the slower leak preceding that). To be perfectly honest, I really fear a bubble, or a false recovery.”
Here are two and/or options:
1. People are keeping money in stocks as a safeguard against inflation.
2. There aren’t a lot of good choices available to savers/investors right now. The interest available is totally pitiful. We put our house downpayment fund in an FDIC-insured money market account some time ago and we’ve watched the interest creep down slowly but steadily from 3.75% to 1.15% or so, and it’s more or less the same all over. This is a problem for elderly people who need a safe place for their money. If you have $1,000,000 in the bank at 1% interest, that is only $10,000 a year. If you have $2,000,000 in the bank, 1% interest generates $20,000, and so forth. So we’re in the rather ridiculous situation where you have to have several million dollars in savings to generate something resembling a middle-class income.
LikeLike
So we’re in the rather ridiculous situation where you have to have several million dollars in savings to generate something resembling a middle-class income.
It isn’t ridiculous, it’s deliberate bi-partisan policy and an outrage. The Dems won’t protect anything that can’t be controlled by the government and the Reps won’t protect anybody with less than eight figures.
LikeLike
I dunno, MH. As alluring as it is to blame our problems on our government, I don’t see enough regular people making tough decisions and facing up to reality. Instead I see unfocused, unproductive anger and an unwillingness to accept that we all may have to sacrifice for the greater good. In particular I find it breathtaking how willing we are to leave an entire generation (those currently graduating from college) totally hanging.
LikeLike
Instead I see unfocused, unproductive anger and an unwillingness to accept that we all may have to sacrifice for the greater good.
Let me know when somebody proposes a definition of “greater good” that doesn’t boil down to watching somebody gambling when they get to keep the winnings themselves and to share the losses among the crowd. That’s pretty much what banking and public sector pension plans amount to right now.
Also, I wouldn’t call the anger unproductive just yet. I’m coming around to have a greater appreciation of simplicity and the like. I’m hoping that it’s a delayed impact of all the Franciscans who educated me and not just the realization that, if after a dozen years of saving and investing conservatively you get a negative real return, you might was well get used to simplicity.
LikeLike
“Let me know when somebody proposes a definition of “greater good” that doesn’t boil down to watching somebody gambling when they get to keep the winnings themselves and to share the losses among the crowd.”
Right. One reason for anger is people’s dawning understanding of what “we” and “the greater good” actually mean in the current context.
LikeLike
The food stamp link is broken.
LikeLike
On the ‘greater good’ theme, maybe I should change my name here from ‘dave.s.’ to ‘Johnny One-Note’ – the note I seem to be playing consistently lately is unbalanced incentives to negotiators. Anyone reading this who reads the comments at Half Changed World will recognize the following I put up there:
I’m a declinist, and I like catch-phrases. So: (multiple sources) ‘those jobs aren’t coming back’ and, from Herb Stein: ‘If something can’t go on forever, it won’t’ and, from Jesse Unruh: ‘Son, if you can’t eat their steaks, and drink their whiskey, and fuck their women, AND VOTE AGAINST THEM IN THE MORNING, you don’t belong here.’
Once we enabled public sector unions/ teacher’s associations, etc., we had negotiators on the employee side of the table who were thinking about the 50-year interests of their people. Once California put in term limits in the legislature, you had negotiators on the government side of the table who were thinking about the 4-year interests of the government, with the concomitant incentive to kick the can down the road past where they could be held responsible. Unruh-type long-term thinkers who acted as though they would be taking responsibility in ten years for decisions made today were gone. Avoid a transit strike now by making pension concessions which will kick in in ten years? No-brainer! Put a slightly-above-real-inflation escalator on Social Security payments which will have almost no effect on current budget problems? No-brainer!
Willie Brown said recently in his weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle:
“The deal used to be that civil servants were paid less than private sector workers in exchange for an understanding that they had job security for life … but we politicians — pushed by our friends in labor — gradually expanded pay and benefits . . . while keeping the job protections and layering on incredibly generous retirement packages . . . this is politically unpopular and potentially even career suicide . . . but at some point, someone is going to have to get honest about the fact.”
There is a well written and a little tendentious history on this in the Phillip Greenspun blog: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/09/07/history-of-public-employee-unions/
I think we are in a relative decline. Used to be, you could get out of high school, take some welding courses at community college, and go to a middle class life making cars, or earth moving equipment. You could get out of 9th grade and go to a decent life making tires. In previous hard times, even when Studebaker went down, manufacturers and financiers had real incentives to do things in the USA even if it was costly because it was so difficult to do them elsewhere – other governments were corrupt and shook you down, other places didn’t have dependable power and telephone service, you couldn’t hire skilled welders, etc. So from your Studebaker job, you could go somewhere else with your skills. Things have changed elsewhere, and USA is not a monopoly provider of infrastructure, there are good phones in Shanghai and Singapore. Perfectly adequate vehicles can be built in Ulsan. We have to be competitive now in a way we didn’t before, or people just won’t buy Chryslers. So now when Chrysler goes down, those jobs go to Ulsan, and tiding people over is forever, not a year. And it seems to me that TANF and 6-mo extensions on unemployment eligibility has an underlying assumption that those jobs will come back.
Now, some people are relatively sheltered from all this, and it’s luck, not skill. You got out of 9th grade in Akron and instead of going to the tire factory you got a job as a cleaner in the public schools. Pretty random choice, the immediate results were nearly the same, you lived next door – now the tire plant is gone, you have both retired, your wage went up 2% per year for years and years and years with union agreements with the schools and you have a nice pension based on that last income – and the tire guy next door who lost his job in 1986 is really skint. No hope for him. This is playing out across the economy.
If we are trying to learn from history, I think we will do well to look at the 50s and early 60s in Britain, and their attempts to manage decline while groups within the society struggled to get the greatest share of what remained. That suggests a situation where a new Thatcherism could gain a foothold – I am worried, and not sure that’s the best way to distribute the (relative) losses which come as others can do what we have. I don’t think we can keep going with schlubs in Lodi flipping burgers and paying state taxes which go to make up CALPERS investment losses and to maintain $400,000 pensions for retirees from the City of Vernon. Short term extensions on unemployment insurance won’t do it, nor will TANF.
LikeLike
Fixed, Elizabeth. Thanks!
LikeLike
I agree with Dave S. that we as a nation are in decline. We ALL have to understand this. Some of us have no choice; if you’re just getting out of college, you’re screwed regardless.
Frankly the people I’m most angry with are older. People verging on retirement or invested in outrageously generous pension plans — these voters apparently will not even DISCUSS the idea that we can’t afford the things we promised 20 or 30 years ago.
It reminds me of the UAW, which in recent years voted to allow *newly-hired* workers to receive non-union wages, as long as those already in place received no wage cuts. This is not the greater good, people. Likewise when I hear about retirees with two homes receiving medicare, it makes my head explode. I am currently 42 and have been paying FICA taxes my entire working life, and I won’t see a penny of it. It’s a massive generational screw-you, and ironically it’s benefiting the very generation that already lived pretty well and accumulated a fair bit of wealth during their prime working years.
LikeLike
“I think we are in a relative decline. Used to be, you could get out of high school, take some welding courses at community college, and go to a middle class life making cars, or earth moving equipment. You could get out of 9th grade and go to a decent life making tires. In previous hard times, even when Studebaker went down, manufacturers and financiers had real incentives to do things in the USA even if it was costly because it was so difficult to do them elsewhere – other governments were corrupt and shook you down, other places didn’t have dependable power and telephone service, you couldn’t hire skilled welders, etc.”
I think there’s still room for the US to exploit a comparative advantage, if we work hard on making business formation and operation streamlined, fair and transparent, rather than opaque and politicized. The bad news is that we’re heading in the wrong direction on that front, which is the only one where we have a hope of competing against low-wage competitors. As of this year, the US has moved down to 8th place for economic freedom worldwide. That’s not so bad granted how many countries there are, but believe it or not, Canada outranks the US for economic freedom. Surprisingly, Asian countries do not dominate the list. #1 is Hong Kong and #2 is Singapore, but the other countries that outrank the US are Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Switzerland and Canada. What that list suggests is that economic freedom is not at all the same thing as a race to the bottom, which should cheer us up.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704541004575011684172064228.html
Probably the worst thing that’s happened over the past couple of years in the US is the growing perception that business success is now a question of knowing the right people (the automakers) or being too big to fail (the banks, the automakers, the housing industry), rather than providing something that people around the world actually want or need. Keeping previously dominant industries on indefinite life support is not the way to feed, clothe, and house 300 million Americans. We need to stop propping up industries just because they used to make a lot of money 5, 10, or 40 years ago, because in the process, we are crushing the businesses that we need to be making a lot of money 5, 10, and 40 years from now.
LikeLike
jen,
If it makes you feel any better, the Boomers really don’t have any money.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/06/AR2009050603322.html
“How bad are baby boomers at financial planning? Extremely bad, according to Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia Mitchell of the National Bureau of Economic Research. They found that more than one-quarter of boomer households thought “hardly at all” about retirement and that financial literacy among boomers was “alarmingly low.” Half could not do a simple math calculation (divide $2 million by five) and fewer than 20 percent could calculate compound interest. The NBER researchers also found that, as of 2004, the typical boomer household was holding nearly half its wealth in the form of housing equity. Uh-oh.
“For a closer look at the retirement squeeze, consider a study released last month by the Congressional Research Service. Patrick Purcell analyzed the most recent data on consumer finances gathered by the Federal Reserve. He found that for the 53 percent of households that hold at least one retirement account, the median combined balance was a mere $45,000.
“Hold on, you say, that figure includes some younger workers who haven’t started saving in earnest yet. Okay, for households headed by persons between the ages of 55 and 64, the median value of all retirement accounts was just $100,000. Purcell noted that for a 65-year-old man retiring last month, that $100,000 would buy an annuity that would pay a paltry $700 a month for life, based on current interest rates.
“And here’s an extra bit of bad news: The Fed data used in Purcell’s study were gathered in 2007. With stock market declines since then, the median account balances are probably even lower now.”
LikeLike
What’s really funny to me is that I see right-wingers bemoaning the loss of those ‘fatcat union jobs’ that they denounced back in the day.
As for Thatcherism, what was the period from 1980 to now in the USA if not Thatcherism?
(sorry for paraphrasing, the copy/paste function on this computer is glitchy)
Amy P, welcome to the real world of lack of wealth (re: median values of retirement accounts). I recall a study in the late 90’s which stated that half of all households had no direct or indirect stock holdings; of the half that did, the media value was $5K.
Most people won’t retire rich; that’s a lie sold to you by the financial planning industry, and by the right, which is eager to have you cast off the chains of Social Security.
LikeLike
What’s really funny to me is that I see right-wingers bemoaning the loss of those ‘fatcat union jobs’ that they denounced back in the day.
The usual argument is that the jobs were less likely to have been lost if the unions had displayed any flexibility.
Most people won’t retire rich
But if they do, they still get an SS check. A check that is likely larger than that received by somebody who retired without any nest egg.
LikeLike
“Amy P, welcome to the real world of lack of wealth (re: median values of retirement accounts). I recall a study in the late 90’s which stated that half of all households had no direct or indirect stock holdings; of the half that did, the media value was $5K.”
I was just looking at an article that said that
“Nearly half of all workers who left their jobs between 2005 and 2008 decided to cash out their 401(k) accounts instead of rolling their money to a qualified IRA or leaving it in their former employer’s 401(k) plan, according to a study by Hewitt Associates, a global human resource firm.”
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10028/1031590-28.stm
I’ve been seeing a lot of stories in the news about people cashing out their retirement accounts to deal with debt and foreclosure, rather than basic survival (food, shelter, etc.). This is terrible on several different levels. Aside from all the huge taxes and penalties involved, 401(k) accounts enjoy a lot of legal protection from creditors, so debtors should not be significantly tapping those accounts to pay creditors.
There are a lot of reasons why individuals do not contribute to their retirement, aside from the obvious one of not having the money. When my husband got his first big job, we went about five years before he signed up for the 401(k). (Dumb, I know, but I feel a little bit less bad about it reading MH’s lamentations about what his account has done over the past 12 years.) The first two years, we really didn’t have the money, and the last three years was just inertia. The kids were little, we were tired, I didn’t open those scary envelopes from the bank or credit card companies, etc.
There are a number of other problems aside from not having the money or inertia. Among other things, high real estate appreciation discouraged retirement savings and encouraged leveraged real estate speculation instead.
The whole thing is very complicated, but I’d note that there are certain common motifs in the story of federal borrowing from the Social Security and the underfunding of public and private pensions. Either as an individual planning retirement or a public official planning the retirements of millions, it’s hard to be future-oriented and sacrifice present gratification for future gain.
LikeLike
“Now, some people are relatively sheltered from all this, and it’s luck, not skill. You got out of 9th grade in Akron and instead of going to the tire factory you got a job as a cleaner in the public schools. Pretty random choice, the immediate results were nearly the same, you lived next door – now the tire plant is gone, you have both retired, your wage went up 2% per year for years and years and years with union agreements with the schools and you have a nice pension based on that last income – and the tire guy next door who lost his job in 1986 is really skint. No hope for him. This is playing out across the economy.”
The NY Times did an article, a good one I thought, profiling this particular scenario. The “guy who lost his job” was trying to go back to school to become a teacher (even though he didn’t like school).
LikeLike
I hear Dave & Jen’s anger about the promises made to relatively better off people — but, the problem is that those *were* promises made in the past. And, people made decisions relying on those promises. People did stay in public sector jobs because of the promise of security and good pensions; they did so when others were leaving jobs to cash in on more lucrative endeavors. And, even when they didn’t, even when they merely were given gifts by politicians who preferred to make only easy decisions, they were still promised.
bj
LikeLike
Beejay: I’m not so much angry as worried. Let me say that all those promises have been just swell for me: I am civil service, just reached 60. I can now retire with a 60% pension, if I stay five years, 66%, if I stay ten – I probably won’t stay ten. And while I have been in my job, my wage has gone from not-quite-as-good as private sector to, I think, a bit better. I have substantially less responsibility and grief than the manager of a small supermarket, whom I out-earn. And now I am looking at a nicer pension than he is, and from the employer which, if it runs out of money, can just print more.
So, yes, I have something very nice, and which I was promised. And the Feds are in far better shape than CA, NJ, MA, IL, so probably my promise gets kept. We have scores of applicants now, for every job that comes open: the word gets around.
I don’t think that’s good for the country, long term, that the guy at the bar whom the girls flock around is the guy who’s gotten hired as a zoning inspector. That’s the road to Greece. Or New Jersey, your choice.
And I think people won’t stand for it, as they figure it out. Not sure how we get from here to there, but I think it won’t be pleasant.
LikeLike
bj, I guess my point is, what do we as a country do when we made promises we can’t keep? We basically made promises to all kinds of people, not just those with pensions. Think of all the kids who took on massive college debt with the understanding that they’d get a better job based upon that. In a sense the entire medicare infrastructure is a promise that we’re in the middle of breaking because we’re not funding it appropriately.
We cannot afford all these things, that’s the hard truth. So what happens next?
LikeLike
The question of debt and promising is a tough one. Millions of people did plan their lives around certain government programs (which should give us pause about creating new ones). There’s a saying that goes “The constitution is not a suicide pact,” meaning that an interpretation of the Constitution that endangers the safety of the country is not valid. While that expression is controversial, I’d rewrite as “The US Federal budget should not be a suicide pact.” We need to tweak our system so that it lasts a long time (even at a much lower level of benefits), rather than trying to keep benefits at the current level until we wind up going Zimbabwe or bankrupt. The federal government makes a lot of promises, explicitly and implicitly, and Medicare is just one of them.
LikeLike
Here’s an extremely interesting post a Monkey Cage on the ‘promises’ issue: http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/03/learning_the_hard_way_the_marc.html#more
about a Swiss referendum on cutting back pension, just defeated, and a previous attempt at cutting back which was successful. The successful one had provisions to safeguard the least advantage. The more recent was just cuts, as I understand it. In a California context, that might mean you would cut the pension of the former Vernon city manager from $450000 a year to $100000, and keep the $28000 pension of a retired schools janitor the same. Seems like a good idea to me!
LikeLike
The same article that I’ve read about PhD programs and law schools and liberal arts colleges has now been written about trade schools.
http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/109081/in-hard-times-lured-into-trade-school-and-debt
One well-researched article is compelling. By the fifth, I’m starting to think, “Look, sometimes you’ve just got to take a risk, and if it doesn’t work out, just declare bankruptcy and don’t consider it a moral failing.”
I’m waiting now for the article comparing wages earned by high school grads and eighth grade dropouts, showing that high school is a big waste for many.
For lots of people without a lot of good options, more schooling probably makes sense, despite the fact that it is a crap-shoot and there are real horror stories out there.
LikeLike