I work at the unemployment office, so I have a somewhat unique perspective.
First of all, I do case management, and I can tell you right off the bat, the majority of unemployed people are NOT lazy. They are desperate to work. They know the economy is bad, and they are thrilled when they find a job, and they know they are lucky to have work. Very few come in with the attitude that they don’t want to find work, and most of these individuals have other problems (mental illness and other psychological problems) that preclude their holding a steady job.
Most of you have already made the same points I’d make, so if I reiterate anything, it’s because I either want to emphasize that point or add my own thoughts. So forgive any repetition.
How many of you have ever worked at a low-wage job as an adult? I’m not talking about a side job in high school or college. As @Qingu states, a minimum-wage job is exactly that: MINIMUM wage. Let’s take California (where I live) as an example. Let’s say you snag a job, at $8.00 an hour. Most of these jobs are part-time, but let’s say you get lucky and it’s full-time, 40 hours a week. Your monthly gross is $1280; that’s before taxes and other deductions, so that’s not even your actual take-home amount. How many of you could survive on that? Okay, maybe as a single adult who’s very frugal in a state with low living costs, maybe you’d be okay. But the majority of the U.S. population lives in about 1/5 of the states, places like California, Texas, New York, and Florida. These are NOT cheap places to live.
Notice most of the people calling for the unemployed to “lower their standards” are people who have no business moralizing or judging; people who are employed in cushy jobs as pundits, politicians, corporate executives, etc. It’s one thing to lower your standards a little bit, it’s quite another to go from earning $60K a year and struggling with a minimum-wage job (most of which, these days, are part-time; there just isn’t enough work to go around). @Qingu has made the same points far more succinctly than I have.
It’s also one thing when you’re just out of school; very few people should be sliding right into jobs in the high five- and low six-figure salaries. That’s not normal, and only is sort of normal today because the U.S. is now primarily a nation full of finance and service jobs. Those in finance make salaries that are way out of proportion to what they should be making, while those in service jobs are in very low-pay salary ranges (which is where everyone else seems to be heading). When you’ve just graduated, taking minimum-wage and entry-level jobs is expected, and is normal. But what’s “normal” these days is not the same as it used to be. When I was growing up, fast-food places, grocery stores, and gas stations employed many teens and young adults. Today I’m seeing people my age and older in these jobs, and fewer and fewer younger people.
As others have mentioned, the current crisis means many highly educated people are competing for low-wage jobs with poorly educated people who normally fill these jobs. As several of you pointed out, a lot of places will not hire “overqualified” people for a variety of reasons: they’re just there to fill the job, and will bolt when they can (of course they will; who can blame them?); they don’t have the job skills for that particular job (if you’ve been working with computers the last twenty years, you’re not going to land a job as a food prep cook, or as a janitor (where you need to know how to use cleaning chemicals, a buffer, a waxer, etc., or as a warehouse worker (where they want people who can drive forklifts)); the other applicants have the requisite level of experience (as @tedd points out); or the employer wants a certain kind of person (not too old, not too young, not too smart (smart people get bored easily), willing to stand continuously for eight hours, willing to work in hazardous conditions, etc., etc.), and you, my friend, unfortunately are not it.
Unfortunately for many unemployed people, right now employers don’t really get it, in some ways. Here in the U.S., if you’ve been out of work for a certain amount of time, they will not even consider you for an interview. So far this is merely discriminatory, not illegal. This means people who were laid off through no fault of their own and can’t find a job immediately fall into a very insidious trap, regardless of whether they had a cushy job or a paycheck-to-paycheck one.
Also, if you have no experience or the wrong kind of experience, employers won’t consider you at all; also it used to be that employers would offer a training period, but nowadays they just expect you to be able “to start right away.” This means a lot of otherwise plausible job candidates get weeded out right away. Often Human Resources employees know nothing about the jobs they’re trying to fill, beyond what’s on paper. Unfortunately, they are the gatekeepers, which means that someone who may very well have been a great fit in person gets shown the door, based on one or two pieces of paper. The resume and the application are ways for HR to screen people OUT.
Add to this the fact that those who are hiring are overwhelmed by applicants. I spoke to a woman last week who had 800 applications within ten hours of posting her job. A representative from a temp agency last month told me she gets 1,200 resumes a week. There are just way too many people out there without work. I don’t know about the UK or other places, but here in the U.S., the unemployed are woefully undercounted. The unemployment figures are misleading, because they are based on people who are getting unemployment benefits and “actively looking” for work. That means the states determine their unemployment rate on the number of people currently in the system. Once they exhaust their benefits and they are no longer “actively seeking employment”, they get dropped from the rolls, and the number goes down. This is why a number of states (California included) are no longer considered at a “crisis” level of unemployment, and are no longer eligible for the FED-ED benefits (the final tier of federal unemployment benefits). Where it used to be a maximum of 99 weeks, now in some places, the best you can get is 79 weeks, and that number is dropping. The minimum you can get is whatever your state’s benefits period is; again, here in California, that’s 26 weeks. Eventually we’ll be back to just the state benefits. 26 weeks is just six months. Since it takes, “normally,” 4–6 months to find a new job, it now takes probably twice as long as that. Still want to say people are “lazy”? Many are running out of benefits all the time.
Back to benefits. Here in California, unemployment insurance is only offered to certain people; you have to have been working a certain amount of time (at least a year) at a certain number of hours. This often excludes part-timers, and definitely excludes those working in temp or contract jobs. You have to have been laid off or had your hours reduced through no fault of your own (layoffs, company went out of business, etc.). The benefits are calculated using your last paycheck, and are then calculated based on the last three months you worked. You don’t get the full amount; you just get a percentage of that.
Benefits can be as low as $40 and up to $450 a week. That means some people are only getting $160 a month in unemployment, while others are earning a maximum of $1800. Is that enough to pay the bills for a family of four, should the sole earner be unemployed? Hardly “living high on the hog and watching TV.” As you exhaust each stage of benefits, your overall bi-weekly check is gradually reduced. Of course, if you’re still receiving the checks by then, you’re probably spiraling even deeper financially and becoming desperate. Eventually you run out of benefits, and that’s it. For most people, there is no more income. You’re then stuck cannibalizing what’s left of your savings, your retirement funds, etc.
Unemployment is not usually “footed by the taxpayers”; employers pay a per-employee state and federal tax that covers the benefits and the costs of administrating the program. However, as @bkcunningham points out, because unemployment is so high right now, states have had to borrow from the federal government to help pay for benefits. So in that sense, yes, those of us still fortunate to have a job are footing benefits for someone else. But you know what? That “someone else” is your old teacher, your neighbor, the person that used to work behind the counter at your favorite restaurant, the cousin of a friend whose job was shipped overseas, and the clerk that used to work at the store around the corner that imploded because someone in corporate made a stupid financial decision and wrecked the company.
I know this is a long post, forgive me. Part of it is because I live this, everyday at work. Part of it is some of the insensitive comments I’m seeing here: I’m truly an angry white male at the moment. Instead of sermonizing about who’s paying for what and how people should get up off their asses and work, consider that those of us in the United States live in a country where the planned budget for the next fiscal year will have approximately ⅓ of the total budget dedicated to the military. Consider that we live in a world where people at the very top pay less in taxes than most of the rest of us. Consider that we live in a world where corporations have gone a number of years in a row without paying any corporate taxes at all. Consider all of this, and then think about this: why are we attacking each other? Why are we so willing to sneer at the lowest among us, but give everyone else a pass?
We’re not in a recession, or a “downturn”; this is a depression, and anyone who’s been following what’s been happening in Europe, particularly Greece, knows that “austerity” budgets and pissing on the poor has consequences that are going to drag everyone down. The roots of this economic implosion are deep, and unfortunately, we are in a period where it is completely different than before, for many reasons (which requires a whole new post/thread, so I’ll stop for now).
I just wish you could, each of you, trade places with me for a week: try to help find a job for the 70-year-old supporting three generations, including a family member with cancer; try to seek employment for the high school graduate, with no work experience, competing in a market filled with tens of thousands of people more experienced than him; try to help the single, middle-aged stock clerk, broke and living in his car; find a new job for the banking clerk with a high school education, laid off after 26 years when her division closed, who sends out twenty applications a week for two years, and has now given up, uncertain if she’ll ever work again.
Come, come sit with me, come work in my job for a week. Then come back and help me tell these people they are “lazy” and undeserving of our help.
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