America and the Struggle for Jobs
And
I’m Doug Johnson. This week on our program, we look at the job
situation in the United States. There was zero job growth last month.
The national unemployment rate was the same as in July, 9.1 percent.
That does not even include people who have stopped looking for work or
part-time workers unable to get full-time jobs.
Coming up, we talk
to Don Peck, author of a new book called “Pinched: How the Great
Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It.” And we
hear from two people about what they had to do to find a job.
Americans face different economic issues. Which one worries them
most? A Pew Research Center-Washington Post opinion poll asked a
thousand people earlier this month. Forty-three percent said the job
situation. About half as many said the federal budget deficit.
Smaller numbers said rising prices and the financial and housing markets were their biggest economic worries.
Three
out of four people said additional spending on roads, bridges and other
public works would improve the job situation at least a little. Many
said the same about cutting business taxes, the federal budget and
personal income taxes. But there was no clear agreement about which
ideas would do a lot to help.
Last
Thursday night, President Obama spoke to Congress to present his plan
for job growth. His proposals include an extension of jobless benefits
for workers who have been unemployed for extended periods. The plan also
includes tax breaks for companies to hire more workers and money for
projects to fix roads and schools.
The Labor Department counts
about fourteen million workers as unemployed. Millions more are working
part time as they try to find full-time employment.
The so-called
Great Recession officially lasted from December of two thousand seven to
June of two thousand nine. Unemployment was five percent at the start.
It reached 10.1 percent in late two thousand nine. This year the jobless
rate has been stuck around nine percent.
There are concerns that
the United States -- and the world -- could face another recession. Some
economists say a "double-dip" could be more painful for average
Americans because the economy is weaker than it was before the first
recession.
Don
Peck is a writer and editor at the Atlantic magazine. In his new book,
“Pinched,” he says economic conditions are limiting opportunities for
millions of Americans. He says the generation of young Americans known
as millennials -- those now graduating from high school and college --
are especially affected.
DON PECK: “The first few years on the job
market are extremely important to setting the career track and life
path of young people. When young people struggle -- when whole
generations struggle in their first few years in the job market --
academic research shows that not only do they start out behind, they
never catch up to where they otherwise would’ve been.”
Mr. Peck
says early in the recession, millennials thought any period of
unemployment would be short. There was even a name for this kind of
thinking: "funemployment."
DON PECK: “The idea that a few months
perhaps of unemployment during the recession, could not only be easily
overcome but could be kind of fun. You know, people were getting
unemployment checks, they didn’t have many financial commitments.
"Many
of them took that opportunity to reassess career, to take vacations,
and I think in part millennials were just trying to make the best of a
bad situation.”
But now, he says, young people are thinking differently.
DON
PECK: “That idea that this period is something that can be easily
enjoyed and that will not materially affect millennials in the rest of
their careers is clearly waning within that generation. I think today
you see among millennials much higher job tenure -- they’re clinging to
their jobs more tightly, they’ve expressed a desire for a single job, a
single employer throughout their career rather than the ability to
switch careers. So that notion of funemployment which many millennials
began the recession with, I think, is long gone today.”
In today’s economy, says Mr. Peck, any work is better than no work.
DON
PECK: “This is a time where young people need to be extremely
aggressive and entrepreneurial and have humility. You know, say yes to
whatever job offers one gets because it’s certainly better to be working
than have the stigma of unemployment all together.”
Twenty-two year old Jessie Way finished college in less than four
years and with honors. She graduated from George Mason University in
Virginia with a degree in technical writing in January. After that, she
spent three months helping her mother who got sick. Then she spent five
months searching for a job.
Jessie was lucky. She recently landed a position as a legal assistant with a law firm.
JESSIE
WAY: "The problem I found myself having was, it's what everyone
complains about -- there's jobs that want experience, but nobody wants
to give you experience."
A demand for experience is not a new
problem for young people, of course. But Jessie Way thinks the situation
today is more difficult than it was for graduates ten years ago.
JESSIE
WAY: "Back then you could say, oh well, I’m just out of college, so I’m
a lot cheaper than these people with experience. So companies could
say, OK, we'll hire some college graduates and we'll have to train them a
little but the price cut is worth it to them.
"Nowadays so many
people are out of work and have been let go and all that stuff that they
can offer that same salary to somebody who does have five years
experience that they used to offer to somebody like me. And it's gotten
to the point now where college kids either can't get a job or can't get a
job that's actually going to pay the bills."
Author Don Peck says one way for young job seekers to improve their chances is by moving.
DON
PECK: “I would really encourage people, particularly if they’re living
in highly depressed places, to consider taking a leap and moving to a
more dynamic region. I think that will help them in the long run.”
A
willingness to move helped Jessie Way find a job. Her new job is more
than an hour from where she was living. But she did not have time to
find an apartment, so she is sleeping on a friend’s couch until she can
find a place of her own.
Thirty-nine-year-old Norm Elrod of Queens, New York, has been laid
off from jobs four times in the past ten years. The last job he lost was
with an online marketing agency. He left in two thousand eight. After
that, he says, he set out to find a way to make himself a better job
candidate. He used online resources to create a website and teach
himself new skills in the process.
NORM ELROD: “That’s how my
website came about. I built that and ran it and essentially trained
myself, or re-trained myself, taught myself new skills that allowed me
to get the job I have now.”
Norm Elrod created a blog called Jobless and Less: The Blog for the Employmentally Challenged.
NORM ELROD: “I wrote about the one thing I seemed to know, which was at that point being unemployed. [Laughs]"
Jessie found her job by answering an online job posting. But Norm says he had no success applying for jobs on the Internet.
NORM
ELROD: “You send your resume out and it goes into a void and one person
will get in touch with you for every one hundred to two hundred resumes
you send out. And it's not because you're not qualified. It's because
they get so many, and oftentimes they're looking for just a certain
thing and there's no way to know what that is.”
His advice to people looking for a job is to learn new skills and meet new people.
NORM
ELROD: “It's very easy to sit at home and send out your resume by
clicking buttons on your computer at your dining room table and feel
like maybe you're being productive. But it's much harder to actually get
out there and meet the people who may know things or can point you
towards things or make that face to face contact. I feel like that is
where any job seeker is going to get more traction.”
His wife’s
full-time job helped the couple pay their bills. They also used savings,
payments from state unemployment insurance and money from projects he
worked on while job hunting.
It was nearly three years until a
contact he met through one of those projects led him to his current job.
Norm Elrod works full time creating content for the website of a major
media company.
The Great Recession was the worst downturn since the Great Depression
in the nineteen thirties. Don Peck says the long-term unemployment that
many workers have experienced can have lasting effects, and not just on
them.
DON PECK: "When you have these long periods of
unemployment, they can really leave pretty big scars on people, families
and communities that are not lost even once the recession is over. When
men, in particular, struggle economically, or when they don’t have
jobs, women simply don’t marry them, but they do have children with
them. And that creates often the sort of unstable family environment in
which children really struggle.”
What would he do about the employment problems in the United States?
DON
PECK: “One of the main messages of my book 'Pinched' is we can recover
from this period faster with concerted public action.”
In the short term, he thinks the government should invest more in public works to create jobs in manufacturing and construction.
DON
PECK: “But I think in the longer term we also need to really work to
build new skills and create more pathways into the middle class for high
school students who might not be going to college.
“That sense of
possibility and that concrete sense of how one can move forward in life
if one isn’t going to a four year college to some extent has been lost
in the U.S. over the past twenty or thirty years. One of the things we
need to do is rebuild that and give young people an understanding of the
ways in which they can build skills and build real careers.”
Our program was written and produced by Brianna Blake. I’m Doug Johnson.
And
I’m Faith Lapidus. You can read and listen to our programs and comment
on them at voaspecialenglish.com. Join us again next week for THIS IS
AMERICA in VOA Special English.
simple present tense :
1. Some
economists say a "double-dip" could be more painful for average
Americans because the economy is weaker than it was before the first
recession.
2. Don
Peck is a writer and editor at the Atlantic magazine
simple past tense :
1. There was zero job growth last month
2. But there was no clear agreement about which
ideas would do a lot to help
simple future tense :
1. I think that will help them in the long run.
2. You send your resume out and it goes into a void and one person
will get in touch with you for every one hundred to two hundred resumes
you send out
