50 Is the New 65: Older Americans Are Getting Booted from Their Jobs -- and Denied New Opportunities

[jtuck004]

108. Well, Werner said they had 100 openings. With 26 million unemployed, that's .0003846% taken

care of right there...and they are one of the biggies. But, of course, they wouldn't fill all those jobs, certainly not permanently, with people who are the most unlikely candidates for being longer-term employees, people who wouldn't take kindly to working a job where they might well be screwed out of any sort of decent retirement, or have to deal with lowball health insuranced.

While a trucking co will hire someone in their 50's, and even 60's, the percentage that have vision or health issues, or simply aren't up to the physical demands of tossing the straps over or unloading and loading, especially if they have worked in an office for 20 or more years, is significantly higher than the younger crowd. And with some experience in this, I can attest to the fact that the liability and health insurance rates reflect this. And there is no employer that is in this for the amount of money they can make for insurance cos, so when and if they can get someone cheaper to drive that load, one will be out the door again.

Of course there are a few that would get on. But in a time when tens of millions of people are out of work, or working jobs that pay so little they have to be on food stamps, are unable to use their minds for more creative purposes, that a few thousands of truck-driving jobs (despite the training schools that like to lie and tell us there are hundreds of thousands of opportunities - - they same lying assholes that tell us that we should be going to college to fill the hundreds of thousands of STEM jobs, which are being filled by lower paid workers on H1B visas when the jobs do exist, and in a time when 50% of college students aren't finding jobs for up to 4 years) for which one only needs a high school diploma and a, what, $10,000 school, is probably not going to be anything close to the answer.

Yes, there are some decent jobs if one wants to move to North Dakota and work pumping sludge out of the ground, or getting in a truck and driving crap around the country (it's very possible to be gone 6 weeks at a time). Some people like that. But for millions of people that means significant changes in their lives such as, perhaps, getting rid of their home, not being able to care for a spouse, all sorts of issues that older folks deal with. Along with millions of others, I have real trouble seeing the 50+ woman in the OP above in the cab of a Peterbilt.

The problem is not that a few tens of thousands of the 26 million unemployed and underemployed can't rip up their lives, leave everything they know and love, perhaps destroy their family, and survive. It's that even then our government policies have been supporting the wealthy as they take as much as they can from workers for the past 4 decades, and selling the assets to the lowest bidder while the inequality this drives is getting worse with each passing day.

Sending 26 million people to trucking school instead of fixing those policies isn't the solution.