So Where Do We Draw The Line On Extended Unemployment Insurance, And Why?

[haele]

30. When we drop Social Security access to age 55 and 401K/Pension access to 50.

Last edited Mon Jan 6, 2014, 04:30 PM - Edit history (1)

A good percentage of the 99 week unemployed are between ages 50 and 60.

These people are unemployed because not only are their jobs being phased out (as Dad commented, there are only so many "real" management and lead positions required in this type of economy...), but pretty much no one is going to consider hiring them at any comparable or even somewhat meaningful wage because of their age and what their training and experience should entitle them to. And the longer one is "unemployed" or under-employed, the harder it is to qualify for jobs other than entry level - which younger, healthier, and cheaper workers who are closer to the requirements and qualifications for those positions are competing with the older, over-qualified and long-term unemployed workers for.
People can talk "brain trust" and "experience" all they want, but if the best opportunity to be able to pay one's bills and possibly put a little aside and not go bankrupt is to work for an established company or organization - which is the reality for the majority of workers - those companies and organizations are not looking to pay very much any more. Unions are broken. Ownership won, and Corporations are People, too...
To the corporation, if you're an older, wiser worker, you can always volunteer your expertise for some little compensation, because if you don't, they can always find someone who will work cheaper. Or you can be an independent contractor, competing with all the other contractors who used to be employed at your office that was downsized - or "right-sized" or whatever they call it from twenty-five full time workers to four trouble-call/dispatch desk workers for any crumb of project you can get.

Bottom line is that the "bottom line" is killing opportunity for real follow-on employment for most of the long-term unemployed. Until we as a country come to grips with the realization that we have become the United Corporations of America and set up taxation and social safety nets accordingly, we will be stuck with people who are not going to have any sort of opportunity to provide for themselves once they reach a certain age or skill-set and lose their jobs to cheaper workers or technology.

The cynic in me views a coming dystopia because now-a-days, that's just too darn easy a mindset for this country to allow itself to fall into.
She says "once all the boomers finally leave the job market and the excess adult low-skill workers die off in the prison population - once everyone realizes Money buys security and finally allows themselves and their future descendants to accept permanent social castes. It's so easy to forget the notion of freedom, happiness, or economic and educational mobility, - and when we go slip into that long twilight of Economic Apartheid, of caste and prisons, we shouldn't have a too much of a long-term unemployment issue in this country".

Because that's what the world Ayn Rand and her disciples, all those "Free Marketeers" envisioned would end up being. Tsarist Russia; Rule by Money with 75% more Corporations.

On edit -

Hyperbole aside and in all seriousness, there needs to be a way to realistically identify who is not going to be able to recover when they are unemployed and who is. If you tell a 54 year old computer tech/sys coder - typical for the average mid-skilled older worker who is losing their job - that they are going to be laid off and need to retrain and go into another field, they are walking away from a career where they might have been making $50K - $70K plus benefits, and the expenses that come with having a good 30 year career they thought they would be retiring from at the age of 65 or 70. For the most part, they are not going to be hired back in their career, excepting the few who already got a job lined up through their network. Un-employment or retraining only delays the inevitable for them - they are sliding out of the employable range for their level of skill, experience, and training, and their future is in minimal wage or starting wage work similar to the work they did when they were in their late 20's/early 30's. And those are the workers they will be competing for jobs with until they're physically unable to keep up. They're always going to be a quarter century older than what employers will expect in a worker for those positions, and they are going to have a quarter century's more expenses that go with them, both their own personal and what they potentially cost the employer who hires them. While their maturity in thought and experience may offset some of those costs, it's still a significant disadvantage when it comes to getting meaningful employment when one is coasting into 60.

Laying off the older worker is significantly different then laying off a 34 year old who has only been working for ten years; the 34 year old, when out on the job market or after retraining, is not significantly a different hire than most people are entering either the original or a new career field. Employers will see little downside with hiring someone with ten years working in a career as opposed to someone who's only work experience was odd jobs while going to college or tech school.
And they can more easily promote and justify lower wages to the younger worker who was laid off; s/he will still be looking at working 30 years to regain personal wealth for retirement purposes and can be more willing to accept an entry level pay in exchange for the possibility of regaining what they were originally making prior to the lay-off within five to ten years. The worker can tell themselves they only had a five-year hiccup, and now they are getting a more permanent chance to plan for their future - it might not be what they had originally chose, but they can still work for a couple more decades and make up for the lost time.

The younger person can - for the most part - make due with a 26 week to find/extend to complete re-training type of unemployment insurance that many states currently offer.
Student Loan Debt/Disability/location job availability are complications for them, but for the most part, they can regain some form of meaningful employment within the alloted time frame between unemployment and re-training program completion.
The older worker - that's far more complicated.
Very few companies want to pay what the older worker could reasonably, by rights of reliability, maturity, training and experience, ask for. After all - the willingness to pay reasonable compensation for that older worker for the work they do was the very reason most companies laid the poor sap off, leaving him or her with few opportunities for future employment, in the first place.

Haele