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What If You Still Cannot Find Work?
“Economy, in Sweet Spot, Adds 313,000 Jobs. It May Get Sweeter.” — Washington Post
So, here I am, in month five of not working. Failed to land a client on my first pass at consulting. While my wife found a job after 15 years of not working, After 25 years of working, in the greatest recovery in that 25 years, I cannot get anyone even to interview me. I have taken advice. I have networked. I have submitted lord only knows how many resumes. I have changed my cover letter for jobs. I have met with a dozen people in “informational interviews.” Either I don’t hear back, I am told “someone else is better qualified” for jobs I could do in my sleep, or I get “You have a strong resume, and you are going to find something.”
Now, I am not using this thread to complain, for am I actually in better spirits than ever, all things considered. For one thing, I am almost walking normally. No, this thread is more about the general idea of those left behind. In a world gearing up for the millennial crowd, folks like me are left out. Oh, in theory, my age is a protected class, but age discrimination in the workplace is alive and well. Overqualified just means “you are going to cost too much.”
What I think conservatives need to acknowledge is that we have a culture where working is needed to survive. We value work, and rightly so. However, the fact I cannot find a job to hire me, even stuff I am very overqualified for, shows that “get a job” is not much of an answer. Sure, we can say that no employer owes anyone a job. But, what do we say to someone who plays by the rules, did nothing wrong to lose his job, and cannot find someplace to take his 25 years of experience? I have heard already all the advice on how to obtain a job. It has not worked. LinkedIn has a group full of people in my age range, and they all have similar tales to tell. So, I am not owed a job, and I have to earn it. Great. I did that and the outcome was losing a job I had earned, and thus far, no one will offer me another chance. Not even a chance at an interview.
What I expect to see in this thread, is lots of advice on that boils down to “well you must be doing it wrong.” Classic conservative response, which is to blame the person with no job. Believe me, I am doing everything I have been told to try, networking, and I am working hard, daily to launch by business, TalkForward. I do think that is my long term right path. I just have to try to support my family in the meantime (another conservative “should”).
I’d like to avoid the advice giving, and concentrate on what our message should be. Right now, we tell people they must work hard to get ahead, that they have no right to a job, and that if they work hard, they will get a job and succeed. OK, gang, I am a model of a hard worker, I am not lazy, I give my all to every task I am assigned. I worked from the bottom of an organization to the top. And it was taken away for nothing I did wrong. I am doing everything conservatives have told me to do, and I am not getting the American Dream. What do you tell someone like me, other than “Life is not fair?”
I feel if we cannot message better than this, then the Republican will always be the second party. I fear if we cannot find a message to address people like me, the left will always win in the long run, because it has a message to address it.
Published in General
Employer based health insurance is insanity. It makes no sense at all. I don’t see how we have any option but to switch to a very simple, stripped down Swiss system.
TL;DR :
Networking is good advice. Take advantage of Internet – particularly sites like LinkedIn ( make sure the keywords are appropriate ) or anything associated with your skills. Give something away
I did consulting (software and product development ) for about 30 years of my 50 year career. Every job and client that I can remember came from some personal connection – no matter how tenuous. That is the reason for all the advice to ‘network’. In my field, there were several software interest groups and I sometimes gave talks that led to contacts. Other jobs came from prior co-workers at earlier jobs. These days, Internet has made it easier to make contacts. I joined LinkedIn to be able to give a reference to an employee at an earlier job and never paid it much attention, but have had several leads from that.
My last ‘real’ job was with a small startup co-founded by an Engineer that I had known from an earlier job. After about 5 years, they sold out to the Fortune 50 company we were competing against. About 2 years ago, BigCo decided to shut our place down and offer some of the employees (amazingly, all under 50) a move to the main site. I was close enough to retirement that I just retired and went back to consulting when things interested me. One job was through a co-worker who tracked me down through LinkedIn.
Can you give something away? A friend of mine a year or so younger was downsized by BigCo the same time I was. He was a hardware engineer and wanted to build a device that could be attached to an iPhone to turn it into a piece of electronics test gear. Before he had a product, he put together a website that documented the design process and in particular, his learning curve in working with a fairly new analog chip. His site became a high hit on Google for anyone trying to work with the chip or hardware interface to an iPhone. The marketing group involved with the chip started sending referrals his way and he eventually got an offer from Apple and has worked there for the last 3 or 4 years.
I am not one to say, but I quit my job today, technically I asked for early release to two weeks after 30 day notice but whatever.
My plan. I have a large inheritance that sadly I am getting to help cushion (I would trade my dad back for the cash, but it doesnt work that way they tell me).
Regardless, I intend to start writing again. Which I have shown in the past to be a modest supplement. I also intend to start doing a couple podcasts and do some local political volunteering while I keep active.
Tom Woods has plenty of options and guests on his show about how they reinvented themselves and started working for themselves. Perhaps instead of looking into a job that doesnt exist for you anymore, its time to reinvent yourself into one of many other things.
I mean if none of the above two jobs work out for me, on the short term I plan to go into temp work or work with my brother on film locations.
A friend of mine worked 15 years as a corrections officer. One day he is laid off by the government. A friend of his got him working locations for films. Now he has traveled the world. He worked his way up to location manager and is trying his hand at screen writing.
The big thing I want to do is get out of wage slavery and start making my own way. Maybe thats what you need to do to.
And finally, the “message” is, it’s your life and you should fight to keep it your own, even when you happen to currently be on the wrong end of the stick.
Charles Hugh Smith has books on this too. I love both of those guys.
Woods will pimp your website if you use his recommended hosting service. He’s big enough that he gets paid sponsors just like the flagship podcast does.
Stop thinking of every job as a career. It’s not. Do it for fun, dignity and money; then wait for someone to give you a break, likely someone you know. Not every job has to go on your resume. And keep pounding on those friends and acquaintances. Yeah, some will be annoying and some may try to avoid you. Find ways to meet with them outside of your job search – golf, lunch, whatever. They may be calling you someday when their luck runs thin.
This is just my opinion. There are certain people that are way better off if inflationist-statism “works.” This includes some of the private sector. Their feedback loop of power comes from taxing inflation. Assets, wages, property taxes etc. It can not work in the opposite way. You have to have redistribution in this system. This got unmanageable after NAFTA, China opened up, and robots. It would be nice if the GOP got realistic about what is going on.
Because I know you didn’t want advice, Bryan, I’m loathe to add this, but not quite loathe enough to stop myself, evidently: Someone with a successful history in social work, and personal experience with dyslexia, might also be valuable to local colleges’ centers for accessibility and disability support.
It is a problem that every advanced country adopted the welfare state so there is no reasonable control group to compare against. It is also difficult to do comparisons to states pre and post welfare statism due to how much the periods differ in other ways, for a start most of the EU and the US went full welfare state before or after WWII — which is a highly anomalous time. What is clear is that welfare states taken to the extreme have proven to be disastrous and states like France that have gone very far have serious issues. Could there be some sort of Laffer Curve of welfare so that a little bit of welfare results in the best society? I suppose, but that is exactly as counterfactual as the claims you are complaining about.
Personally, I think welfare slows growth and everything else that goes with growth due to the effects of removing funds from productive uses in order to make people more comfortable in the present. I think the curve is fairly flat for small amounts of welfare statism but quickly rises taking away large chunks of growth away. If the welfare state is slowing the rate of growth and technological progress by just 1% per year you’d end up with enormous differences once compounded over 100 years. Given that the welfare state is redistributing around 13% of the economy I’d be very surprised it if wasn’t at least a 2% drag on the economy. So the fact that when we look around right now and don’t see a disaster is a perfect example of the seen vs unseen.
Hard actuarial stabilizers by law in any government actuarial system. The central bank keeps it’s mitts off of the economy; all it does is back up banks in a punitive way. I see no point in pensions for government employees; just pay them more instead. Something like that. Then it might work. Think of how far away we are from that.
These days another metric should be placed into the equation – what benefit to Corporations is now resulting from social programs? I think it is JP Morgan that receives a certain percentage of every transaction occurring when a person on welfare uses their food stamps debit card.
What good did we get for decades of FICA taxation? A 15% tax on labor in what is now a globalized labor market. A bunch of IOUs in a file cabinet in Virginia? A bond market collapse? All it is, is intergenerational theft.
I think the reason conservatives have trouble writing messages of hope for large groups is because we are oriented to individuals, not groups.
I used to joke to my Republican friends that Democrats love groups but hate individuals. Republicans hate groups but love individuals. :)
You’ve encountered at least one of those. And hysteria about the president – or anyone/anything else – isn’t part of my portfolio of responses. Nor is it germane to this wide-ranging discussion. :-)
They want the system to work. They want “nice” experts to make it work. The want to believe in…I don’t know…people being decent to each other out side of honest trade and families or whatever. They want to believe in the efficacy of non-public goods. Well, good luck with all of that.
Try thinking about how all of the parts of their belief system have to fit together. It’s not easy.
Boilerplate: I’m not talking about all anti-Trumpers.
Two of these three things are wrong:
So you’re right, we have a messaging problem. To start with, we should stop telling people things that clearly aren’t true.
Sure it is a problem when making analysis but if we assume some rationality in the choices societies make the fact that none lack a welfare state I think tells us something about what is or isn’t possible. If conservatives speak out against the foolishness of socialist utopianism, is it not possible that a welfareless paradise is also impossible and utopian?
And so maybe conservatives should admit that they too want or need a welfare state just a differently set up one, because the value of the welfare state is arguably partially psychological. It represents our collective investment in each other, it is a tangible representation that we feel for each other and sympathies with those in hard times. And isn’t that what the demand is and the critique of conservative messaging in the OP is?
I think the polling data and voting behavior suggests that most Republican voters support Social Security and Medicare and oppose any large changes or cuts to either program. The idea that we should eliminate or somehow privatize them is more the domain of hardcore activists and/or libertarians, more of an extreme than a mainstream position.
In practice, we’re all socialists now. The difference between a progressive and a conservative is that the former want a much larger (and more expensive) welfare state while the latter think the current size is just right and oppose further expansions. The only ones who truly want a much smaller welfare state are the libertarians, and frankly there just aren’t enough of them to have any meaningful impact on modern politics.
More proof that in the end we lost the Cold War, that a statement like this is seriously made on what is supposedly a a conservative website.
And we don’t know what the hell we are doing.
Also, be sure to vote.
This reminds me, there is no good reason to not read “The End Is Near…” by Kevin Williamson.
The only reason we haven’t taxed the e middle class even more for our horribly run redistribution system is because of discretionary central banking. We are obviously at the limit of that stupid idea, to0.
Your experience is not universal, though. I see people with 20-30 years of experience getting hired into my company, being hired as contractors/consultants, making a ton of money in consulting, all based on their experience and education. All up and down the main drag here in Charlotte.
That said, there is something to the age thing, and I do think it revolves largely around cost, and probably skill set. It’s generally true that you don’t see lots of younger people signing up to learn the latest toolsets at work, of any kind – it’s usually the younger crowd. Marketable skills have been, and always will be, marketable. It’s quite possible to get left behind in this, regardless of years of experience. When I have to show a 60-something person how to do a VLOOKUP, and they make a lot more money than I do, is that also “fair”?
Haven’t read through the entire thread but where you’re applying for jobs, the types of jobs you’re applying for, the requirements for those jobs, etc, are all huge factors. I had an MBA in Vermont and had trouble making ends meet. I moved to Charlotte, NC, for a job, and my salary doubled.
It wasn’t an accident. I had to uproot and go if I wanted a better-paying gig with professional development potential. I got the offer, and 3 weeks later I was at a desk in Charlotte.
I wish you the best of luck. I’ve been unemployed. I’ve been fired. I’ve been on permanent SSDI disability, but recovered, and was told it was easier “just to stay on” – but I got out of it because I wanted to be normal again and work again. All I did in these instances is find a way through to the other side. There’s no one path.
This is my own pedantry, but a welfare state, even a generous one, is not necessarily socialist. The key feature of socialism is that some entity other than private individuals or organizations control the means of production.
I just want to insist on this point, because loose use of the word socialism is what’s causing people my age to think that the ideology that killed 100 million people in the 20th century is no big deal because it’s just Medicare for All and Free College.
But if you make sure the distinction remains clear then Medicare for All and Free College will be debated on their own merits. Is that a good thing?
Are we talking about the difference between “The deserving” poor and the undeserving poor?
Setting aside the fact that Valiuth is now talking like a Democrat, the problem is when you start using government force to effect all of this, it gets unwieldy and dishonest really fast. Look around.
I would prefer to debate them on their own merits now, rather than to be in a position twenty years from now where I or my hypothetical children might have to escape America the same way my father escaped communist Czechoslovakia.
Or, to put it another way, I don’t know if it’s a good thing, but destigmatising socialism by conflating it with popular ideas is definitely a bad thing.
I have been persuaded to moderate my views based upon experience, education, punditry, and discourse, that this is probably true in a sense. I think it has more to do with the idea that uncertainty is a thing and the it is possible that people who have lived a minute, been a few places, seen a few things, can see themselves in broken and desperate people.
and it is terrifying. One of the things about a future time perspective is that being conservative by nature means you can see the future and all the terrible things that can go horribly wrong, and that these horrors can happen to you too. Which is why Hayek was a welfare statist. This view of all the places that danger lurks in the future is why conservatives typically propose that people proceed wisely and prudentially in their behavior.
That is not the definition of socialism. That’s the definition of fascism. Communism is when the government not only controls it but own the means of production (a.k.a. property).