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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
And now we are way off topic. Tschüss!
Patience, @skyler, it’ll come back around; it is Ricochet, after all. :-)
Yes, Jonah Goldberg explains something that we on the right have known for donkey’s years: both are leftwing (if it has any meaning at all) and both are totalitarian and both are socialists.
Here’s my little contribution to this debate:
It is clear, that our best minds at Ricochet run up against the problem that there is not a great message from our side. The best we can do is sympathy and encouragement.
At the end of the day, being conservative does mean accepting that there are often no good solutions. If the fixes were easy, we would have done them already.
Conservatism, and libertarianism can’t work under a discretionary central bank regime. In this situation people either need government or you are just plain stupid to not get in on the graft and rent seeking.
Also me.
Everyone likes to go to Venezuela or North Korea in the examples about statism, but why not look at the real examples of what US progressives want which is France, Germany, or Scandinavia? Those countries are not stuck in abject poverty, I think it is debatable if they are really better off than the US, but they certainly aren’t wildly worse off than us either.
@aClassicLiberal on twitter is very good on this. He’s from Sweden and he’s an actuary and a CPA. I think he lives in Florida.
After my time in the Filipino underground fighting circuit I have promised myself to never do a cage match again. So much ferret blood…
Indeed, I think Sowell captures this idea in Conflict of Visions with his distinction between the Constrained and Unconstrained Visions. The Unconstrained Vision sees human nature as perfectible, and therefore every social problem has a solution if only we are clever enough (and determined enough) to solve it. The Constrained Vision sees human nature as fixed and unalterable, so there are no comprehensive solutions, only trade-offs.
You did what you had to do, man. Those ferrets were asking for it.
Well I think that would be the conservative answer. If one wants to be provocative about it you could say that conservatives need to push small scale personal socialism. These were arguments made of course at the time when the welfare state was being implemented. I think what serves to undermine the individual charity argument is the worry of free riders, ie. people who themselves will not be personally charitable, yet will clearly benefit from the healthier society created by the charity of others.
We we have between 40 trillion to 200 hundred trillion in unfunded liabilities. The debt to GDP gets worse and worse. Social problems are breaking out everywhere. I say it’s the Fed, government actuarial science, the regulation of the financial system, and economic cartels colliding with NAFTA and robots. No one looks at it that way. They worry about the wrong things.
Speak of the devil.
they aren’t liabilities.
Well, there are ways around this. #SoylentGreen
Think about it: If the Fed doesn’t pay for the Illinois pension system, what happens?
I think continuing the use of liabilities as a term is 1.) Technically incorrect, and 2.) rhetorically counter productive towards rational reform.
There isn’t actually an obligation to pay, just a desire to do so.
Grandma will die without her Social Security and Medicare that she “paid” for. Discuss.
I suspect the most likely outcome is the gradual phasing in of “means testing” to these “entitlement” programs. Grandma won’t die, she’ll get her check if that’s her only source of income. Meanwhile, those of us who were responsible and saved and invested money for retirement will not get back most of the money we paid into the system b/c we don’t “need” it.
Most of the people under the age 50, wont receive back only a fraction of what they had “invested” in the social security ponzi scheme. Yes, I imagine it’ll start with means testing, opt outs, and raising the eligibility age. Keeping in mind that when the program started, the 65 year retirement age, was 4 years greater than the average life expectancy. So the original designers of social security, had envisioned a system where most of the people paid would not get any payouts.
Indeed, the actual name of the program is Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI). Just like home owner’s insurance insures against the risk of your house burning down, and auto insurance insures against the risk of a car crash, old-age insurance was meant to insure against the risk of actually living to a ripe old age…
Interdependence, @valiuth?
The old fraternal organizations weren’t perfect, but they also didn’t destroy the economy with theft perpetrated at the point of a gun.
Hi Bryan,
I don’t have any advice. My reaction is “there but for the grace of God go I.” (I am lucky that when no one would hire me, I simply put out my own shingle, but that option is not available to most people.)
All I can offer is that I am so sorry that you are facing this nightmare, and wish you the very, very best.
Gary