What happens when you don’t have time to earn it back?
by digby
Arthur Delaney gives us yet another look at the real faces of the economic crisis. This is a group I’m familiar with — the late baby boomers in their late 40s and 50s who are having a hell of a time finding a decent paying job. They’ve gone through their savings and cashed out their retirement funds and they’re just not coming back.
Keep in mind that this remains the biggest single generational demographic in the country:
Americans are more pessimistic than ever about their retirement prospects, with 27 percent of all workers saying they are “not at all confident” about retirement, according to a yearly survey released Tuesday by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. That’s a 5 percent increase from a year ago. What’s worse is that some of the people who should be looking forward to retirement the most don’t even want to think about it. Jayne Dunn, 55, said she’s been out of work since December 2008, when she lost her job as a landscape designer in Cheshire, Conn. She described her job search as “demeaning, demoralizing, just desperately awful” and said thoughts of retirement are forbidden. “You just don’t do that,” she said. “You just think kind of day to day.”[…]The unemployment rate for Americans ages 55 and up stands at just 6.4 percent, compared with 8.9 percent for the population as a whole. But according to the AARP Public Policy Institute, the average jobless spell lasts 45.5 weeks for Americans older than 55, compared with 35.2 weeks for those younger than that. As of October, according to the Congressional Research Service, more than one in 10 unemployed workers older than 55 had been jobless for longer than 99 weeks, which is the cutoff point for unemployment benefits in the hardest-hit states. Just 6 percent of unemployed workers younger than 35 have been out of work that long.And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, among displaced workers — people who lost their jobs after three years with the same employer — folks older than 55 were much less likely than their younger counterparts to have found new jobs between 2007 and 2010. Many long-term jobless in their fifties say unspoken age discrimination is the reason they can’t find work.
Read on for some more of Delaney’s brilliant interviews with economic victims.
It isn’t a sexy story. These are middle aged people, many of them sandwiched between kids in college and aging parents, without a lot of time to start over and rebuild to where they thought they’d be at retirement age. I don’t guess a lot of people are particularly interested in their plight. But it’s worth keeping an eye on even if their fates don’t affect yours. If the economy recovers enough to re-employ these people (not a sure thing) large numbers of the baby boom are still going to be unable to retire from the workforce as planned. That sounds very right to our Randian overlords who think people should either get rich quick or die working. But in truth, having a bunch of elderly people competing for jobs means a strain on the economy as a whole. You want to get them out to make room for the young.
There’s a depression going on in this country for millions of people and some of the hardest hit are people in their 50s who fear they may never work at a decent job again. I know a few of them. It’s a truly frightening situation.
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