Chronic jobless losing faith Sunday, August 14, 2011 By Sara Foss (Contact) Gazette Reporter
CAPITAL REGION — Colin Abele estimates that he’s applied for thousands of jobs since he lost his job as a legal secretary in early 2009. “I’ve applied everywhere I can,” the 28-year-old Berne native said. “I’ve applied at every chain store.” He’s also applied at law firms, but without any luck. “I’ve been told I’m not experienced enough. There are so many people out of work, and the competition is fierce. I only have a two-year degree and a few months’ experience.” Being unemployed, Abele said, is “just devastating.” Abele is one of the growing number of long-term unemployed — people who have been out of work more than six months. “The number of people who have been out of work for six months or longer continues to increase,” said Mitchell Hirsch of the New York City-based National Employment Law Project, which maintains a website that serves as a resource for unemployed workers. Older adults and blacks are the most likely to fall into the category of long-term unemployed, while the duration of unemployment for younger workers is generally much shorter, Hirsch said. “Younger workers typically have a great ability to be hired for temporary positions,” he said. “These jobs pay less, and they have no benefits. But these jobs are usually not career building. That’s a serious issue for younger workers. In the past, you could more readily enter the workforce and be on a career path.” Last Wednesday, a crowd gathered at the state Capitol to call attention to the nation’s high unemployment rate. The rally was organized by the local chapter of the liberal activist group MoveOn.org, as part of a nationwide day of action. Joe Seeman, a member of MoveOn.org, said the rallies were a response to the debt ceiling agreement reached earlier this month. The deal calls for the formation of a 12-member Congressional supercommittee to cut federal spending by $1.5 trillion. Many have praised this focus on spending, saying the government needs to get the federal debt under control, but others have argued that spending cuts will only exacerbate the even bigger problem of unemployment. “Has Congress done a single thing for jobs?” Seeman said. “Ask people if they care about the deficit or getting a decent job.” More than 14 million Americans, or about 9.3 percent of the country, are out of work. Locally, the unemployment rate is 7.2 percent. Hirsch said that there are approximately 6.2 million long-term unemployed people, comprising about 44.4 percent of the unemployed. He said that the average length of unemployment has also gotten longer, and is now about 40 weeks. “Until there’s a significant increase in jobs, it’s going to be extremely difficult to bring down the levels of unemployment we’re seeing,” Hirsch said. Some economists have said that if job growth remains sluggish, high rates of unemployment are likely to persist for much of the decade. Sixty-year-old Cohoes resident Pat Cumo attended the jobs rally. Cumo has been unemployed since September, when the Bon-Ton department store in Latham closed and she lost her full-time job there. She worked at Verizon for 25 years and receives a pension, but said that her work at the Bon-Ton “helped make ends meet. You can live on a pension, but not if you want to do things like go to dinner.” Cumo said she has focused on finding work in the “activist field, where I could help people.” The problem, she said, is that advocacy organizations “don’t have any money” and are thus unable to hire large numbers of people. Her unemployment benefits, she said, are set to run out next month. Astrit Bushi, 38, also attended the jobs rally. He said he was walking around town and decided to stop by. It has been about four years, he said, since he worked regularly; past jobs include construction, customer service, cleaning and driving a cab. Right now, he’s waiting to see whether he’ll be hired as a truck driver. “I will do anything that pays some money,” he said. An Albanian refugee who moved to the United States in the 1990s, Bushi said he has only lived in Albany for a few months, often staying at the Capital City Rescue Mission in Albany. He said he was planning to move to Canada from Jacksonville, Fla., in the hopes that there would be more jobs there, but was turned away at the border. A recent National Employment Law Project study found that some employers are posting advertisements that explicitly state that applicants must be currently employed or only recently laid off to be considered for job openings. “Initially, we were shocked that employers were doing this,” Hirsch said. “But the more we dug into it, we saw that it was more widespread and pervasive than most people imagined.” He said that the type of jobs barring the unemployed from applying run the gamut, “from food service workers to corporate executives, to paralegals and warehouse workers.” Hirsch said that employers prefer to hire people who are already employed, which makes it more difficult for the long-term unemployed to re-enter the work force. “This exclusionary attitude toward people is debilitating,” he said. “If it goes on too much longer, you’re talking about millions of people potentially being unable to work again. They’re not ready to retire, at least not comfortably, and in many cases they’re the chief breadwinner for their families.” Legislation proposed in Congress would bar employers and employment agencies from screening out job applicants solely because they are unemployed. Before Hirsch got his job at NELP, he worked as a manager for an Eastern Mountain Sports store in Connecticut for 20 years. He said he lost his job as part of a restructuring and was out of work for six months. “I was right on the line of long-term unemployment,” he said. Michael Saccocio, executive director of the City Mission of Schenectady, said it is taking longer for mission residents to find employment. “We tell them that they might not find what they’re looking for,” he said. “It’s more competitive.”................>>>>......................>>>>.....................http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2011/aug/14/0814_jobless/
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