Your Recession

Here’s the first episode of Salon’s new series on joblessness, which is titled F**ked (people watching at work: the video never says the curse word explicitly, but the censored version is displayed rather large as the title).

The series looks at the lives of the 99ers, those who have been jobless for so long that their unemployment benefits have been entirely used up.

Regardless of how you feel about the politics of the 99ers this series looks to be a thought-provoking watch.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

It might look like Stacy London‘s life is nothing but peaches and sunshine, but the stylist and co-host of TLC’s What Not to Wear has had her share of failures.

“I was actually fired when I was the senior fashion editor when I was at Mademoiselle,” she explained in our Media Beat interview. “In retrospect, I can say it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. At the time, I was furious. I thought that I had done a really great job, a really strong job while I was there. And one of the things that was really hard was that I sort of had to reconfigure how to identify myself. I’d associated myself really with my name on that masthead for so long that it took a second for me to figure out what’s next. It actually took about a year.”

The most important thing she learned? That a forced “vacation” can ultimately lead to a personal (and career) breakthrough.

You can also view this video on YouTube.

Part 1: Stacy London: ‘It’s not just about the clothes. It’s about the psychology behind them’
Part 2: What Not to Wear’s Stacy London Takes Your Fashion Questions

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer shut down March 17, 2009 to be replaced by an online-only site with much fewer staff.

The former book critic, John Douglas Marshall, hasn’t yet found gainful employment.

He wrote in the Atlantic last Friday that he’s cashed his last unemployment check. Nearly 3 years of unemployment, 400 applications, three in-person interviews.

It’s not a happy story. He’s been freelancing and applying for jobs. He’s clearly a qualified, intelligent human being, like so many of the jobless.

And yet…

I honestly thought that I could land another regular job, even if I was a few years short of retirement. That turned out to be a Fractured Fairy Tale, as my blue file folder testifies.

That folder, now 3 inches thick, scarcely contains all the weekly logs of jobs that I applied for in order to qualify for unemployment – three jobs every week during two years of federal unemployment, then four jobs every week during six months of Washington State unemployment. That totaled 400 job applications, from my first to be communications director for a Seattle private school on 4/8/2009 to my last to be a technical editor for a staffing agency on 6/30/2011.

My weekly logs contain jobs in writing, editing, marketing and communications, jobs at non-profits, at publications and publishers, at retail concerns, at universities and colleges, at ad agencies, law firms, the zoo, even a few newspapers. … I never heard back from most places I applied and only scored three in-person job interviews from my 400 applications, three in-person interviews that taught me how close I could come to landing a job and still not get it.

Ugh, ugh, ugh. Our condolences go out to Marshall, who is one of those people who is doing everything right and not able to catch a break. Like millions of other Americans today.

Touching story from Theodore Ross in the New York Times’ Opinionator about being laid off from Harper’s, and what happens to your social life afterward.

“I received no gold watch or commemorative plaque, and the $75 service fee to cash out of the profit-sharing program was higher than the amount owed me,” he writes, but at least there were some farewell cocktails involved. First, he went to a bar with his old editor and a writer he’d worked with for a few years. The second trip “included the full assembly of my friends and co-workers. I recall being thanked, with only minimal sarcasm, for my exemplary contributions and years of service. A few politely indifferent questions regarding the direction and progress of my book were asked, I believe; and while pledges to stay closely and eternally in contact weren’t stated explicitly, I feel confident that they were implied. The rest vanished mysteriously into the depths of a shot glass.”

Then there were the lunches, the coffees, and so on, “to preserve a connection, however tenuous, to my former life.” Yet ultimately, as anyone who’s changed jobs knows, it’s a futile effort…see how well it turns out by reading the rest of the piece.

Editor’s note: Writer and marketing professional Mary Katherine Rossi contributes this tale of job search and phone interview woe. Sound familiar? Probably because we’ve all been here before. If you have a tale, let us know too—we’ll be happy to be your outlet for catharsis.

It’s like I’m on my umpteenth blind date. I’ve gone through the rigmarole before, but maybe this will be the one. I try not to, but I talk loudly around him and I cough to muffle awkward pauses. Even so, I tell myself I’ve got what he’s looking for. But ultimately, he just isn’t that into me. The difference is that my date is a job recruiter and we’re not out to dinner. It’s time for a phone interview.

I’m about to talk to Doug, a recruiter on the west coast who contacted me on LinkedIn to discuss an entry-level communications job in my town. I’m overqualified for the position, but with the state of things…well, you know. Can’t be overly picky. Plus he showed interest first. Has to be a good sign.

He suggests an 8pm EST call. Seems late, but I agree. The day of the interview I entirely mismanage my time and end up answering the call in my car while parked in a grocery store parking lot. I’m freezing, have no notes in front of me (the ultimate plus, if any, of a phone interview), and worry that a car alarm will randomly go off during the call.

The phone rings. I answer the call with a polite yet personable “Hello?”

The response: gurblegurblegurble. I hear nothing but static.

“I’m sorry?” I ask courteously.

The second time he’s perfectly clear. “It’s Doug? We have a phone interview scheduled?” I’ve said three words and he’s already annoyed. I have to turn this rocky start around and wow him with the goods I’ve got for this job.

He starts asking the usual questions. I structure each response to show my range of previous work and capabilities. I’m no bigwig, but I’ve been in the field for a couple of years. I think I’m a pretty great catch.

His responses went from “Uh huh,” to “Yep, okay,” to “Oh, well that’s interesting.”

His obvious lack of interest in my answers weaves in between mocking the area of the country I live in, which is also where the job is located. I get it, I live in the Northeast, it does indeed snow here and yes, it gets quite cold. Oh, well that’s nice your pool is still open. Let’s focus on what I can say to impress you.
Read more

Congress has passed the unemployment benefits extension that has been held up in the Senate for weeks due to a filibuster. The House of Representatives approved the measure by a 272 to 152 vote on Thursday, which sends the bill to President Barack Obama‘s desk for his signature.

“Unemployment benefits protect those who are have lost their jobs through no fault of their own but would lead to more jobs, higher wages, and a stronger economy for all Americans,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), according to NPR. “The money will be spent immediately on necessity, injecting demand into the economy, creating jobs.”

The bill will restore unemployment benefits to nearly 2.5 million people who have gone without work for over six months or more. These benefits ran dry seven weeks ago, while Senate Republicans and conservative Democrats filibustered the measure in defense of growing deficits. The bill does have a steep price tag, adding $34 billion to the national debt. The Senate finally voted in favor of the extension by a 59-39 vote on Wednesday night.

The bill finalized today will act retroactively; meaning those who have gone without payments over the seven-week period will receive compensation. After Obama puts his signature on the bill – which he says he will as soon as it gets to his desk – the payments will start flowing, possibly as early as next week.

After being sworn in Tuesday as the junior senator from West Virginia, Democrat Carte Goodwin provided the 60th vote needed to break a Republican filibuster and allow an extension of unemployment benefits to move forward.

The Senate still needs to give final approval to the bill which could happen today.

The extension doesn’t provide more benefits for those who have exhausted their 99 weeks, but it does allow for those who have been out of work for 26 weeks or more to begin to collect unemployment again. About 2 million Americans were cut off from promised benefits after the old unemployment benefits bill expired in May, a move analysts said was like “pulling the rug out from someone halfway through.”

Are you waiting for your benefits to be reinstated? Let us know. Either way, we’ll keep an eye on the issue for you.

We’re blogstalking today, and found this.

Tech writer. Loved her coworkers, the environment, but never got good at her job, she says.

“I’d sit down at my desk, spread open a binder of user manuals or guides and stare at meaningless words on a paper that talked about wiring and batteries and electronics. I liked the technical aspect of the language, and I honestly tried my hardest, but I’m no engineer.”

She put in two years, fresh out of college, and was laid off last week. There was crying. A lot of crying, really: “Matt made me breakfast, I cried. People called, I cried. People texted, I cried.” But the experience of being laid off was also liberating: “I was handed my freedom yesterday,” she wrote.

It really is like a Kubler-Ross process; you have to cry and scream it out before getting to “okay, make the best of it.” And if you’re fresh out of school and have no expenses besides student loans, well, that makes it easier.

What’s next? What’s ever next? Not to get all philosophical on you. It sounds like this particular blogger may go from tech writing to travel writing. But really, the open road is ahead.

photo: Amarillo Chuck

Do unemployment checks prolong the recession? To listen to some, sending those weekly checks just encourages people to sit at home watching videos on YouTube. But according to Les Leopold, author of The Looting of America, that’s patently wrong.

“We’re down 8 million since the start of the Great Recession. We aren’t even creating enough new jobs to keep up with population growth. So what jobs are the unemployed not taking?” he writes. “Economist Dean Baker suggests that the Republicans are trying to keep unemployment as high as possible right now because they think that high jobless numbers will spell disaster for the Democrats in November. And if we give the unemployed extended benefits, that money will act as a stimulus, generating more jobs. Well, we can’t have that!”

Besides, while it is true that some people use their unemployment checks for ill rather than gain, we can’t all be this guy.

Other myths Leopold tackles are the idea that people are simply too expensive to hire, thanks to benefits like health care and pensions, and the idea that the only “real” jobs worth creating are private sector.

On the benefits issue, well, Leopold concedes that companies could indeed save money by paying out fewer benefits to employees, but that it’s been shown that money saved doesn’t get invested into growth.

And the private sector ain’t really so private: “Has anyone noticed that private industry has been on the public dole for decades? We have millions of alleged private sector jobs funded by the Defense Department and through subsidies for industries from sugar to oil, and of course banking. We’ve given so many tax dodges to corporate America that most companies pay almost no taxes at all. The idea of a purely private sector is pure fiction, a soothing fairy tale for Tea Partiers and faith-based, free-market ideologues.”

So what do we do with this information? Take to the streets in protest? Write our senators? Or just cry into our pillows at night?

Since the recession began, a full 55 percent of Americans say they’ve been unemployed, taken a pay cut, had their work hours reduced or become involuntary part-time workers, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Social and Demographic Trends Project.

That number looks a lot worse than the official 9.5 percent unemployment rate or even the 15-20 percent rate that includes “discouraged workers” and part-timers. According to Pew, 32 percent of Americans have been unemployed at some point during the recession. Also, unsurprisingly, more workers went from losing a full-time job to gaining a part-time one than the other way around.

Half of Americans say their finances are worse now than they were at the start of the recession, and two thirds of them say it will take their families three years to recover. And many workers are delaying retirement.

Sound familiar? If you’re one of the 55 percent, none of this is news; if you’ve been lucky enough to have kept your job this whole time, it may be somewhat of an eyeopener. Fifty-five percent? Really?