banktime.com

Nowadays, you meet so many people who are out of work and who have probably been looking for a job for a really long time. When these people find a job, the first thing out of your mouth is probably a heartfelt congratulations. Too bad that, for some people, the start of a new job is just as financially stressful as the period of unemployment before it. As reported by the New York Times, many recently-employed Americans have had to settle for positions taking a good deal less money than they were making before.

The story profiled two women: Chelsea Nelson of Mountainburg, Arkansas, and Donna Ings of Lexington, Massachusetts. Nelson, aged twenty-one, recently started work as a waitress at a truck stop. Depending on how many tips she earns, she makes between seven and eight dollars per hour. Ings, aged forty-seven, is working as a home health aide for a healthcare company making ten dollars per hour. Both women had to search high and low for jobs: Nelson, who is married with a two-year-old son, moved her family all the way to California in a fruitless search for a job. Ings was out of work for a year before she found her position. Both women are thrilled to have found positions in such a difficult market, but they are financially struggling due to having taken significant pay cuts from the jobs they had in the past. They’ve supposedly beaten the odds, but they remain worried about supporting themselves and their families. Ings formerly worked as an executive assistant for a wholesale tuxedo distributor, and Nelson used to be a secretary.

In the United States, the rate of Americans on unemployment insurance assistance remains over nine percent. With the amount of citizens out of work so high, there has been little time or energy to devote to the question of the quality of the jobs that these people might hope to get. Every hoped-for recovery has so far panned out, meaning essentially that the focus remains on simply getting people back into the job market. The full extent of underemployment and insufficient employment might not be realized until long after the ravages of this recession have ended, the Times pointed out.

One of the factors affecting the quality of jobs, it was indicated, is a trend in job growth that has been in place since well before this recession started. The best jobs, those with high salaries and great benefits, were definitely growing – but they have always required a lot of education, training, and, sometimes, experience. On the other hand, jobs in the service sector were also burgeoning: jobs requiring almost no training, schooling, or special skills, but which paid only very modest salaries. In other words, middle-class jobs have been in short supply since long before overall joblessness became an issue. The recession only took that trend and amplified it.

People lost jobs in all areas of the spectrum, but those working in mid-level jobs (nurses, secretaries, office support staff, etc.) never had enough jobs to gain back their previous status level. According to a joint paper by the Center for American Progress and the Hamilton Project, the years between 2007 and 2009 saw very few changes in the total number of “high-skill” and “low-skill” positions, but a sharp drop off in those jobs classified as “middle-skill.” Now, workers from all former skill levels have found themselves competing for the low-skill positions.

It’s been found that the most job growth in recent days has happened in segments of the economy where wages tend to be “low to middling.” A massive number of the jobs available today have incomes of less than fifteen dollars per hour. Experts like Annette Bernhardt, policy director for the National Employment Law Project, have called the difference between lost jobs and those available currently to be “staggering.” Simply said, there is almost no way that someone working in a relatively-comfortable middle-skill job before the economic crash would be able to get a job that well-paid again these days. The positions simply aren’t there. Bernhardt was quoted in the article as worrying about how “working families [would] have a way to support themselves” if this trend towards “bottom-heavy job creation” perseveres.

Historically, recessions have been particularly harsh on the poorly-educated. What happens is that people with better education, qualifications, and experience generally get re-employed the fastest after a period of unemployment, because they fill in all the availabilities on the low end of the job availability scale, edging out those low-skill workers even though they are technically overqualified for the position. During the Great Recession, it is true that those workers with the least education seem to have been hit the hardest, with their periods of joblessness lasting longer. Interestingly enough, however, it’s been found that middle-skill workers ultimately suffer the most when you take into account how many of them have had to settle for jobs that don’t pay them nearly enough. It’s a problem unique to this group of people.

Take Ms. Ings, for instance. During sunnier days before her lay-off, she comfortably supported herself and her now-adult daughter with her salary at the tuxedo wholesaler. She earned over sixteen dollars an hour, and had what she describes as a “comfortable” life. Ings, who never got child support, stresses that she felt it was her job as a good mother to make sure she always had a good job to support her daughter. She was laid off in March 2009, at which point she says that she fully expected to find another “corporate job” with a similar pay grade. Little did she know, however, that times had changed and that it wasn’t that easy – the people offering jobs comparable to her old one now wanted workers with at least a bachelor’s degree. Ings, a high school graduate, could no longer compete with the flood of her unemployed peers, many of whom had better credentials than she did.

Ings decided to obtain her certified nursing assistant (CNA) certificate, so that she could apply with home healthcare companies. She considers herself lucky to have found a position with the Home Instead homecare company, which is one of the few employers in Lexington to have been hiring steadily. Home healthcare is booming as an industry, since the number of sick people out there is not impacted in any way by the recession. Home Instead has created twenty-four hundred jobs nationally this year. Ings was happy to get the position, but her drastic pay cut has been stressful, she says. She works fifty hours every week, and has been financially struggling – and that’s without health benefits. Shortly, she’ll become eligible for insurance coverage through Home Instead, at which point even more money will be deducted from her paycheck. Ings frets that she’ll be bringing virtually “nothing” home as pay, and worries constantly about the future.

Nelson, for her part, says that she constantly rues her decision to quit college when she was eighteen years old. Her former job as a secretary making twelve dollars per hour wasn’t bad, but she had a very hard time finding a replacement job when she was laid off, she says. Compounding the trouble was the fact that Nelson’s husband also struggled to find steady work, and they have a small child. The family moved temporarily to California to be close to family members in the hopes that they would find a more amenable job market. That didn’t work out, and they ended up back in Arkansas. Kenneth Nelson got factory work making eight dollars per hour, but Chelsea struggled hard until the waitressing gig came along. The small, young family is currently living with Chelsea’s mother as they scrimp and save money for their own home someday. Chelsea remains pessimistic that their dream will ever come true. With the “jobs [they] have,” she points out, it’s hard enough just to get by.

These stories are hard to hear, and are so emblematic of the struggles being faced by countless American individuals and families today. It’s tough when you’ve been on unemployment for a year or more to not jump on a job as soon as you are offered one, but few people stop to consider that their financial stress might have no end in sight. Although the rules of unemployment insurance state that beneficiaries may not turn down a valid job offer, many people purposefully prolong their time on benefits in a futile quest to find employment that will get them an income close to what they were making before. It’s a sad fact that most never will.

This is, of course, a vicious cycle. People not making enough money are likely to continue being late on their mortgage payments, car loan payments, and credit card bills. They are less likely to spend money in an economy that badly needs some economic stimulation. Ultimately, this will stall the creation of more new jobs. Is there really any question why people say that things really aren’t getting any better, despite the promises of politicians?