This might make me sound inconsiderate, but in his position I would take nearly any job I could just to make some money. He can't afford to be picky about what he gets if he's living on the streets.
Yeah, that's what I don't get. Everyone says "hey, all these unemployed could work at McDonald's". The last time they had that massive hiring event millions showed up to fill 50000 positions.
No one wants to admit that nearly every business except tech is sitting on cash and just working their existing employees to the bone because they can (and because it's more profitable). The real hiring is overseas, as it should be.
People like the guy in the video and 99ers may need to start their own businesses if they can't find anything. Necessity is the mother of invention (and entrepreneurship).
If you are able bodied and hard working, you can almost always find jobs in construction or demo (one or the other is almost certain to be doing well in any particular economic situation). These are not good jobs, but they are jobs. At the very least it is generally quite easy to get under the table work with these sorts of gigs.
If you are able bodied, hard working, and reasonably bright, then contact local apprenticeship programs. They are almost always desperate for new people these days. These sorts of jobs cannot be outsourced and are in high demand since the society in America these days so highly encourages everyone to seek university education.
Food service jobs are actually quite difficult for most people to land compared to most jobs. The reason people use it as an example of where unemployed people could work is because lots of teenagers can get those jobs meaning that people who say that are remembering back to when they or their buddies got those jobs.
EDIT: I'm not pulling this out of my ass here, I say this from personal experience. For about 5 years before I got into uni I worked a few jobs in demo (gutting, nothing specialized, just swinging a sledgehammer) and as a migrant farmhand (most of that work as general labour at various processing plants down the coast). Most of my friends from that time went on to get apprenticeships in various trades. I don't care to think about how many pounds of asbestos I probably inhaled, but it was work.
This getting down-voted? This is an eminently reasonable suggestion. If I had need of money and was able bodied I would absolutely apply for such a job if the alternative was homelessness.
Two extra points:
1) At the age of 55, I am not sure how vast a swath of jobs are available in construction. I know crane operators make major bucks, but there is a long waiting list for the training. Perhaps someone with more experience knows of other non-labor intensive jobs in these industries a 55 year old man could find. But maybe in this instance, for this man, it's not the right fit.
2) Regarding asbestos: I hope you're joking. Having three degrees does not entitle anybody to any job. But everyone in America deserves safe working conditions at the jobs they can find!
It is probably one of those "your results may vary" things.
I know people with the opposite experiences. I know people who are just gutting, cleaning, sledgehammering and etc that are constantly looking for more work, taking it where they can find it, and living paycheck to paycheck. There is a work drought. We're talking people without high school educations who have worked jobs like this for years but have been having a harder time now than ever.
On a higher level, I also happen to know the owners of a construction firm. They make solid money (don't know how much for sure but over $150K/yr) who have complained about how they are dipping into savings, investing more than ever in advertising, and still having problems finding projects to do.
I think there is reason to be suspect about the guy in this article, but that doesn't mean times aren't really tough all over.
Regarding apprenticeship-type programs, my father works for the Corps of Engineers, and my uncle is a life-long electrician. Both are work with training programs these days. Each of them has said that it's extremely hard to find someone who is both reasonably intelligent (or able to put down his/her smartphone long enough to appear so) and able to stick with a program through completion.
One of the reasons I could never do manual labor for the rest of my life (after working on farms and road crews) was the sheer intellectual loneliness of it. No matter how strong I was, or how fast I worked (I'm still pretty good with a pick-axe), I was still the loser who didn't go out and blow money at the bar. Worse yet, the area was like 70% male and I couldn't get a date as a laborer to save my life.
The fact is, computers and large-scale engineering projects are really fucking interesting and siphoning off talent from other areas. The dreaded brain drain. Meanwhile, our grid is crumbling and we're playing it conservatively--minor fixes, if anything. If there was some serious thought and excitement put back into it, to not just modernize, but futurize our utilities--we'd see a lot more people start to join.
NIMBY is a problem: no micro-wind farms, no upgraded rail projects, no weird bio-tech projects, nothing new or innovative. If anyone's intellectually curious, why the hell would they want to join something as boring as a public works project?
I was still the loser who didn't go out and blow money at the bar. Worse yet, the area was like 70% male and I couldn't get a date as a laborer to save my life.
That sounds almost exactly like my last programming job. Except it was more like 90% male. :-)
One trick to avoid this gap is to re-enroll in school, at least until you can secure work again. You may have to take loans in the short term, but depending on the loan the interest may be 0% or near 0% while you are out of work. You might even learn topics that will make you even more attractive as an employee, and refresh your memory on topics that you've forgotten about while being out of work (for some reason, these obscure, academic questions seem to be common interview questions). In addition, there are practically always events on campus that offer free food, so you can minimize meal costs this way.
I've had several colleagues in the past few years do this. They'll join a master's program at a University somewhere. The colleagues will suddenly go from unemployed to a rising student with prior, verifiable work history. Once they get a job, repaying the loan is fairly easy, especially if it's a state school.
I really hate the go back to school argument. It sounds to me like this: Hey, you know that degree that is doing absolutely nothing for you right now even though you loaded yourself with debt to get it in the first place? Well, the problem is that degree, which you're still paying for, that's the old model. What you need to do is upgrade to a better degree by taking on more debt. Then you'll really be able to get a job (for reals this time!), and if not, there's always a PHD...
Also, a 0% loan is still a loan, you have to repay the principle, and if you overpay for an education (itself overpriced for the same reasons houses were overpriced), you'll still have to pay that back.
Not arguing for or against, but you remind me that my inspiration for dropping out of college at age 20 was two men I knew who both had college degrees and delivered newspapers for a living. One was a couple of quarters shy of a Master's and in default on his mountain of loans (he later suckered a woman into marrying him and paying them off -- that was his big accomplishment in life) and the other went back to school for a second bachelor's, which never got finished for some reason. He lived with his mom until she died and he inherited the house. The last I heard, he was still delivering newspapers. I decided I could deliver newspapers without a mountain of student loans and would be better off doing so without the debts.
I can only speak personally of the individuals I know who have done this at NC State. The cost per semester is $1,802.17 for one class. The average time that I've seen for the people who've tried this approach has been between 1 and 2 semesters, maybe 3. Of course, I don't know that many people in the first place, so my sample size is limited.
Perhaps this is the strategy he was pursuing when he took on a second masters in acoustical engineering. Getting more degrees will probably not solve his problems, especially for a 55 yr old man.
Ok, fair enough, I'm talking about getting another degree often being a bad investment, you're talking about going to school simply to prevent or fill a gap in your resume.
If that's the goal, let's say you only go back to school for a year. What does grad school cost these days? 28k for public, 38k for private? So you're paying $30,000 for someone to essentially vouch that you're doing something with your days while looking for a job?
Seriously, I'm just not seeing where this makes practical financial sense?
If you are in desperate need of a job, then don't go to grad school for a year to reset yourself, take a handful (at most) of classes at a community college. Paying a handful of thousand (at the most) so that you can find any work in particular is well worth it if that is what you need to do.
I don't find it inconsiderate. the Parent poster is simply suggesting that if you don't have a job, and desperately need a job, take any job you can get.
He did not disparage people who become unemployed, it is obviously something that happens to qualified, hard-working people every year for various reasons.
I agree with the poster's sentiments. If I was ever in a position where I was unemployed, I would take whatever job I could find if the alternative was becoming homeless. Obviously, if Wal-Mart turned me down, that is not a job I would be able to take.
I can see why a hiring manager at a place like that wouldn't want to hire someone highly over-qualified, someone who would be likely to leave at the first viable opportunity of something better (and an opportunity they'd actively be seeking).
