The New Cling-Ons

  Picture Courtesy of Dennis Duitch Consulting

 

 

Global economics took a big downturn in 2008 with the big market crash, and if you haven’t noticed, the job market still has not recovered. Downsizing and phasing out older workers with obsolescent skills has pretty much settled down, at least until the next “market correction,” which many experts see “just around the corner.” The official unemployment numbers suggest a rosier picture than reality because of the restructuring of labor in the United States. But even growth economies like China are now “downsizing” their growth and job projections. Although, the just-released October U.S. job numbers appear bright and consumer spending is on the uptick, below the surface is the reality of the big “reset” in our expectations… and our reality. Younger generations facing the job market aren’t so optimistic anymore as older workers cling-on to their jobs longer.

Here in the United States, a whole pile of workers has just stopped looking for work, and the number of white males between 25 and 54 in the workplace is at its lowest point in decades. They just do not factor into the ordinary unemployment numbers. Statistics tell us that drug addiction and suicide are at an all-time high among this demographic. Many of us (at all ages) have been forced to take part-time or contract work in lieu of more permanent employment – the new “gig” economy. To make matters worse, underemployment of the well-educated and exclusion of the under-educated has combined with the uninterrupted fall in the real buying power of average Americans for decades.

It’s tough for displaced older workers to find work, and even when successful their job searches take a whole lot longer, where they can even find work, than qualified workers in peak employment years. The message to older workers, then, is to hang on and stay in the workforce longer. Don’t quit your job. Don’t retire.

“In its 16th annual retirement survey released [in May], Transamerica researchers found that 41 percent of American workers envision transitioning into retirement by reducing their hours and one in five plan to continue working at the same pace as long as possible. Only 21 percent expect to stop working immediately.

“The desire to continue working into retirement is strongest among those in their 60s. Eighty-two percent of that cohort expect to stay on the job past 65 — or are already doing so. ‘As baby boomers retire,’ [Catherine Collinson, president of the private nonprofit Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies] says, ‘they are revolutionizing what retirement means and what it will look like.’

“Other studies echo these findings. In April, the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s annual Retirement Confidence Survey found that the percentage of people who plan to work past 65 is at an all-time high — 36 percent. One in 10 say they will never retire.

“This isn’t just talk. It’s already happening. Since 2000 the labor participation rate for those between 65 to 69 years old has grown by 37 percent. About one in three is currently in the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The spike is even more pronounced for those in their early 70s, a 42.4 percent jump. Now nearly one in five of 70- to 74-year-olds are still working.” Miami Herald, June 26^th.

The impact on younger workers parallels the refusal of older workers to retire. The youth unemployment rate in the U.S. (the Mundi Index places it at 17.3%) seems terrible, but by many international standards, it’s well within normal limits (just not normal limits we’re used to and significantly worse than the comparable numbers in even Russia and India).

Unemployment among the youngest employables is epidemic the world over, with really hopeless numbers in some of the most volatile regions on earth. “The statistics on youth unemployment are disturbing. Official figures from the United Nations' International Labour Organization (ILO) estimate that close to 75 million 15 to 24-year-olds around the world are out of work. But youth inactivity – those not in work, education or training – exceeds 260 million in developing countries, according to the World Bank.

“Further, many of the ‘employed’ young are under-employed, with informal or intermittent jobs, or acting as unpaid family laborers, making it hard to gain skills and experience. With 20 million young people entering the labor force each year from Africa and Asia alone, a young person’s prospects of getting a good job are dim.

“Young people have had a raw deal in the labor market for some time. Youth that experience unemployment often face a ‘scarring effect’ – they are more likely to go through unemployment as adults and can have an earning gap as high as 20% which can persist for more than 20 years.

“The Middle East and North Africa region, which has the highest unemployment rate in the world (~30%), witnessed the social and political ramifications of youth unemployment in 2011. Young people took to the streets to protest their poor employment prospects and dissatisfaction with their governments. Yet now, four years later, many of these young people still find themselves without jobs. In Tunisia, where the protests started, the youth unemployment rate remains over 30%, while in Egypt, it hovers around 40%.” Dalberg Youth Unemployment Report.

In many developing countries, the dearth of jobs even for educated youth has become the breeding ground for hopelessness and a fundamental basis for militant extremism among the young, particularly young males for whom developing cultures define “manhood” as becoming a stable provider. This loss of meaning, of identity, has created a new anger that often results in violence and intolerance. In the end, economic displacement, the notion of nothing to lose, is a horrible fomenter of discontent, violence (some of it directed inward) and misery. As politicians rally to push jobs to their own kind and keep work from drifting overseas, there’s a price that goes with that effort… everywhere.

Oh, and there’s one more thing, particularly near and dear to the heart of those workers we call “subsistence farmers,” poor devils who work like dogs to survive: for too many, global climate change is taking even those “jobs” away, depleting and desiccating their slim threads to life, destroying the ability of their land to produce crops, eroding the land away or simply killing them with new plagues (if starvation doesn’t do the trick).

“Climate change could push more than 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030 by disrupting agriculture and fueling the spread of malaria and other diseases, the World Bank said in a report [November 8^th].

“Released just weeks ahead of a U.N. climate summit in Paris, the report highlighted how the impact of global warming is borne unevenly, with the world's poor woefully unprepared to deal with climate shocks such as rising seas or severe droughts.” AOL.com, November 8^th.  It’s the ugliest form of unemployment.

With no unoccupied or sparsely populated viable agricultural land left, and migrants already feeling unwelcome malevolence when they try to cross borders to find new hope and possible survival, exactly what will happen to these poor souls? But then, there are so many of us so dedicated to pursuing an unfettered ability to enjoy economic growth that the notion of containing global warming is politically untenable where it matters most.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes it’s just plain hard to accept that we live on a planet with lots of other people, and there is a cost to just about every economic decision we make to protect ourselves.