Despite applying for several of the few job openings which have occurred, our search for employment continues to be futile. I’m beginning to think we’ve both really hit that glass ceiling of age discrimination but how does one actually prove it? Does being asked the question if I can “keep up” while interviewing for a housekeeping job (while the inference was very obvious), qualify? The unemployment numbers here are the highest in the nation as evidenced by this recent article from the Yuma Sun, from which I have excerpted crucial parts:
“The Yuma-area's jobless rate inched downward, reaching 26.7 percent for the month of April, according to the latest figures released Thursday by the Department of Commerce. But it's a statistic that isn't showing much stability from month to month....
Even the state's troubled construction industry managed to post a modest gain of 2,200 workers. But overall construction employment is still 19,800 below what it was a year earlier, and 134,700 below the peak in June 2006....
For example, the number of people employed in Arizona in April is still 38,200 less than a year earlier....
But Van Sickle said even the end of the recession - whenever that happens - won't translate into lower unemployment. He said statistics from prior recessions show that hiring usually doesn't start in earnest until sometime later.
"There's a lot of individual people represented by all these job losses," he said, citing the Arizona figures. "Their personal recession is going to continue for a long time."
Job losses are only part of the picture.
"There's a lot of people who had to take pay cuts," Van Sickle said.
"So they could come out and say 'the recession's ended,' but personal recessions will continue for a long time," he said.”
Boy, do we feel the pain of that truth, media hype to the contrary that the country’s recession has ended. One of my biggest fears is that we have no more than moved here than we will be forced, once again, to go on the road, like the itinerant Oakies from the Dust-Bowl in search of greener pastures. When does it end?
