Talk about stating the obvious:
(CBS News) Unemployment has hit baby-boomers especially hard. For those over 55, the jobless rate has doubled since the recession began, to 6.8 percent. In real terms, that’s more than 2 million people, many of whom once had good-paying, white-collar jobs.
And the older you are when you lose a job, the harder it is to find a new one, CBS News correspondent Byron Pitts reports.
If effort and optimism were gold, Eric Garner would be a rich man.
“I’m the busiest unemployed guy I know,” Garner said. “I mean, I work a 12-hour day. I just want to get paid for it.”
For the past year, Garner’s full time job has been looking for a job. He’s out of bed by 6 a.m., searching the web, emailing resumes by 6:15.
He has 50 different resumes, he says, because he customizes the resume that he sends out for each employer.
Garner was laid off from a financial services firm in 2010. Since then he’s had a few bites, a few interviews, but still no offers.
How is it possible that someone who is college educated, working on a masters degree, with 32 years of work experience can’t find a job?
“It’s tough out there,” Garner said. “I applied for one job they told me there were 300 applicants. The interview process lasted over a month. I got down to the final three and then they hired a friend of a friend who was inside the company. I was a little disappointed but it’s like, okay, something happened, what am I going to learn from this? Make your contacts.”
It’s not you, dude. When are you going to figure that out? You’re just debris on an economic tsunami.
