7 ms·

Millions of Unemployed Face Years without Jobs

44 points by pg 17y ago

michaelneale 17y ago
The positive spin for HN folk: if you are an entrepreneur, get cracking ! This is both opportunity for you, as well as a Good Thing to do for the economy (yes yes, I know, unlikely to hire a long term unemployed person for a new internet startup, but it still doesn't hurt !).
- pg 17y ago
  Though you might not directly hire a long-term unemployed person, you could indirectly, by causing growth in suppliers.
  - robryan 17y ago
    Yeah, the problem I see with direct hiring is that a lot of the work entrepreneurs do is about creating efficiencies which remove these people from the workforce. Mechanical Turk would be a good counter example but I don't think anyone in the US could realistically make a living from it. Maybe the answer is a start up that aims on giving these people a new skill set, which allows them to do something that is fairly procedural but something that can't be automated. Some of the jobs we find boring and monotonous may seem new and exciting to people just moving into tech.
- jmatt 17y ago
  Yes this is a great time to ramp up a new project. I found a great designer who was laid off from a full-time job as an Art Director. He is doing contract work now but only part-time while he looks for another full-time job. This gave me an opportunity to get him involved with a new project. I got favorable terms on compensation and he's more interested in the project because it's not just another side job. I know a few programmers working in the US on visas that were laid off. Both decided to return to school for masters or phds instead of attempting to find a new job within a month. I'd love to hire them to do work but haven't done enough research into whether that's feasible. Both were previous co-workers. Hard working, smart and motivated to do well as programmers. But didn't have much initiative to step into design or program management. This ended up being their down fall. The company wanted people that could code and absorb layoffs in testing, design and management. Being a good programmer wasn't enough. /sigh Definitely some great talent out there that has stumbled into bad luck with the economy.
  - jmatt 17y ago
    As a follow up, all these guys are borderline cases of "long-term unemployed".
_delirium 17y ago
It seems we have at least ~20 years of a serious transition problem, even if in the long run it's a symptom of positive technological progress: there's a large cohort of blue-collar workers in their 40s and 50s caught out by the rapid decline in US blue-collar jobs. Some will find other skills, or go back to school to acquire skills (and valuable pieces of paper), but can that absorb millions of middle-aged people who have been blue-collar workers all their lives and now find that to be a dead end?
- marshallp 17y ago
  Unskilled workers can progress to doing tasks that involve labeling data for machine learning - computer vision, sentiment analysis in audio and text are examples currently being done on mechanical turk. The only limiting factor currently is lack of imagination and investment from so-called innovators - they'd rather 'innovate' by creating another social network or incrementally improve a 1960s technology (microsoft) than do anything truly useful to society. Efforts in this area include google goggles/voice and microsoft project natal (though it's woefully underfunded compared to it's potential).
rms 17y ago
I only see this getting worse in the future. There just isn't enough work to go around anymore. How many white collar/service jobs don't involve any actual work? I just hope our economic system can adjust so we don't have a perpetual, growing underclass.
- pg 17y ago
  I believe this is an illusion. It always seems like technology is eliminating jobs, but it has always tended to create as many as it kills, which is why after hundreds of years of new labor-saving inventions, the number of jobs is still close to the number of people who want them.
  - sabat 17y ago
    It's not an illusion. It's real. I'm closer to poverty right now than I have ever been in my life.
    - xenophanes 17y ago
      No it's an illusion. I'm further from poverty right now than I have ever been in my life. But personal anecdotes don't actually determine what's going on in a whole country.
      - sabat 17y ago
        What's going on in the country -- that of which I have some direct experience -- is far more than any one personal anecdote. Your experience, in fact, is anecdotal.
  - natrius 17y ago
    http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/21/business/21unemployed_graphic2/21unemployed_graphic2-articleInline.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/21/business/21un... That graph is the scariest thing I've seen about this recession, and I think it makes a pretty convincing case that this time actually is different. I honestly think unskilled labor is dying off. I can't imagine what new jobs can be done with minimal education that won't be automatable within the next decade, and many existing jobs will be lost as well. It's a matter of time before people start smashing self-checkout machines.
aresant 17y ago
Is there any average-skill, reliable way that people can make an income during a down turn like this? I'm thinking outside of the internet-set like istockphoto / writing articles / etc. Tangible, GDP positive tasks. Farming?
- rms 17y ago
  This is not really tangible or necessarily GDP positive, but it does really pay $15/hour while you work from home. I know that 99.99% of work from home jobs are a scam, but this is indeed real, my brother has been doing it for three months now and has gotten several paychecks. They are hiring in most non-UK countries. The job is rating the relevance of results for specified search engine queries. http://www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-us/company/web-site/internet-assessors.htm http://www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-us/company/web-site/...
- _delirium 17y ago
  Cottage industry, possibly? Farming is difficult to pull off at more than subsistence levels without significant machinery, even if you're targeting the relatively high value hand-picked/local/organic market. A lot of the obvious cottage industries also decline during a downturn, like miscellaneous arts and crafts, but I've run across people making decent livings from textile work that they sell on ebay. For smallish amounts of money, one step up the farming chain to baking is fairly profitable. However it gets complicated fast if you want to make a full income doing it, because there's all sorts of health regulations for being a baker or confectioner that pretty much prevent you from doing it out of your home kitchen. Can probably get away with ignoring them if you're selling cookies and bread to <50 friends and friends-of-friends.
  - aresant 17y ago
    That's an interesting idea. Locally I've seen a variety of people springing up offering to do meal services (eg they'll cook for you and your family, as well as their own).
- protomyth 17y ago
  Had a buddy who became a certified electrician. It helped him during the tough times. Also know a couple of people who do some carpentry (furniture, mostly).
xenophanes 17y ago
how can she possibly be in danger of going homeless if her husband gets $1595 a month? it's b/c their rent is 1380. just move to a cheaper apartment. if you're broke with no job prospects and stay in a pricey apartment you can't afford, how is that a sob story that should make us sympathetic to more welfare spending? why should i pay more taxes so she can live in an apartment that costs more than mine?
- natrius 17y ago
  The article explains part of that. It costs money to move. First/last month's rent, utility activation, and the costs of moving their actual stuff.
  - xenophanes 17y ago
    They could have set aside enough money for that when they still had money. Also, you're double counting some things. First month's rent ... you would have paid rent money not to move too for the same month. And last months' rent, well you already paid it where you are, when you move out you skip paying rent for the last month. Basically whether you move or not you pay the same number of months of rent. And you get your security deposit back when you move out and can use that to pay the next one (unless you trashed the place).
    - F_J_H 17y ago
      I'm curious. Do you own or rent?
      - xenophanes 17y ago
        I rent.
    - natrius 17y ago
      Ok, I think I agree. They should move ASAP, but their credit is probably horrible.
    - 17y ago
hop 17y ago
I've been thinking of hiring a bunch of commission based salespeople for our startup. Has anyone done similar? Can people still receive their unemployment until they start making some sales or would they have to stop immediately when they started calling on prospective buyers? We can't afford to put them on a salary yet, but it could be a good opportunity to help get some unemployed people going.
- gcheong 17y ago
  That probably depends on the rules in your state. You should contact the agency that handles it. On my unemployment (CA) form it asks me if I earned any money for the weeks I am claiming for. Presumably they subtract any money I earned for those weeks from the benefit amount I would receive, so it could be that if your employee does not earn any commission for a given claim period then they would not lose any unemployment benefit but its always safest to get it from the horses mouth.
- patrickgzill 17y ago
  It is based on the time period, at least in the state that a friend has worked in. So if the time period is 2 weeks, then if you pay once a month, that will be a 2-week period where they were employed, and a 2-week period they were not. For individuals it is run on a cash basis, that is, if you cut them checks every 3 months, they would only lose benefits for 1 period each 3 month interval.
holdenc 17y ago
The day of reckoning for an entitlement-based economy is coming. Many people will have a hard lesson to learn: no one deserves a job or unemployment benefits. This idealism is a product of good times.
- scythe 17y ago
  Yeah, some people deserve to starve. Fuck 'em.
  - holdenc 17y ago
    I did not say this. I just said some people don't deserve to eat.
  - noonespecial 17y ago
    Nobody deserves by virtue of existing to be supported by someone else. Nature dictates that the least fit die. We humans have decided to disagree. We named it "civilization".[1] [1] We haven't got it quite perfected yet, but we're working on it. So far, it hasn't been half bad.
- greenlblue 17y ago
  Not sure what you mean by entitlement-based economy. Everyone certainly deserves a job since everyone should participate in some productive way in a social environment.
  - holdenc 17y ago
    And entitlement-based economy rewards people based on their situation rather than their contribution. BTW -- Your logic is flawed -- 'should participate in some productive way' != 'deserves a job.'
    - greenlblue 17y ago
      My logic is flawed? It seems to me that your definition of productive participation is flawed since a job by definition is productive contribution. Next time you claim somebody's logic is flawed you better check the axioms, i.e. how your terms are defined.
Alex3917 17y ago
One of my predictions for 2020 is that services like Mechanical Turk are going to employ a significant number of people in the US. The only reason this hasn't happened already is that there is a lot of friction once the tasks get more complicated than checking whether or not an image is porn. But once someone invents a 'programming language' for outsourcing that allows people to easily Turk higher-wage tasks, I think we are going to see an explosion of piecework knowledge workers. The fact is that these people are never going to have jobs again, and once their unemployment runs out there is going to be this huge unexploited resource just waiting for someone to arbitrage.
waterlesscloud 17y ago
But the Obama graph shows massive improvement since Bush left office!!!! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130898 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130898
- jcdreads 17y ago
  No, it does not show that more people are finding jobs; it shows that people are losing jobs much more slowly.
greenlblue 17y ago
What I don't understand is why people aren't calling for massive restructuring of the financial system that leads to fucked up situations like this, i.e. collapsing bubbles caused by greedy investors looking to get something out of nothing. A CEO gives himself a multimillion dollar bonus and nobody flinches and chalks it up to the way the market works. If the cognitive dissonance doesn't make your head explode well then there isn't much point to making up sob stories like this.

44 points by pg 17y ago

The positive spin for HN folk: if you are an entrepreneur, get cracking ! This is both opportunity for you, as well as a Good Thing to do for the economy (yes yes, I know, unlikely to hire a long term unemployed person for a new internet startup, but it still doesn't hurt !).

pg 17y ago
Though you might not directly hire a long-term unemployed person, you could indirectly, by causing growth in suppliers.
- robryan 17y ago
  Yeah, the problem I see with direct hiring is that a lot of the work entrepreneurs do is about creating efficiencies which remove these people from the workforce. Mechanical Turk would be a good counter example but I don't think anyone in the US could realistically make a living from it. Maybe the answer is a start up that aims on giving these people a new skill set, which allows them to do something that is fairly procedural but something that can't be automated. Some of the jobs we find boring and monotonous may seem new and exciting to people just moving into tech.
jmatt 17y ago
Yes this is a great time to ramp up a new project. I found a great designer who was laid off from a full-time job as an Art Director. He is doing contract work now but only part-time while he looks for another full-time job. This gave me an opportunity to get him involved with a new project. I got favorable terms on compensation and he's more interested in the project because it's not just another side job. I know a few programmers working in the US on visas that were laid off. Both decided to return to school for masters or phds instead of attempting to find a new job within a month. I'd love to hire them to do work but haven't done enough research into whether that's feasible. Both were previous co-workers. Hard working, smart and motivated to do well as programmers. But didn't have much initiative to step into design or program management. This ended up being their down fall. The company wanted people that could code and absorb layoffs in testing, design and management. Being a good programmer wasn't enough. /sigh Definitely some great talent out there that has stumbled into bad luck with the economy.
- jmatt 17y ago
  As a follow up, all these guys are borderline cases of "long-term unemployed".

_delirium 17y ago

It seems we have at least ~20 years of a serious transition problem, even if in the long run it's a symptom of positive technological progress: there's a large cohort of blue-collar workers in their 40s and 50s caught out by the rapid decline in US blue-collar jobs. Some will find other skills, or go back to school to acquire skills (and valuable pieces of paper), but can that absorb millions of middle-aged people who have been blue-collar workers all their lives and now find that to be a dead end?

marshallp 17y ago
Unskilled workers can progress to doing tasks that involve labeling data for machine learning - computer vision, sentiment analysis in audio and text are examples currently being done on mechanical turk. The only limiting factor currently is lack of imagination and investment from so-called innovators - they'd rather 'innovate' by creating another social network or incrementally improve a 1960s technology (microsoft) than do anything truly useful to society. Efforts in this area include google goggles/voice and microsoft project natal (though it's woefully underfunded compared to it's potential).

rms 17y ago

I only see this getting worse in the future. There just isn't enough work to go around anymore. How many white collar/service jobs don't involve any actual work? I just hope our economic system can adjust so we don't have a perpetual, growing underclass.

pg 17y ago
I believe this is an illusion. It always seems like technology is eliminating jobs, but it has always tended to create as many as it kills, which is why after hundreds of years of new labor-saving inventions, the number of jobs is still close to the number of people who want them.
- sabat 17y ago
  It's not an illusion. It's real. I'm closer to poverty right now than I have ever been in my life.
  - xenophanes 17y ago
    No it's an illusion. I'm further from poverty right now than I have ever been in my life. But personal anecdotes don't actually determine what's going on in a whole country.
    - sabat 17y ago
      What's going on in the country -- that of which I have some direct experience -- is far more than any one personal anecdote. Your experience, in fact, is anecdotal.
- natrius 17y ago
  http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/21/business/21unemployed_graphic2/21unemployed_graphic2-articleInline.jpg http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/21/business/21un... That graph is the scariest thing I've seen about this recession, and I think it makes a pretty convincing case that this time actually is different. I honestly think unskilled labor is dying off. I can't imagine what new jobs can be done with minimal education that won't be automatable within the next decade, and many existing jobs will be lost as well. It's a matter of time before people start smashing self-checkout machines.

aresant 17y ago

Is there any average-skill, reliable way that people can make an income during a down turn like this? I'm thinking outside of the internet-set like istockphoto / writing articles / etc. Tangible, GDP positive tasks. Farming?

rms 17y ago
This is not really tangible or necessarily GDP positive, but it does really pay $15/hour while you work from home. I know that 99.99% of work from home jobs are a scam, but this is indeed real, my brother has been doing it for three months now and has gotten several paychecks. They are hiring in most non-UK countries. The job is rating the relevance of results for specified search engine queries. http://www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-us/company/web-site/internet-assessors.htm http://www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-us/company/web-site/...
_delirium 17y ago
Cottage industry, possibly? Farming is difficult to pull off at more than subsistence levels without significant machinery, even if you're targeting the relatively high value hand-picked/local/organic market. A lot of the obvious cottage industries also decline during a downturn, like miscellaneous arts and crafts, but I've run across people making decent livings from textile work that they sell on ebay. For smallish amounts of money, one step up the farming chain to baking is fairly profitable. However it gets complicated fast if you want to make a full income doing it, because there's all sorts of health regulations for being a baker or confectioner that pretty much prevent you from doing it out of your home kitchen. Can probably get away with ignoring them if you're selling cookies and bread to <50 friends and friends-of-friends.
- aresant 17y ago
  That's an interesting idea. Locally I've seen a variety of people springing up offering to do meal services (eg they'll cook for you and your family, as well as their own).
protomyth 17y ago
Had a buddy who became a certified electrician. It helped him during the tough times. Also know a couple of people who do some carpentry (furniture, mostly).

xenophanes 17y ago

how can she possibly be in danger of going homeless if her husband gets $1595 a month? it's b/c their rent is 1380. just move to a cheaper apartment. if you're broke with no job prospects and stay in a pricey apartment you can't afford, how is that a sob story that should make us sympathetic to more welfare spending? why should i pay more taxes so she can live in an apartment that costs more than mine?

natrius 17y ago
The article explains part of that. It costs money to move. First/last month's rent, utility activation, and the costs of moving their actual stuff.
- xenophanes 17y ago
  They could have set aside enough money for that when they still had money. Also, you're double counting some things. First month's rent ... you would have paid rent money not to move too for the same month. And last months' rent, well you already paid it where you are, when you move out you skip paying rent for the last month. Basically whether you move or not you pay the same number of months of rent. And you get your security deposit back when you move out and can use that to pay the next one (unless you trashed the place).
  - F_J_H 17y ago
    I'm curious. Do you own or rent?
    - xenophanes 17y ago
      I rent.
  - natrius 17y ago
    Ok, I think I agree. They should move ASAP, but their credit is probably horrible.
  - 17y ago

hop 17y ago

I've been thinking of hiring a bunch of commission based salespeople for our startup. Has anyone done similar? Can people still receive their unemployment until they start making some sales or would they have to stop immediately when they started calling on prospective buyers? We can't afford to put them on a salary yet, but it could be a good opportunity to help get some unemployed people going.

gcheong 17y ago
That probably depends on the rules in your state. You should contact the agency that handles it. On my unemployment (CA) form it asks me if I earned any money for the weeks I am claiming for. Presumably they subtract any money I earned for those weeks from the benefit amount I would receive, so it could be that if your employee does not earn any commission for a given claim period then they would not lose any unemployment benefit but its always safest to get it from the horses mouth.
patrickgzill 17y ago
It is based on the time period, at least in the state that a friend has worked in. So if the time period is 2 weeks, then if you pay once a month, that will be a 2-week period where they were employed, and a 2-week period they were not. For individuals it is run on a cash basis, that is, if you cut them checks every 3 months, they would only lose benefits for 1 period each 3 month interval.

holdenc 17y ago

The day of reckoning for an entitlement-based economy is coming. Many people will have a hard lesson to learn: no one deserves a job or unemployment benefits. This idealism is a product of good times.

scythe 17y ago
Yeah, some people deserve to starve. Fuck 'em.
- holdenc 17y ago
  I did not say this. I just said some people don't deserve to eat.
- noonespecial 17y ago
  Nobody deserves by virtue of existing to be supported by someone else. Nature dictates that the least fit die. We humans have decided to disagree. We named it "civilization".[1] [1] We haven't got it quite perfected yet, but we're working on it. So far, it hasn't been half bad.
greenlblue 17y ago
Not sure what you mean by entitlement-based economy. Everyone certainly deserves a job since everyone should participate in some productive way in a social environment.
- holdenc 17y ago
  And entitlement-based economy rewards people based on their situation rather than their contribution. BTW -- Your logic is flawed -- 'should participate in some productive way' != 'deserves a job.'
  - greenlblue 17y ago
    My logic is flawed? It seems to me that your definition of productive participation is flawed since a job by definition is productive contribution. Next time you claim somebody's logic is flawed you better check the axioms, i.e. how your terms are defined.

Alex3917 17y ago

One of my predictions for 2020 is that services like Mechanical Turk are going to employ a significant number of people in the US. The only reason this hasn't happened already is that there is a lot of friction once the tasks get more complicated than checking whether or not an image is porn. But once someone invents a 'programming language' for outsourcing that allows people to easily Turk higher-wage tasks, I think we are going to see an explosion of piecework knowledge workers. The fact is that these people are never going to have jobs again, and once their unemployment runs out there is going to be this huge unexploited resource just waiting for someone to arbitrage.

waterlesscloud 17y ago

But the Obama graph shows massive improvement since Bush left office!!!! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130898 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1130898

jcdreads 17y ago
No, it does not show that more people are finding jobs; it shows that people are losing jobs much more slowly.

greenlblue 17y ago

What I don't understand is why people aren't calling for massive restructuring of the financial system that leads to fucked up situations like this, i.e. collapsing bubbles caused by greedy investors looking to get something out of nothing. A CEO gives himself a multimillion dollar bonus and nobody flinches and chalks it up to the way the market works. If the cognitive dissonance doesn't make your head explode well then there isn't much point to making up sob stories like this.