{"id":398978,"date":"2010-03-10T17:17:36","date_gmt":"2010-03-10T22:17:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sacbee.com\/2010\/03\/07\/2586558\/the-long-term-unemployed-struggling.html#mi_rss=Opinion"},"modified":"2010-03-10T17:17:36","modified_gmt":"2010-03-10T22:17:36","slug":"the-long-term-unemployed-struggling-to-find-their-place-in-a-new-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/398978","title":{"rendered":"The long-term unemployed: Struggling to find their place in a new economy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tCharles Montiero has been unemployed for 13 months after laboring for 23 years in a tool repair shop. Montiero and Niyyah Seraaj, a former medical assistant and office assistant for the state, watch a computer lesson during a retraining class at the Sacramento Food Bank on Tuesday morning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Charles Montiero is staring intently at his computer screen as the instructor tells her pupils to try copying and pasting a photograph into a document. He picks a pretty winter scene of snow-covered trees and pops it into a file. <\/p>\n

With the slightest hint of a smile, he tells a fellow student, “I don’t know if I can do that again.” <\/p>\n

But such small triumphs, repeated countless times across the state, could decide the pace of California’s steep climb to recovery – and what the job landscape looks like on the other side. <\/p>\n

About 2.3 million Californians are unemployed, and Montiero is part of the largest group – those out of work for more than six months. Their ranks have more than doubled over the past year to about 768,000, and if they find jobs, many of them will be doing something entirely different or making much less money. <\/p>\n

The plight of the long-term jobless is a primary reason why digging out of this recession will be tougher than in the past. To get the state back on track, government, along with nonprofits and businesses, will need to focus their efforts on this group – with aid so families can survive what’s left of the downturn, and also with training so that as the economy rebounds, they’ll be ready for the new jobs. <\/p>\n

The state’s latest unemployment rate, announced Friday, was 12.5 percent for January, up slightly from December and up from 9.7 percent a year ago. That’s bad enough, but if you go deeper into the numbers, it gets shockingly worse:<\/p>\n

• The unemployment rate has doubled in two years and is at the highest level since the early 1940s. Add another 1.5 million Californians forced to work part time, and 20 percent of the work force is either unemployed, underemployed or has given up looking. <\/p>\n

• California lost 900,000 jobs just last year. That means the state has about as many jobs as it did a decade ago, when there were 3.6 million fewer working-age residents. Just to get back to even would take four years of adding 20,000 jobs every month, an unlikely prospect. <\/p>\n

• The payout in unemployment benefits totaled an astounding $20 billion last year, compared with the previous record of $8 billion in 2008. (Whatever your opinion of President Barack Obama’s $862 billion stimulus package, just think how much worse off California would be without that shower of unemployment cash.)<\/p>\n

• While about 1.4 million Californians are collecting unemployment insurance, one-third of the state’s jobless are not receiving any benefits, either because they don’t qualify or because they have used up their share. (The maximum check is $450 a week and the average is about $308, and the benefits have been extended from the usual 26 weeks to up to 79 in high-unemployment states like California). <\/p>\n

Yet even all those statistics do not truly tell the story of the toll on individuals, families and communities of the wrenching economic disruption. <\/p>\n

Stretched thin<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

Charles Montiero only knows that after 13 months without a job, he’s barely keeping afloat financially, and he’s running out of time. <\/p>\n

“I need to get to work now,” he says. “At this point, I’m just looking to make ends meet.” <\/p>\n

Montiero, who turns 52 next month, has thinning hair and a graying beard, and he has an easygoing manner as he talks about what has befallen him. <\/p>\n

The only other time he was unemployed in his entire life, he says, was a short stretch in 1984 after he left the Army, which he joined out of high school and where he spent eight years repairing M-16s and other small arms. <\/p>\n

He came to Sacramento nearly a quarter-century ago and quickly found a job at Sierra Pacific Tool Service. For 23 years, he repaired jackhammers and other construction and demolition equipment. Making $13.50 an hour, he was settled, finding his way back from a divorce and some financial problems. <\/p>\n

Then a little more than a year ago, his boss died, the shop was swallowed up by its main competitor, Capital Air Tool, and he and a fellow worker were let go. He doesn’t blame the small family firm that took over, but the timing could scarcely have been worse. <\/p>\n

He says he applied last October with Paratransit for a job driving disabled people around, but that didn’t work out. Two weeks ago, he put in for a warehouse job in Natomas at HAVI Logistics, which delivers food to area coffee and juice shops, but he hasn’t heard back. <\/p>\n

Cost-cutting lifestyle<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

For more than a year, Montiero has been collecting unemployment of $291 a week that he says is the main reason that he has been able to keep his house in North Sacramento. <\/p>\n

He has been cutting costs where he can. He quit smoking in September and buys his groceries in bulk. Eating out is out, save for the Sunday breakfasts with his mother, Lori. If he couldn’t get treatment and his cholesterol and high blood pressure pills through the Veterans Affairs medical center in Mather, he couldn’t afford health care. <\/p>\n

On a typical day, he says, he calls about possible job openings, fills out online applications and takes his 3-year-old German shepherd, Sheba, to a dog park near his house. <\/p>\n

The biggest change in his life is that since last month, he has been learning computer basics for two hours every Tuesday morning at the Sacramento Food Bank’s “computer clubhouse” with two dozen other middle-aged and older students. On Monday and Thursday afternoons, he returns to practice during open computer lab. <\/p>\n

In his old job, Montiero never had reason to use a computer, but says that nowadays he’ll almost certainly need basic computer skills in any job. Still, it has been 35 years since he has been in a classroom, and after each session, his brain feels “fried.” <\/p>\n

He was referred for the two-month course by the state Employment Development Department. Short on cash, the agency is counting on the help of nonprofits and companies to train workers. EDD and the employer-funded Employment Training Panel are trying to scoop up federal stimulus money. <\/p>\n

Older workers hard-hit<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

Charles Coger, who runs the computer lab at Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services, said that most jobs now require at least some computer skills and that the unemployed often have to search for jobs online. Two classes, totaling about 50 students, have graduated, and at least five have found work, he said. <\/p>\n

While it’s certainly not easy for young people now trying to enter the work force, the challenge is particularly daunting for older workers, who once might have believed they would keep the same job forever. <\/p>\n

“A lot of things are just being built to throw away. You don’t repair them any more. So therefore you’re doing away with the laborers, you’re doing away with the repair people,” Montiero says, a touch of bitterness in his voice. <\/p>\n

He tries not to get upset or dwell on what might lie ahead if he can’t find work and his benefits run out. <\/p>\n

“I kind of try to put it out of my head,” he says. “There’s got to be somebody out there who needs an old coot like me. I’m not stupid. I’m able. I can do work.”<\/p>\n

Their worlds turned upside down, many long-term jobless are hanging on, afraid to look down at the dark abyss. <\/p>\n

Here’s where government, partnering with corporations and nonprofit groups, can make a difference. While the private sector is much better at creating jobs, government can shore up the safety net with food stamps, health care and other aid. It can make sure that the jobless are receiving help promptly; after being slammed for slow and poor service, EDD has added staff as well as Saturday hours.<\/p>\n

And state government can provide job training through community colleges, job centers and places like the Sacramento Food Bank. <\/p>\n

Its computer lab, filled after school with students ages 10 and up, would not exist but for the generosity of two corporations. Intel gave $20,500 last fall to buy computers, and some employees volunteer to keep them running smoothly. UPS gave $20,380 to purchase computers and to pay for Microsoft training for Coger and instructor Michelle So. <\/p>\n

Job market changed forever<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

The experts say that the job market will likely look a lot different than the one we knew before the recession started in December 2007. <\/p>\n

Even when people start shopping again and when housing prices rebound, a lot of jobs will remain missing. Many companies have survived the recession by slashing payroll and then finding ways to wring more work out of remaining workers, or just doing less. And some kinds of jobs – including many that didn’t require a college education but that offered a gateway to the middle class – aren’t ever coming back. <\/p>\n

Howard Roth, chief economist for the state Department of Finance, said he’s “greatly concerned” by the numbers of long-term unemployed, and the mismatch between their skills and the jobs that will be available. “That’s a major reason the recovery will be slow,” he said. <\/p>\n

Most economists say that California’s unemployment rate will stay in the double digits well into 2012. The Legislative Analyst’s Office says that by 2015, the rate will drop to 6.9 percent – but that’s still higher than the peak during the last recession. <\/p>\n

“It is going to be very long and very tough,” said Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project, a nonpartisan research group in Sacramento that is among those calling on the Legislature to increase job training and to protect the human services safety net. <\/p>\n

So if the question is what we can and should do to help the jobless on this steep climb to recovery, the answer is anything we can, or at least everything we can afford as taxpayers and citizens. <\/p>\n

As the state’s politicians and policymakers confront the scary new normal, it’d be a good exercise for them to keep in mind people like Montiero. There are thousands and thousands like him. They are our neighbors and our friends. And for everyone’s future, they could use a helping hand.<\/p>\n

\n\t<\/a>
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\n\tCharles Montiero listens to instructor Michelle So at a computer class last week at the Sacramento Food Bank. He says his brain feels “fried” after classes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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