Are You or Someone You Know Among the 2 million Set to Lose Jobless Benefits this month?

You hear the recession over, I read on Walnut Creek Patch, of which I’m editor, that Black Friday retail sales, for example, showed signs that the U.S. economy is in recovery

I talked last week with Walnut Creek’s retiring city manager, Gary Pokorny, who acknowledged the 10-plus-percent unemployment rate nationally and in California but said locally, “there are some signs the economy is coming back.” He mentioned some new development coming to town, some interest in investing in the rental housing market.

But he also said “Obviously, the economy is still pretty awful.”

Yeah, no kidding.

I’m sorry, but I’m in the glass-half-empty camp mode now. I'm kind of a gloomy gal that way.

I know people who have been laid off, been jobless for months, and seen savings and their hopes for their kids’ and their own futures’ slip away.

We all know people who have been laid off, whether we’re talking about neighbors or co-workers. Or, you’re the manager or business owner who had the job of telling someone his or her services are no longer required.

I've been hearing about high-earning male breadwinners of households being laid off. What’s up with that?

And, I hear about highly skilled workers staying unemployed for months…. A contrasting image to claims by some Republicans that some of those long-term unemployed want to continue to coast along on their unemployment benefits.

Personally, I don’t know anyone who fits into this category. Everyone I know who is jobless or “underemployed” is desperately seeking that elusive goal—which wasn’t so elusive, once upon a time--the full-time job.

I’ve been through a layoff, although this was back in the dot-com bust. The recovery from that seems like a breeze compared with what we’re dealing with now.

The only upside—if you want to call it that—to being laid off in an economic downturn is that you don’t have to take it personally. You’re not getting laid off because you can’t perform. You’re losing your job because the company or the organization you work for can’t perform. Or because of larger macro-economic conditions beyond anyone’s control. That's it: The economy is slacking off and failing to uphold its responsibility as a productive worker and team player.

When I was laid off in 2003, I was the family breadwinner. It was scary. I did qualify for unemployment benefits, which helped us pay for our health care and other basic costs. I believed I earned those unemployment benefits, which I collected for about three months before I found another job. I had been paying into the system since I first started working fulltime at age 22.

Congress has deadocked on extending jobless benefits, which average about $310 per week and have been helping millions of families make ends meet.

More partisan wrangling is rearing it’s ugly head on this issue, which is too bad. Without an extension, 454,000 jobless Californians will see an end to their benefit checks this month, according to Labor Department figures.

Looking for work and feeling like a piece of s---

I was talking to someone I know who has been out of work for six weeks. He feels pretty lousy.  He spends his mornings looking through Craigslist and other services that list jobs in his field. He sends in his resume, cover letter, work samples.  He doesn't get called back.

Six weeks in to his job search: .He feels like he's letting his family down. He feels like he's letting himself down. All he's worked for in his life--it seems meaningless.

I hear of people--mostly professional men, actually--who have been out of work three, six, eight months.  This person I know--he's just in the beginning stages of this weird sort of misery and despair.

I ran into a neighbor the other day at Pacific Bay Coffee Company.  She herself works as a consultant, juggling several jobs to keep her family afloat. These are jobs she never expected to have. Her husband is a commercial architect. Or was, until he was laid off from his job eight months ago. This couple had come to the United States--specifically from Europa and to the East Bay--about six years ago so that he could take a well-paying, challenging job here and so that they could give their kids a taste of an American suburban life.

This neighbor, who has dual citizenship, loves it here in Walnut Creek. And so do her children, so much so that she decided that she and her kids would stay here in Walnut Creek, and her kids would stay in school here--she didn't want to uproot them from their friends and neighborhood--while her husband goes back to Switzerland. To work. He finally landed a job--all the way back across the Atlantic.

"So much for coming here to live the American dream," she said, and she searched her laptop for cheap fares to Europe for the summer.  The family will be there or here together during summers and Christmas holidays.

That person I know: He had a job where he managed all sorts of projects and people in a very tough competitive field, and he had to work across all sorts of media and industries.

"I feel like I'm so under-qualified," he said.

He talked about specific job skills he didn't have that these vacant jobs were looking for. The skills mostly had to do with the ability to work in certain computer programs.

Feeling useless and under-qualified: that's exactly how you feel when you're out of work and e-mailing your cover letter and resume off to prospective employers these days.  You send those pieces of yourself off and never heard back. Is anyone out there to actually receive them?

I was there myself after getting laid off seven years ago. I went up to sign up at a Walnut Creek temp agency, where I learned my Word skills were not quite up to snuff. They gave me a pitying look and suggested I'd probably only qualify for the lowest paying temp jobs.

Of course, I could pay to take a course. Sure, I thought. Take a course in this one software program out of how many software programs these days that might just be useful.  

I left feeling dejected, but also a bit angry. Sorry, but getting a bit better at Word is not that hard.

Fortunately, I managed to land another job soon after that interview at the temp agency.

Actually this person I know mentioned the computer skill he needed to make the cut for a few of the dozens of jobs he was applying for. The jobs he's looking for are not technical jobs, and the job that I landed required just that skill.   I didn't have it either when I was hired. I learned it on the job. I got to be pretty good at it.

As it happens, I had other qualities and skills and work/life experience that were far more valuable for this particular position.

It's just sad when I hear these sorts of stories, and I wonder, have we evolved into such an era of specialization that most of us are technically unqualified for many jobs we could do perfectly well?

Or are there just so many applicants for every one job?

Recession Blues: More worrisome job loss news, and renowned East Bay children's hospice facility closes due to falling donations

Just the headline we all want to see, huh? But I knew that my husband was part of a disturbing trend in the East Bay, of companies shedding jobs. He was laid off this week; according to the state, another 4,500 people lost jobs in the East Bay in February.

"The job losses in the East Bay are pretty widespread," Jon Haveman, and aconomist and partner with Beacon economics told the Contra Costa Times. According to the Times, the thousands of positions lost marked the worst month for our region's job market since last September. 

In the Bay Area, a total of 6,700 jobs were cut. The next worst hit area in the Bay Area was San Francisco and the Peninsula. There were some bright spots. The South Bay gained about 100 jobs.

Most of the East Bay jobs lost were in government and construction.

Job woes and recession blues were a bit topic of discussion among parents at Walnut Creek Intermediate's sixth-grade skate night Thursday.  I ran into another parent, who had just been laid off this week as well. She works at George Mark Children's House in San Leandro, the Bay Area's only hospice for children.

The economic downturn and falling donations George Mark, a home-like setting in the San Leandro hills, to close and to lay off 52 of its some 60 staff. Managers say this isn't a permanent closure. They are just suspending  inpatient services for several months so they can look for new sources of funding and partnerships with other Bay Area hospices and health organizations.

(Photo here, from Robert Gauthier of the Los Angeles Times, shows certified nursing assistant, cradling a boy during a pool therapy session at George Mark.)

If you have a job, how happy are you with it? Survey finds highest level of job dissatisfaction among U.S. workers in 22 years

I'm fortunate to have a job right now. Are you? If so, how are you feeling about it?

I guess a lot of Americans who are lucky enough to  be employed right now, in the worst economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s, aren't feeling so great about it. This is according to a survey by the Conference Board research group, as reported by the Associated Press.

This survey says that only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their work, and that this is "the lowest level ever recorded" by the resesearch group in more than 22 years of studying the issue. In 2008, 49 percent of those surveyed reported satisfaction with their jobs.

The Great Recession is partly responsible, researchers believe, because it has made it difficult for people to find challenging and suitable jobs. Besides having jobs that might be pretty boring, American workers are also dissatisfied because incomes have not kept up with inflation, and soaring health care costs are eating into take-home pay, the story says.

I know.  I know. Those of you who have been out of work for a few months or longer are thinking that us horde of employed should quit griping.

But maybe there is something to this overall decline in job dissatisfaction, something that speaks to a general lack of confidence and fear about our individual and national future.

You know, I hear this dissatisfaction expressed among those who have hung onto jobs. These workers toil at companies hit by layoffs, pay cuts or furloughs. Their workplaces are in survival mode, playing it safe, without any shared sense of anything beyond survival.

With individual and organizational horizons becoming limited by a fear of dimming prospects, a workplace culture can become depressing, demoralizing.

Again, I know it might not be fair to gripe if you are employed. People who have been laid off are worried about keeping their unemployment benefits, paying for health care. Oh, they've also got to buy food, pay for rent or a mortgage, car insurance, and whatever continuing costs of basic living come their way...

Signing their kids up for soccer... Getting new tires for the car ...

Just so you know, while I still have my job right now, I have also been through a lay-off and dealt with unemployment and keeping up with Cobra payments to maintain our family's health insurance. We went a month without health insurance... a gap ... and it scared me the entire time...