Laid Off and Left Out - New York Times: "'The majority of the people who are laid off,' said Mr. Uchitelle, 'end up in jobs that pay significantly less than they earned before, or they drop out altogether.'Overqualified doesn't begin to cover it. When I was a lowly secretary at Universal Studios I worked with many people with college degrees, who were making the same amount of money I was. I got tired of being bossed around by people whose job I could do (and did while they were on vacation, nobody missed them!) and eventually went back to school myself. Not anything normal mind you but I went back, buckled down, apprenticed at the same time and got my degree. Big whoop. Now I have a huge student loan and I work for the same wages I left. Great advancement.
At the heart of the layoff phenomenon is the myth, endlessly repeated by corporate leaders and politicians of both parties, that workers who are thrown out of their jobs can save themselves, can latch onto spiffy new jobs by becoming better educated and acquiring new skills.
'Education and training create the jobs, according to this way of thinking,' writes Mr. Uchitelle. 'Or, put another way, a job materializes for every trained or educated worker, a job commensurate with his or her skills, for which he or she is appropriately paid.'
That is just not so, and the corporate and political elite need to stop feeding that bogus line to the public.
There is no doubt that the better-educated and better-trained get better jobs. But the reality is that there are not enough good jobs currently available to meet the demand of college-educated and well-trained workers in the United States, which is why so many are working in jobs for which they are overqualified."
The only people who benefited were the people I helped (yeah!) and Direct Loan Services.
No pension either.
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