ETCETERA
NIGHTCAP
Chasing The Job Market
By Harry Kirsbaum
l
am the 57 percent. Although this
represents a majority, I know that
my group is not a majority of Ameri-
cans. It's an arbitrary number based on
my age. We are middle-aged, befud-
dled and wondering how much faster
this bullet I'll call the 21 st-century job
market can speed past us.
Superman would have a hard time
chasing this one. He outran bullets
coming out of revolvers in the 1950s,
not forced to chase job leads on the
Internet and add resumes to employer
website black holes. He didn't need to
pay health insurance premiums or pay
for gas at $4 a gallon while searching
for more work, either. He just had to
avoid Kryptonite and send his cape to
the dry cleaners every week — be-
cause superheroes should be tidy.
My group might not be in the
majority, but I'm pretty sure that if you
spoke to someone middle-aged about
100 years ago, you'd hear the same
lament, with a better outcome.
At the start of the last American
century, our population was 76 mil-
lion and mostly agrarian.There were
trains, but no cars or airplanes and, as
a rule, we rarely traveled more than 25
miles away from our birthplace in our
lifetime. An American male lived to the
ripe old age of 46, and women lived
two years longer.
By 1929, men lived to 60 years old,
women to 64, people were driving
cars and Boeing was about to intro-
duce the first airline stewardesses the
following year.
Within one generation, the world
had changed, and a middle-aged
person would be equally befuddled at
the noise and pace of the new world,
but he could get over it with retraining
and some earplugs.
A guy working in a factory making,
for the sake of an argument, buggy
whips, could see the writing on the
wall at the turn of the century. Within
a few short years, the buggy whip
would be obsolete, and he would be
out of a job, unless the buggy whip
factory retooled and manufactured
something car-related, like bumpers or
brakes, or steel-belted
radials.
The point is, manu-
facturing was the bread
and butter of the new
American century, and although the
world saw drastic change, it was all
good change, until that First World
War and the Influenza Pandemic of
1918-1919, which ended that World
War. And that Black Friday in 1929,
which caused the Great Depression,
but stay with me, it was really good for
a few years.
Fast forward to 2000. The life expec-
tancy for a man is 75, and a woman
is 80. People drive 25 miles to go to
lunch, and they can reserve a table
through what Tony Soprano referred
to as "the Internets:'
What seemed like a fast-paced life
in 1930 has become warp-speed, and
a middle-aged person like me, who
worked full time at a newspaper in
2000, is now freelancing. My for-
mer colleagues are now my biggest
competitors, and we're all chum in
the water. The buggy whip analogy
doesn't apply, because the platform is
different. We can write about the news
all we want. There aren't any papers
making a profit to keep us working.
Why buy a newspaper when you can
watch news on your smartphone, or
hear about it on Twitter, 144 charac-
ters at a time?
Instead of planning for retirement,
my group is scrambling for work. The
world is changing around us and tech-
nology is advancing so rapidly that we
can't keep up.
I spoke to a neighbor recently who
has been out of work for a long time.
She had worked for Border's 18 years
when it dissolved. No one reads books
on paper, either. Can you say"Kindle?"
So I'll keep trying to find writing
projects and keep searching the job
placement websites. I could apply for
a job in social networking, but I don't
think they're looking for a 57-year-old
writer who hates writing in 144-char-
acter increments. P.7
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38 September 2012 1
1D MEAD
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