General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Should there be a limit on how long one can receive unemployment benefits? [View all]haele
(12,721 posts)Forcing a 50+ year old lower- level professional (a specific technical skill analyst or some other technical office manager, project manager, etc) who was laid off to "retrain" and take entry wage/lower level jobs from the new college grads just to "have a job" further strangles an already small job market in that particular field.
I would posit it is most probably better for the US economy in the long run to let that person "retire" at age 52 or 55 because the chances he or she would be able to just walk right into a job that is comparable (+ or - $10K or benefits or more) to the job that they were laid off from is perhaps 10% or less, instead of forcing them to sink through the job market churn until they end up working at Radio Shack or Best Buy on minimum-wage commission because they don't have the social network to get a job somewhere else; or because not being snapped up within the first six months of unemployment washes them out of consideration by most HR filters.
The chances of finding a comparable job within the standard three to six months after losing your job depends on three things - if you were able to line up a job before you were let go(or how good is your network), how old you are, and how specialized the field you were working in was. Some fields have flexible requirements; a marketing or HR manager can usually find work across several different fields and types of businesses, but a FAA Transponder Development Engineer has a very small field that those skills on a resume means anything, and will have a much harder time finding a job that pays the mortgage and the kid's college loans that were taken out before the owner got tired and sold the business to a venture capital consortium that decided to close it down and sell off the assets to a partner in Malaysia.
I don't want the Best Buy, Target, and other low wage/entry level jobs (Analyst level 1, Journeyman Technician, etc) to be going to 55 year old engineers desperate to keep the roof over their heads, I want those jobs to go to high school grads and college grads starting out, as they were meant to. I would be willing to put up with the 2% or so chronic unemployed (be they just unemployable due to attitude and aptitude, scammers or just plain unlucky) if people who were in positions that they had a higher chance of not finding another "career" job were basically able to retire and free up the jobs that were left to folks who need them to make a career start on.
Haele