"Must have worked in the previous 12 months," More companies excluding long term unemployed

Long-term unemployed face stigmas in job search

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And on top of that, some companies — including PMG Indiana, Sony Ericsson and retailers nationwide — have explicitly barred the unemployed or long-term unemployed from certain job openings, outright telling them in job ads that they need not apply.

The phenomenon poses a vicious cycle of unemployed people wanting work but not being able to get it because they are unemployed, human resource experts say.

"You could compare it to when people are buying homes," said Pete Morse, partner of Barnes & Thornburg's labor department. "A home that's been on the market a period of time, people are going to look at it and say, 'Hey. There must be something undesirable about this house.' "

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"The mere fact of you being unemployed for a period of time is not a protected characteristic," he said. Categories like age, race and gender are.

Still, a company like PMG Indiana that recently ran an ad for a production assistant that read: "Must have worked in the previous 12 months," walks a fine line, Blickman said.

"An employer should ensure that it has a solid business justification if it adopts that kind of policy or practice," he said. "The employer also risks the loss of good will among its own employees, customers and the public with this kind of policy."

http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/employment/2011-01-23-longterm-unemployed_N.htm

Can't you say you were self-employed? Register a fictitious name with your county and list that as your employer on your resume. As long as your "self-employment" doesn't interfere with your ability to find work you will remain eligible for unemployment benefits.

If they are ok with being amoral and unfair, then so am I.

I mean, this is EVIL.

Right now, it is nothing more than a lazy method for for HR to thin down the applicant pool.

We will NEVER be able to sustain the levels employment which we had before.

grabbed by the rich.

One way to share those benefits is to shorten the work week. In addition to increasing the equitable distribution of work and income, that would increase the stability of American families and allow parents to spend more time with their children. That might do more to improve the test scores and educational progress of American children than anything else we could do.

for years, discriminating against the unemployed, but not the in-your-face way that this is happening. HR departments have often chose people who are employed and apply for a job over those who are not working at the time. The thinking seems to be that if no one else wants you, neither do they. Sad, they pass up a lot of potentially great employees.

that discrimination laws have teeth. Look at the millions who get rejected on the basis of age and are unable to do anything about it.

Companies must be forbidden from simply throwing a resume in the garbage can b/c the person is out of work for a long time in this economy. They at least deserve to have their resume read.

against the struggling.

This is some serious bad juju.

..I don't see anyway that can possibly be legal..

I saw no end of this when my career went splat - when I finally found another job as a glorified stock boy at a department store all of the sudden I wasn't raw sewage anymore.

This is how you get people to shut up and work longer for less money and fewer benefits.

not good enough to even be candidates for a job
cast off by unemployment benefits folks
probably few qualify for much aid

go beg at churches for food
sell oranges at off-ramps


or better yet, just please vanish altogether.

that's what those folks are really being told..

they want this again...

until it ran out, it falsely props up the numbers.

Once the 99'ers fall off--they simply do.not.count.anymore.

The government doesn't count them in their figures--they are essentially persona non grata's. They have fallen off of the grid. Corporate Amerikkka would like to keep it that way--as do the politicians who use the false numbers to prop up their successes.

UI benefits have nothing to do w unemployment rates. Period.

But the numbers of new claims for UI benefits (which is related) often get bigger headlines than the actual unemployment rate (which is generally very depressing right now).

A 99er, or a 50 weeker, or 20 weeker or any number of week UI claim isn't a new claim.

New claims are just that, new claims. Benefits ending at 99 weeks (or any number of weeks) has no change on new claims.

99er have no effect on new claims. Benefits ending at 99 weeks doesn't make new claims look better.
99er are included in U-3 to U-6 numbers. Benefits ending at 99 weeks doesn't make unemployment look better.

to pay a "little bit more" in unemployment taxes.

They're desperate enough that the employer could abuse the hell out of them.

... see, you don't want to end up like him.

Crack the whip, productivity and profit goes up, wages go down, and the remaining workers are scared because they all know someone who hasn't found work for a long time.

It's probably more about hiring people who have good work habits (they're used to being at a job on time everyday and putting in their hours) and current work skills than about conspiring to keep workers down. I'm not defending it, it truly sucks.

To me it brings up needed services for these long-term unemployed. They could use job retraining or skills updating, and possibly some mechanism that would "seed" them back into the workforce with a starter job, probably some low-level gig in their field that would pay them some, allow them to get their work habits back, and would let their skills continue to grow on-the-job. The gov could partially subsidize these "seed" positions to encourage companies to hire these people.

Many of us have Masters Degrees.

This is all about the health insurance and its mandated-ness. No employer in these hard times is going to hire a worker who comes with a health insurance premium twice the size of someone twenty years younger.

We are not obsolete. We don't need to be retrained. We need to have a government that truly does things with an overview of the true cost of every program they put together and how it affects each different group of citizens. Instead, both Congress and the WH arre responsive only to the Bigger Players, like Big Insurance and the Uber Rich.

It's bad enough that my spouse and I have to scrape by on what his small publishing firm brings into the household -we are going to be paying a one percent tax increase on those earnings because of The Obama/Republican Dec 2010 Tax Breaks for the Uber Rich. (BTW, his Master's degree is quite current - he obtained it in 2002!)

Surprised to see you take this position, I often like your posts.

Your premise here seems to be that these employers are refusing to hire the long-term unemployed because of health-care exposure. That would correspond more to age than to recent employment history, no? I don't dispute that health care costs are a huge negative influence on hiring in general, and hiring older employees in particular, and there is probably some positiver correlation between long-term unemployed and older workers, but I doubt it's all that strong of a correlation.

I have been mostly out of the workforce for the last 3 years (never applied for UI since I haven't been looking for work as much as I should), living on savings, which will run out soon enough. I was/am a computer programmer (and a musician which is where all my energy goes and none of my money comes from).

My skills are certainly out of date, and I'm a little over 50. An affordable way to get retrained would indeed help me to get hired. In my line of work skills become outdated in only a few years. And I am no longer used to getting up at a certain time every day, and giving my day to an employer. That will be a difficult transition to make, hopefully if I am lucky enough to get work I can come through for the employer. An employer looking at me would be correct in questioning my ability to get back in the soul sacrifice mode of work. If I can, I'll get by with contract work to maintain a flexible lifestyle, but it's more likely I'll have to get a real job somewhere.

Although I doubt that the issue discussed in the OP (companies not looking at candidates who have no recent work history) is caused by health-insurance mandates, I completely agree on the evils of the mandate, at least when we're being required to buy into a largely un-regulated private insurance scam that is the problem and not the solution.

More to a possible intersection with your point and the OP, I am still stunned that there has been no progress in de-coupling health care costs from employment. I see no logical reason for these things to be connected in any way. It hurts US businesses who have to pay a share of their employees' health care costs. It hurts citizens, many of them without jobs that have health plans, and many more of them that are in a constant state of fear of losing those jobs, or are too scared to try a different job or to start something on their own because they need the health coverage.

Obviously a single-payer universal non-profit model is what is needed, other interests though are in power and have other plans.

But I'm a long ways from believing that companies are rejecting the long-term unemployed because of health-care costs, I think skills and habits are much stronger motivations to these companies. If you have evidence to the contrary, I'll look at it.

It still sucks, and good luck to you and your spouse and your careers.

Totally unemployed people are older people.

Both of us in this household have lived through other "recessions." When I was younger and facing the recession of 1980 to whenever, I worked at a hamburger shop, cooking hamburgers. I enjoyed that job. And through my day to day people contact, I met a man who helped me learn about computers. From then on, I was "recession-proof," at least until the mid 1990's when what I knew about computers became obsolete.

Until 2007, I did elder care, which paid me well, and which I enjoyed. But when I started looking for a new nursing agency, way back in 2006, no one would hire me. I was even told to my face that I would not be considered for being hired due to the fact that the agency paid health insurance and that they couldn't afford the cost of a 56 year old on the payroll.

But at my current age, and with my current health conditions, I simply can not stand on my feet and do restaurant work as I approach my sixtieth birthday. I cannot even use the want ads, because most of the jobs there are indeed for "service" positions, requiring a person to be on their feet. My reason for mentioning all this is that I think this is probably a given for most of my contemporaries.

As I said earlier, there may be some positive correlation between age and the long-term unemployed. Employers discriminating based on age is illegal, so I can see where you're coming from, you think this is an end-around employers paying higher health care costs for older employees, and their way around it is to not even consider resumes from the long-term unemployed.

There might be some amount of reality to that, not much, though in my opinion, I just think they want people who are in the flow, up to speed, and people always look more attractive when someone else wants them.

From the article linked in the OP,
"Companies are saying, 'I will take the person who was just working or is currently working,'" she said. "It is extremely difficult to get back into the job market."

So sorry, I think you missed with your analysis.

Though I reject your analysis, I totally support your position that health-care costs are an obstacle to employment, there's no way that should be the case and it clearly is a factor.

What troubles me about your original response to my post, is that you basically slapped down my interest in seeing job retraining for those of the long-term unemployed that feel they would benefit from it. Seems to me like that's something you could at least show some support for, whether we agree with what's going on here or not.

I'm done with this, I've made any points I had to make and I've listened to yours. Have a last shot if you need it, and have a good one either way. We should be allies not battling over differing analysis.

Earth mom says it in response upthread

Mon Jan-24-11 12:25 PM
Response to Original message
21. They are killing the baby boomers/middle class right before our eyes. nt

And another entire thread, now on greatest thread, was written by DU'er Skidmore who points to this thread being about older people and terminal unemployment. His or her thread is at

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x261358

"Baby Boomers are being disappeared."

and others in your situation. The easiest way to get back into the swing of the work routine after a hiatus (mine was due to babies) is to take temporary contract work. Sooner or later, you might find an employer who needs someone just like you -- someone who is creative but not necessarily an early riser.

The real problem is the discrimination in the workplace. I suspect that lengthy unemployment correlates very highly with being over 50. I really think that the reluctance to higher the long-term unemployed is a mask for age discrimination.

I am hoping to do just that. I've done some contract work in the past, hopefully I can get something to get back into work mode. Can't complain too much as I've mostly dragged my feet doing other things (music, politics and family) and haven't focused on employment as much as I need to, looking to change that soon since the savings are running low.

Obviously I don't agree with your other point (not as primary motive anyway), though I read the other threads re disappearing baby boomers and I do agree with some of that, and I've seen it represented in the media, there is a concerted effort from various sources to kick the baby boomers while they're down and blame them for their circumstances. That generation has always been hated by TPTB, they wouldn't just shut up and reach for the phony American Dream like their parents' generation did, and like many of their children did. And they wouldn't just shut up and fight the phony wars when they were told to. I have always thought that the Baby Boomers are the greatest generation. They were willing to do the internal work required to wake up, and to question the insanity around them. They made tremendous progress re environmental consciousness, spiritual awareness, civil rights, body awareness, peaceful coexistence rather than domination, it goes on and on. Greatest generation (so far).

I stayed on for a few weeks short of eight years. I learned so much and also contributed so much. As my job assignment grew, so did my salary.

The advantage of temping is that you get a chance to discover talents and abilities you never knew you had.

This was in the late 1980s. I had never really used a computer. But when a large corporation donated an old one to the non-profit, I started reading the manuals -- and figured it out. I was able to do merging and learned Lotus and word processing. From there I leapt to even better opportunities.

That is why my attitude is to always accept any job. I washed dishes for a while -- in spite of my MA and almost PhD. Life is about living not about "succeeding." Who knows what success really is anyway.

..."encourage" companies to hire long-time unemployed?

They're tax incentives for crying out loud. Why wouldn't Rs support tax breaks? More importantly, why aren't Democrats shoving this down their throats and exposing them?

The case is simple: Dems are trying to reduce unemployment, Rs are doing everything they can to prolong the suffering of the down-and-out.

They would not have spent an entire summer putting together a health insurance "reform" effort that makes it highly unlikely that any employer would ever higher someone in their fifties.

Those of us in our fifties come with an health insurance "ransom" on our precious lil heads that is at least 50% higher than workers in their thirties. It doesn't take a genius IQ to realize why so many of us older folks have the same sad story to tell about trying to get work.

Pay lipservice, "yes, there's a lot of that going on and we have to stop it," but no steps taken to deter discrimination.

Tax incentives to hire the down-and-out, i.e., long-term unemployed, older workers, etc..- that's an approach. I know this policy isn't perfect, I'm just wondering what the argument against a real job creating tax policy is.

It is so subtle that the companies don't risk any claims against them. But in what age group are the majority of long-term unemployed right now? If you are young, you get a job in fast food or some other filler employment. But when you are in your 50s you will not be hired to wait tables -- not in most parts of the country.

This is heartbreaking. And Obama does not even mention it in his glorious, holy sounding speeches.

Baby boomers supported their parents and their children, and this is their thanks.

I have taken care of my wife since May of 2008. Guess I am in the long term unemployed and totally screwed line. What does PMG make?