Saturday, November 5, 2011

Thought concerning Long-term Unemployment Originally Written in 2019

   I grew up in Michigan and way back then I could see the beginning of the hand witting on the wall for the auto industry.
  After I graduated from college I went to work for a container producing company. We were working on qualifying steel from overseas to use in producing containers. I remember asking if we buy supplies overseas where will people in this country get jobs to buy the product packed in the containers we produce.

  Of course there is another side to this story. I also remember how much the union rules interfered with my doing my job by not allowing me to write the various codes on the containers I used in my research. I had to stand over a union worker to make sure he wrote the correct codes on each container so two of us were required to do a job that should have taken me half the time to do alone.

  When I was unemployed for several months and much younger I put on a short shirt and tended bar. A few weeks I made more money as a bar-maid then in my technical field. I also worked as a waitress to support my kids while I looked for a job in my field. I even jumped from the consumer field to the aerospace field with about a 10% reduction from my last job. I collected unemployment when necessary but never stopped looking for a job. But then I'm from another generation, not that of the current.