I hear a lot of crap in the news about how terribly the economy is doing, and about the recession that’s coming in the near future. I don’t really watch television, but I can only imagine the scary graphics that the networks have come up with for the evening news. (I’m envisioning squiggly down-ward stock ticker lines, heading into a crack in the ground, with flames and explosions).
The New York Times tells me that there was a net loss of 17,000 jobs in January. Usually the number of jobs goes up. OOPS. It also says that a bunch of people dropped out of the labor market. Now, I’ve always thought that this was a sneaky way of miscounting the actual numbers of unemployed people. I mean, 4.9 percent sounds like a nice low rate of unemployment, until you realize that it isn’t including people who “aren’t looking for work” (who decides that?). Personally, I think that homeless people, for instance, should be counted as unemployed. They currently are not.
But anyway, these numbers and figures usually seem purely abstract to me. Hard to imagine what 17,000 jobs actually looks like, what those jobs are, who would have been hired.
But in practical terms, it means that the job market has become tighter and more competitive. Especially for people who are not established in a steady career, who don’t have the best education, and who don’t have a rich uncle with “room to grow” in his company. For me in Philadelphia, this means that all the jobs are gobbled up as soon as they’re posted on Craigslist or wherever.
Here’s a personal example from Philadelphia, where I live. I’ve been working at a non-profit in town for about 6 months, but I hated the job and eventually couldn’t take it. I lasted long enough to put a good amount away in savings, which will also help me move to New York in the near future. But realistically, this thing killed my brain and was starting to make me cynical, angry and approaching despondent.
I gave my two weeks notice on Wednesday. The same afternoon, my boss put up an ad. By Monday morning, the organization had hired someone. And this for a job that requires 1-2 years experience, and pays under 25 thousand a year. But the fun doesn’t end there. The person they hired had the same position I had several years ago. She left to get a master’s in creative writing. And now she’s back. With a master’s in creative writing. To the same shitty job. Whoa.
Will New York be better? I sure hope so.
