I'm getting convinced that we need a new WPA for older folks like me, especially in Tucson, AZ and similar places. I'm concentrating on the boomers because there is age discrimination, which makes it harder to get a job and that leads to more time unemployed. More time unemployed, especially past 6 months, makes it almost impossible to land a job. Here's the data:
The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
It's an awful catch-22: employers won't hire you if you've been out of work for more than six months
Matthew O'Brien Apr 13 2013, 11:48 AM ET
The Atlantic
Ghayad ran a follow-up field experiment to find out. In a new working paper, he sent out 4800 fictitious resumes to 600 job openings, with 3600 of them for fake unemployed people. Among those 3600, he varied how long they'd been out of work, how often they'd switched jobs, and whether they had any industry experience. Everything else was kept constant. The mocked-up resumes were all male, all had randomly-selected (and racially ambiguous) names, and all had similar education backgrounds. The question was which of them would get callbacks.
It turns out long-term unemployment is much scarier than you could possibly imagine.
As you can see in the chart below from Ghayad's paper, people with relevant experience (red) who had been out of work for six months or longer got called back less than people without relevant experience (blue) who'd been out of work shorter.
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