I've been laid off twice in the past 18 months and I'm looking for a job right now. I'm not looking for sympathy; I just want you to have context.
So follow me past the squiggle and let's talk about The Economy, Stupid...
I work in I.T. I've been working in I.T. for a long time. As a result, I'm one of those higher-level managers who knows a lot, gets paid a lot, and has responsibility for millions of dollars of . I've got the Master's degree, etc., etc...I'm qualified. I'm still middle class; we don't have two houses or a country club membership. My wife works and we need two paychecks.
Because I am out of work, I'm applying for any jobs for which I might be a fit. I started applying in June and started getting the form-letter rejections shortly thereafter. Here are a couple of excerpts I think are interesting:
"...there were over five hundred and twenty submissions..."
"The recruitment attracted a total of 166 candidates..."
Remember, this isn't for a job flipping burgers. I have been the hiring manager for IT jobs and if you see 10 resumes a week for a typical systems administrator, you're doing okay. If you are hiring someone managing a technical group with million dollar budget responsibility, "normal" might be a couple of resumes a week. 150? That's nuts. For one job, they said they had reduced it to 8 candidates, all of whom had experience doing the exact work in the exact industry. A decade ago, you'd be thrilled to get ONE candidate like that.
The market is brutally difficult right now for white collar workers. I know I am not alone in expanding my search. I started looking locally - I live near Philadelphia - and now I'm looking at every opening, even if it's across the country. One problem with that is the hiring companies don't need to look far away; they have good candidates right down the street. I know. I'm competing with them.
So what's the point of all this? Just this: Things may be better than they were under Dubya, but they are still bad. Recovering from 8 years of the Right's policies is going to take a long, long time. The failure of the Republicans to do anything to keep the middle class employed has trickled down courtesy of their "enrich the rich" policies.
President Obama is finding it tough to get reelected. That's because The American People hired him to clean up the mess and they think it's not cleaned up. I don't think The American People realize just how screwed up things got. I wanted to write this diary to document the fact that I can see how screwed up things are.
If The American People get the message that Obama is cleaning things up and Romney wants to screw it up all over again (why, I wonder?), then BHO will get reelected. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. If Romney gets elected, they'll terminate unemployment for slackers like me and I'll be lucky to get that job flipping burgers.