• Buddy, can you spare a dime Buddy, can you spare a dime By Tad Bartimus Will President George W. Bush or Sen. John F. Kerry find my sister-in-law a new job to replace the one she lost six months
• Buddy, can you spare a dime
Buddy, can you spare a dime
By Tad Bartimus
Will President George W. Bush or Sen. John F. Kerry find my sister-in-law a new job to replace the one she lost six months ago? Unlike her, they don’t have to worry about having enough money in the bank to pay for groceries, aren’t staying awake nights agonizing about how to pay the mortgage, and wouldn’t know a Kmart in-store coupon if it leaped into their limos.
Even without Yale degrees, we hoi polloi realize there aren’t any quick fixes for our ailing economy. The war in Iraq is costing more than we bargained for, oil prices are aiming for $50 a barrel, interest rates are climbing and consumer spending is down.
From the executive suite to the secretarial pool, few of us feel financially secure — with good reason. Since Bush became president, nearly 1.2 million jobs have disappeared even though a million have been created. If you’re out of one, or soon to lose one, there’s no comfort in a near-static unemployment rate of 5.5 percent.
Every week, it seems, I get distraught word from a friend or relative that that they’ve been downsized, outsourced, or forced to take cuts in pay and benefits.
This week it was my 56-year-old sister-in-law, calling from L.A., to say she’d had her first face-to-face interview in six months of job hunting, and it didn’t go well.
“The competition is horrendous,” she said. “The Internet has changed everything. Now hundreds — maybe thousands — of people from all over the world apply for the same job. You never hear back from the company; they keep a position open for months looking for more and more qualified people. I’m up against Ph.D.s begging to sell pagers. It’s crazy.”
The Labor Department reports that employers hired just 32,000 Americans in July, far fewer than previously predicted. And for those of us who believe bad news comes in threes, prices in the last 12 months rose 3 percent while pay increases for four out of five working Americans averaged just 2.3 percent. Any fifth-grader can do the math.
As a saleswoman in the cellular industry, my sister-in-law Dixie earned $65,000 a year. She wants a replacement job that’s “a step forward, not a stopgap,” but fears her chances of finding one at her old salary, with health insurance, are slim.
“I’ve sent out 60 resumes — craigslist.com, yahoohotjobs.com, monster.com — you name it, I’ve posted on it,” she said. “I was so naive when I started I was ‘Googling’ (google.com) until I realized I had to learn how to refine my job search on the Web.
“I’d only had a computer at work so I bought a laptop online at eBay (ebay.com) just like the one I lost so I wouldn’t waste time learning how to use it.”
She said she has to guard against Web surfing for leads that go nowhere “because my unemployment benefits run out next month and I’m getting pretty scared.”
So is my stepdaughter, who worries her job of nine years is about to be shifted from Seattle to New Delhi. So is my 60-year-old friend who was fired just six months shy of being vested for a pension. So are several over-55 friends with medical issues who’ve sadly accepted paltry take-it-or-leave-it early retirement packages so they can hang on to their health insurance — which will now cost three times as much as it previously did.
“The economy is strong and it’s getting better,” the president said recently. “This campaign is going to be talking about visions.”
For all of our sakes, he and Kerry have to stop conjuring those visions out of smoke and mirrors.
Log on to www.tadbartimus.com to order Tad’s new book, “War Torn,” and share your thoughts, read great stories and visit with her. You can also write to Tad c/o The Women Syndicate, P.O. Box 10169, Columbia, Mo. 65205.
