Click here for info on the Print Journal (and to purchase your copy)!

It's Not Three Years Ago Anymore

By Sarah Stodola

---------------------------------------

During the past year in New York City, seven of my friends have been laid off (one of them found another job, only to be laid off again six months later). Two of them have graduate degrees from the Ivy League. One of them is an architect. All of them are above average in intelligence and competence. Four of them have yet to find another job. (None of this is counting most of the entire staff of the bar where I used to wait tables).

Needless to say, this isn’t the best time to be getting a proverbial foot in the door in Manhattan.

A little less than a year ago, I was starting grad school, and mighty glad of it, because it meant that I could survive in New York for a while without having to worry about employment. By the time summer 2003 rolled around, the economy would surely be showing signs of a rebound and I would be able to find a decent job. But summer 2003 - practically speaking - is only a month away, and I am finding that I will be competing with some of my closest friends for a frighteningly limited number of openings.

I’ve had my resume on HotJobs for the past few months, where according to the statistics that they track for their members, I have applied to at least 17 jobs, all of which I was at the very least moderately qualified for - a fair number of which I was overqualified for. I’ve had one interview for a part-time position, and I was not called back for a second interview. The reason? Competition is about as tough as it’s ever been. A friend of mine at school applied to be a tutor for high school students readying themselves for the SATs. This is a position that people during undergrad used to fill. My friend, however, was turned down, and it was explained to him that while he was in fact highly qualified for the position, he was not quite as overqualified for it as the people who were actually chosen. Most of the new SAT tutors, it seems, have their Ph.D.s from eminent institutions and still can’t find a full-time position. But at least if you have your Ph.D., you can find part-time work as a tutor for high school kids. If you are a first-year grad student, like my friend and like me, a job like this may well have become a pipe dream.

It didn’t used to be this way. Four years ago, after I finished my undergraduate degree, I traveled for a few months, temped a bit, and took a few freelance jobs.  Then, in mid-March of 2000, my parents told me that I would no longer be covered by their health plan as of April 1st, so I better get myself a “real” job - the kind that offers benefits. I updated my resume on HotJobs, and this time, I didn’t have to apply for any jobs at all. Instead, a job found me. The day after I updated my resume, I received a phone call from a nice woman in Human Resources at a well-funded Internet start-up. Two days and one painless interview later, I became a dot-com employee, with stock options and everything. I even had dental coverage.

To sum up, in the year 2000, my job search lasted three days, during which time I posted one resume, wrote zero cover letters, and in fact applied to zero jobs. In the year 2003, I have revised my resume countless times and written too many cover letters to count, ditto with jobs applied to. This isn’t what I thought life was going to be like when I was 22. I entered the job market during the biggest glut of job opportunities my generation will probably ever see, and little did I know at the time what a rude awakening I was in for.

I have become a statistic. In 2000, the unemployment rate was four percent, the lowest in 30 years. Last month it was 5.8%; in New York City in February, it was 9.2%.

There are a lot of possible factors to blame for the current situation. I wasn’t going to bring this up, but as I write this it doesn’t seem prudent to ignore it. I began writing this essay on Monday evening, and I meant it to be about me and my friends here in New York - a personal gripe, I suppose. But yesterday morning, Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times dealt with this very issue, and then this evening this very same Paul Krugman spoke at my school, again about this very same issue. And while I have been putting a personal spin on the larger issue, Krugman of course puts a political and economic spin on it. And I am so convinced by his words, I can’t help but include some of them here.

Krugman, in addition to writing for the New York Times, is a Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton. In 1991, he won the prestigious John Bates Clark medal, which is given out to only one person every two years. I don’t know much about the field of economics, but one has to assume that all of this means he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to financial matters. And jobs.

And what Krugman says about jobs in this country today is that the high rate of unemployment is largely a result of economic policy within the Bush administration. We have recently been in a recession, but we are still in a good position to have a strong economy. And there are some relatively simple steps to take in order to get there. First, we can’t have any more long-run tax cuts (especially when the cuts made are intended to benefit only the wealthiest Americans). Second, we have to pump money into creating jobs - a similar policy to that of the New Deal, when the Works Progress Administration was created, providing millions of people with work on public projects such as roads and hospitals.

You don’t have to be paying that much attention to politics today to know that the Bush administration is currently doing exactly the opposite of what Krugman says is necessary - as if you needed another reason to dislike Bush.

I have barely scratched the surface of Krugman’s argument (for more, read his column from April 22, titled “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs”), but as so often happens, I am completely worked up by and angry at Bush and just about everything he does.

The problem with employment in this country can and should be resolved. There’s no reason that we should spend over $70 billion on an avoidable war in Iraq, and nothing on a critical problem at home that could likely be solved with far less money.

So, if my friends and I don’t have jobs this summer, I’ll know exactly who to blame.

---------------------------------------

Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three.  She can be contacted at [email protected].

© 2003 Me Three