Archive for April, 2007

I, of all people, should know better. But every time I hear a radio or television blurb telling me that “affordable” health insurance can be mine by just calling some 800 number, I call and hear the same old story.

If you have to pay for your coverage without the benefit of a company contribution, like I do, you know very well just how expensive it can be. But you should also know it is more than that. And, why it is more is the same reason those ads for “affordable” coverage are so misleading. Here is the deal.

I wrote in Are There Any Good Jobs Left? Career Management in the Age of the Disposable Worker, that in a real sense the American system of health care coverage is one that distributes coverage to people when they need it least (i.e., when they are healthy and have a job) and keeps it from them when they need it most (when sick and out of work). The reason is quite simple. Health care is a private enterprise solution to a pubic issue. As such, it is a system motivated by profits more than health care. When the two conflict, guess which one wins—profits win every time.

Look at it this way. It is expensive to provide health care coverage to people who are already sick and without income. Companies that are motivated by profit certainly have no incentive to cover people who cannot pay and are already sick. They cannot make money behaving this way. This has historically been known in the business as the problem of adverse selection.

It is helpful to understand that private enterprise has played an important role in developing medicines and treatments for people. So this is not a plea to take the profit out of the system. It is a plea however to resist accepting the outcome of private enterprise as a substitute for public policy. When those two conflict (the public good and private enterprise) in a substantial way, action is required.

Fortunately, that is where we are today. As health care has gotten prohibitively expensive, private employers large and small are anxious to control the burden. As greater numbers of white collar workers feel the sting of job insecurity, they too see the issue as an appropriate focus of public policy. The choir of voices calling for reform is beginning to span the political spectrum.

But we are not there yet. Meanwhile understand that those ads for “affordable” health care are largely private enterprise initiatives that are willing to take you on only if you are relatively young and perfectly healthy. Furthermore, if you become covered and get sick, they are likely to look to jettison your coverage as fast as they can. Good businesses—ones that attract capital and provide good returns—look to control cost. Otherwise, those who run them join the ranks of the unemployed looking for relatively inexpensive coverage but probably won’t be able to find it.

So the next time you are tempted to respond to one of those ads, remember they are on your side as long as they can make a buck.

The difficulties of being unemployed and over 45 are legion. There appears to be an enthusiastic desire to “remove” those difficulties by trying to teach us to be more like those under 45.  Universities are a part of the problem: they invite us into college.
    I returned to college honestly and innocently.   When I talked with the university’s continuing studies personnel, they assured me that their graduates were employed readily.  There was quite an impressive list of alumni: persons of stature in the local economy and society.
     I wished to return to my career in computers, so my first choice was a program in information systems.  The university had a good list of impressive classes taught by impressive faculty.  I took all the right classes.  It didn’t take long to discover that nothing of what I was offered in class was new to me.  To a great extent, this wasn’t surprising, as I had spent 17 years working with computers, but it was a bit disappointing.  I finished up with a degree in information systems.
    I tried to get to know other students.  I assumed that we had much in common: same age, same life experiences, same desire to improve our places in the economy, and the same dedication to improving our personal lives.  What I didn’t know was that most of the students were seeking only credentials that would validate their current employment and to obtain a promotion. As far as I could determine, only one other person was trying to complete a degree in order to obtain a new job.
    As graduation neared, I went to the university employment-assistance office.  They had no idea how to talk with me.  Facing someone who had experience was outside their comfort zone.  All of the jobs on file were entry-level positions.  I received no responses from resumes sent after graduation.  I now have a $25,000 student loan debt and nothing to show for it. 
    A few years later,  a human resources manager told me that it is ridiculous to expect that the degree would help me find employment.  “At your age,” she said, a degree was for personal satisfaction, not for employment.  She told me she was working on a graduate degree that she knew would not increase her income.  Her final remark was this memorable sentence: “I suggest you face up to some hard realities and re-think your expectations.”
    The university that promotes those degrees is a hidden aspect of the problem we face at this age.  It would appear that “continuing studies” programs are for the image of the university more than they are for their students – particularly older students trying to regain suitable employment.  Prospective students over 45 aren’t taken seriously in that they are seen as a market rather than as students.  (Perhaps there is a Federal regulation that encourages recruitment of students over a certain age.)  There is no effort to introduce them to employers who are seeking employees with experience.  It is my belief  that my undergraduate degree is  geared more toward legitimizing the working adult — leading to promotion in employment already held  — than it is to education in a complete sense.  Of course, universities derive their income from persons who are actively in a program; what happens after graduation does not have an effect on the cash flow of the school.
    My lesson from this is to avoid generating large debts that don’t have a promised payoff.  I will never have any degree-related employment; the debt will be paid off with income derived from sources that have nothing to do with my university experience. 

59 year old senior executive trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Major questions: 1. Go back to Fortune 500 and all that entails. 2. Buy a small business and grow it. 3. Retire. On any given day I want to do all three.

Columnist Bill White of the Allentown Morning Call pictures Circuit City CEO Philip J. Schoonover getting a warm welcome to hell – very warm. Satan tells him, “This place is full of overpaid, outsourcing, golden-parachuting, employee-abusing worms like you.” Schoonover’s sin? Laying off 3400 employees because they had been around for too long and needed to be replaced by minimum wage workers. His punishment? Having a choice of Dick Cheney or Nancy Grace as a roommate and spending eternity listening to Sanjaya’s Greatest Hits.

The New York Times took the Circuit City slaughter with much greater equanimity. In his economics column last week, Times columnist David Leonhardt showed some pious sympathy for the laid-off, who will, after a 10 week cooling off period, be able to re-apply for their old jobs at much reduced pay. But he goes on to explain that Circuit City’s employee abuse is just part of the larger corporate demand for “efficiency.” Wal-Mart, after all, has capped employee pay and taken the stools away from its elderly employees. Sadly, Leonhardt notes:

It’s probably not possible to halt these changes. It may not even be desirable. The flexibility of the American labor force seems to be one reason that recessions have become less frequent and unemployment is less of a problem here than in Europe, notes Jason Furman, a leading Democratic economist

Furman, by the way, is a pretty flexible guy himself. An advisor to John Kerry in 04, then an NYU professor, and now a project director at the Brookings Institute, he’s made his mark as a “liberal” defender of Wal-Mart’s anti-worker policies. It’s fellows like Furman who put the “ick” in the word “Democratic.”

But from Allentown to Times Square, no one is commenting on where the new flexibility may be taking us. Time was, not so long ago, when seniority was rewarded with higher pay and other perks. But that higher pay now carries a lethal risk. As a friend who writes software for a major multinational explained to me: “If you ask for a raise, the boss is going to say, ‘Why would you want that? It would be like having a bulls-eye painted on your back.’” The more you make, the more tempting it is to fire you.

I experienced this myself a few years ago when I lost a lucrative writing contract with a major media outlet. “Why?” I asked my agent. “They said they were paying you more than any of their other outside writers,” she told me, as if that were a sufficient explanation. Foolish me, I thought the raises I had gotten meant the bosses were pleased with my work. What they meant was that I was doomed.

Once you fire the high-performers and experienced workers, the next step will be to demand that employees pay you for the privilege of working. Why not? Most workplaces provide air-conditioned environments and bathroom facilities, complete with soap and paper towels. These are things you’d expect to pay for in a hotel, so why should workers get them free? Having busted his $10-20 an hour senior employees down to $7 and change an hour, Schoonover’s bound to see that the best route to higher profit margins is negative pay.

I know what Schoonover’s defense will be when he gets to the Pearly Gates: “The market made me do it.” He’ll be confident about getting in to the Good Place, because for men like him, as well as Leonhardt and Furman, whom he’ll bring along as character witnesses, the market is in fact the deity, determining who will starve and who will eat, who will work and who will beg.

But if the deity is someone other than “the market,” if He or She turns out to be a moral entity, capable of distinguishing right from wrong, then poor Schoonover – it’ll be Sanjaya for all eternity.

For nine years I worked for a pittance in a public library for a medium size county goverment. Even though I had an ALA-MLS which was a requirement of the job when the ad for director was placed, I — and five other highly qualified applicants — lost out to a person who did not even have the MLS, or anything beyond a BA.

But — she would be loyal to the county administrator instead of her profession and do what he told her such as to accrue monies to be returned to him at the end of the fiscal year and replace full-time professionals with part-time high school graduates. He has since replaced all the department heads with two women, job splitting, so he can play them against each other and de facto run the departments himself. So much for working hard and getting a good education — and playing by the rules — and being loyal.

This concept is long overdue. I will do as much as I can to support the organized efforts of the group. In this system organized power is the only successful way to cope with the business money machine. Ultimately the money system itself is going to be replaced or collapse and take the country with it.

The healthcare crisis in America is one of the hottest topics for United Professional members. Jonathan Cohn has written a book called “Sick — The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis — And the People Who Pay the Price.” The following is an excerpt from the book’s website:

“America’s health care system is unraveling. Every day, millions of hard-working people struggle to find affordable medical treatment for themselves and their families — unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular check-ups, let alone for hospital visits. Some of these people end up losing money. Others end up losing something more valuable: Their health or even their lives.

In this powerful work of original reportage, Jonathan Cohn travels across the United States - the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee access to medical care as a right of citizenship - to investigate why this crisis is happening and to see, first-hand, its impact on ordinary Americans. …”

My workplace is non-union but when a few of us therapists started the union drive — yep! You guessed it!

The bosses who work for a non-profit institution which calls itself in another language “compassion” hired one of the most union-busting firms in the nation to put a halt to our efforts — we (five of the union leadership) are on a “hit” list for firing — they are just waiting for the right moment I suppose.

Anyhow, being white (for the most part) “liberals” in management is no guarantee that the cause of labor will receive a sympathetic ear. This is shameful and shows a lack of understanding of the connection between issues. It shows that they are more interested in how they appear than who they are in actual fact — greedy bottom-liners.

“This morning, my nine year old son and and his friends were engaged in a heated discussion. They were excitedly rehashing the plight of striking workers struggling for higher wages and more vacation time. In the end, one of the workers, emboldened by union organizing fever, (supporters of The Employee Free Choice Act beware!), destroyed the workplace and they got their jobs back but at lower rates and what amounted to a giveback of benefits. …”

Click on link to read entire story

Born in Santa Clara County, CA, 1944. Life member of California Scholarship Federation; entered UC Berkeley with Honors in 1961; dropped out a year and a half later. One child, born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, 1971; husband, a Mexican citizen, died of testicular cancer when our baby was not quite 2 years old.

Returned to California, entered UC Santa Cruz when she was in 4th grade, got a degree in Computer and Information Sciences in 1982, and worked as a software engineer in (now called) Silicon Valley for fifteen years, living mainly in Santa Cruz during that time. I have never remarried. Moved back into the house I grew up in in Los Altos, CA, after my Dad died in 1991.

Was “let go” from the last company I worked in in the computer industry in 12/1996; they presented me with a letter which described our “separation” as a mutual meeting of minds, but it really had to do with my age. I know this, although they covered themselves well, of course. I was at the top of my game, receiving kudos from clients in the financial industry (I worked for companies with large database products–not Oracle! Could have, but didn’t like that one!)

What the heck, given that I entered the industry at age 38, older than many of the CEOs in whose companies I worked (I worked for three that went public while I was there), I’d had a good stint. I was unusual from the beginning, given both age and gender. Made a lot of friends, friends to this day. When I was let go, I didn’t attempt to find more work in the industry, because I’d just recently passed the six-month period that has to pass before an insider can sell stock; I had a fair number of options which I exercised. Good thing I sold when I was let go (at $26 a share), because a month later the stock went down to $8 and tanked after that.

Anyway, I went into business for myself, with an individual who turned out to be a person with no integrity; I moved to Utah during that time. I should have used my discrimination. I put up a LOT of money for our business, and lost about everything. I’ve learned a lot. I managed to sell the condo I bought with only one late payment. I had to decide whether to go back to California, or to Florida, where my daughter had lived since 1993, to declare bankruptcy. I chose the latter. I figured I could get a job there. I did not intend to try to go back into the computer industry, since I was now considerably older, it was 2001 with a plethora of people looking for IT jobs (”dot-com” bust), something I’d never done anyway but the only kind of thing I could’ve found in Florida, and since my skills were out of date anyway.

After a mysterious health condition manifesting in a whole-body rash (stress?), the only jobs I could find paid a maximum of $10 per hour. I enrolled in a private college in Dania Beach, Florida (Key College) and am enrolled in their court reporting program. Using a machine to do stenography, which is what one learns to do in a court reporting program, enables one to go into closed captioning or into CART (helping the hard-of-hearing and deaf), and these last two are truly merit-based. Your age doesn’t matter.

Court reporting is also, albeit a little less so (merit-based). One can earn very good money. It’s VERY difficult to get through: attrition rates are, I’ve read, 95% and more, and when I get through it (NOT IF), I won’t have anywhere near as many years in which to work as those folks I’m enrolled with (mainly twenty-somethings), and I’ll have a student loan debt, too, as well as one to my brother. Sigh.

But what else can I do? Without trying this, I’d have a debt to my brother I’d never be able to pay off at $10 per hour. I have a couple of highly-skilled friends whom I met in the computer industry who, like myself, have not been able to find work in years. One left on her last job on her own volition. The other, whose last job was Director of Engineering, was laid off after the company for which he worked was acquired by another. I guess I should stop now. I’m glad I’ve found you.