2 years, 73 cover letters, 10 interviews and still unemployed

Message to the White House last fall, on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce building.
(photo by me, via cellphone)

This month, I marked the two-year anniversary of being out of work.

As the date approached, though, I felt things finally were looking up. I had three hot prospects on the line: one, an employer with whom I had already had a face-to-face interview (and had moved on to the "critique our product" stage), and two others, with whom I was due to interview in a matter of days.

So I had no reason to sulk. Instead, I looked back on the two years and crunched some numbers:

• I counted 73 cover letters on my computer written over the 730 days in those two years, meaning I averaged one cover letter every 10 days -- which is miraculous, given that I dread writing cover letters. (And "averaged" really is a key word, since earlier this year I'm pretty sure I came close to becoming a discouraged worker as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: pulling the covers over my head and giving up. On the other hand, I subsequently entered a phase of extended unemployment benefits, now ended, during which I had to prove to state labor officials that I met a weekly quota of job inquiries -- meaning that my pace of cover-letter writing surpassed the average.)
• Over the two years, I landed 10 interviews: two in late 2009 (plus a "howdy" face-to-face before the employer was ready to interview for a new position), four in 2010 and four so far this year. None, though, has yielded a job.
• I also had 3 preliminary phone conversations that led nowhere, one in which I was told a candidate was already in hand, but they wanted to talk to me anyway (to reinforce that decision, I suppose), and one in which the employer, who had asked applicants to specify salary, wanted to see whether I'd bite at a lower figure. (I couldn't afford to relocate for the stated salary, and didn't relish a commute of up to three hours a day.) The third was with an employer I quickly determined I didn't want to work for.
• There also was 1 prospective employer that conducted an extensive conference call with me and then had me critique/edit some stories and send along copies of a feature I had created at one job, which had piqued their interest -- and then stopped answering my emails and phone calls. 1 other prospect had me do a trio of tests, two of which I passed with flying colors. I apparently stumbled on the third and was told I could try again in six months. (Huh? The logic of that escaped me.)

To mark the first anniversary of my unemployment, I compiled a list of the 10 things I had learned in those 12 months. A few of them still apply, including this big one: you need a job to get a job. Just the other day, the headline again was about how the few companies that are hiring prefer the employed or just slightly unemployed as candidates. Meantime, some 6.29 6.185 million (updated for July) unemployed have been without a job for six months or longer, down from the year-ago level in June 2010 but at a year-to-date high for 2011.

We know now that the 2007-09 Great Recession was more severe than first thought, which provides a tiny bit of solace as I approach 25 months without a full-time job. But writing about it, and living it, really hasn't gotten any easier.

77 cents: Recession spreads pay-gap pain

Chart from Center for American Progress report,"Not Working:
Unemployment Among Married Couples" (click to enlarge)

The 2007-09 Great Recession often has been referred to as a "mancession" due to the cutbacks and job losses seen in industries populated by men.

But now comes word that we all soon could be paying a price for the wage gap that long has plagued women in the workplace because the recession turned them into the prime breadwinner in many families.

Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., has published a paper, "Not Working: Unemployment Among Married Couples," that makes just that point:

"With so many wives — and women more generally — supporting families, there could not be a more important time to ensure that women are paid fairly. The typical woman earns an average of 77 cents on the male dollar, and so when a husband loses his job the family suffers since her earnings are typically lower than his."

Boushey also notes that older couples are particularly vulnerable, given the man's longevity on the job (= higher wages) and the likelihood the woman took time off to raise children (= lower wages). Add to that the hit the couple's nest egg took during the recession as the financial markets skidded and the equity they may have lost in their house as the bottom dropped out of the real estate market. The resulting outlook for retirement isn't pretty, and there could be implications for Social Security in the future.

Plus, as data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been showing month after month, older workers laid off in the recession are finding it harder to get back into the job market. As of January 2010, Boushey says, that included two-thirds of unemployed men and women aged 55 to 64 vs. just 50 percent of men and 40 percent of women aged 35 to 44.

Boushey's conclusion? "Addressing pay equity should be a key priority as we address the recession."

Weekend read: Journalism, economy better or worse?

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

Items you don't want to have missed:

"The State of the News Media 2011" (Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism): In its latest findings on the news industry, Pew says things are looking up a bit: revenue is recovering somewhat and layoffs have lessened. But Pew detects "a more fundamental challenge to journalism": that with each iteration of technology, "a new layer of complexity" is added that moves the industry farther from controlling its own destiny and shifts revenue to others.

"Newspaper Ad Sales Hit 25-Year Low in 2010" (Reflections of a Newsosaur): Alan Mutter continues to track the unraveling of the traditional revenue model at newspapers. Last year, he says, ad sales hit a total reminiscent of 1985; what's more, that number was down by half from the all-time high seen just five years ago. The bright spot: 2010's drop was "the least worse" decline in the five-year period.

Musical interlude: A theme song, perhaps, for publishers and their revenue goals.

"What James O'Keefe Knows about Media (and You Should Too)" (Poynter): Poynter's Steve Myers takes a look at what he calls the "entrapment journalism" of James O'Keefe -- using reductio ad absurdum to catch institutions (Planned Parenthood, ACORN, NPR) in uncompromising positions. "Whatever we call this surreptitiously recorded audio and video," says Myers, "...[w]e should think about what this work is, where it fits in the media landscape, and why it gets attention."

Video interlude -- if you have an hour and a half to kill in the name of long-form journalism.

"The Forgotten Millions" (New York Times): "Why doesn't Washington care?" asks op-ed writer Paul Krugman as he runs the numbers on the long-term unemployed. Lawmakers seem more interested in cutting the deficit than in helping Americans get back work, he says, partly because the economy now is "suffering from low hiring, not high firing."

But here's a tale from one of the "forgotten millions" that Congress should listen to, as chronicled on the website Over 50 and Out of Work:


Elizabeth Zima from Over Fifty and Out of Work on Vimeo.

Victims of recession now pawns for Congress?

Over 50 and Out of Work Trailer from Over Fifty and Out of Work on Vimeo.

As expected, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives today blocked approval of a three-month extension of jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, which could affect some 2 million people by the end of the year.

Too bad members of the House didn't take the time to view some of the video stories on the website Over 50 and Out of Work, which offers heart-wrenching accounts by baby boomers displaced by the Great Recession. The trailer above introduces some of those affected, who talk more fully in individual interviews about their careers and how they became unemployed.

These are just regular folks -- your neighbor next door, an uncle, a woman at church -- who were whacked as the economy nosedived. Their stories are yours, too, if you share their label of long-term unemployed -- jobless for six months or longer. Worse, about a third of the 14.6 million Americans unemployed as of the second quarter this year had been jobless for a year or longer, according to the government.

In the videos, you'll meet Stan in Detroit, out of work since January 2009. He spent his career in manufacturing and was asked to retire from his job as an engineer when auto-parts maker Delphi Corp. stumbled. He figures the recession has hit him financially to the tune of about $500,000. Bob, on Long Island, worked in the financial services industry, pricing credit vehicles like bonds. Out of work since March 2009, he says his wife worries that he'll never work again -- as he does, too. Brian and Jessica were on the West Coast; he kept losing jobs in various fields as companies were acquired or faltered. When he landed with banking giant Washington Mutual, he figured he was set -- until it failed. The couple moved East and now live with Jessica's father.

The emotions are just below the surface for these recession victims: They seem embarrassed to be where they are and scared of where they may be headed. I hope they (we) aren't further victimized by a lame duck Congress using the extension of unemployment benefits as a political football.

Feel better? Great Recession has ended

Way back when, in a more innocent time, "The Dating Game" was one of the oh-so-nearly-risqué game shows produced for network television by Chuck Barris.

And every time I hear mention of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee, I think of the show, because of the clever "Dating Game" treatment Fortune magazine gave the group -- complete with iconic daisy graphics -- in a 2001 story explaining its complex work.

So the show's peppy theme song came to mind this week when the news broke that the committee finally had put an end date on the Great Recession: June 2009.

Yes, it took the panel more than a year to assess when the economy began to rebound, just as it took until late 2008 for the group to set the start of the recession at December 2007. Why the lag? A Q&A explains. (And if you really want to make your eyes bleed, click on the Excel spreadsheet on the committee's main page to read all the numeric details.)

But that doesn't mean we're back to boom times.

Coincidentally on the same day the Great Recession was put to bed, the New York Times ran another story in its excellent series "The New Poor," through which it has been detailing the downturn's personal toll. Remember that among the country's 14.9 million unemployed are more than 6.2 million who have been out of work longer than six months. And at the current average of just 82,000 new jobs created monthly, it will take awhile to get all of them (us) back to work.

Yet things are beginning to feel different now than they did during the dark days of 2009: more listings on job boards, the promise of more holiday temp hiring, a decline in "mass" layoffs (50 workers or more).

And I was lucky this week in landing two preliminary job interviews, after what seemed like many months of near misses. (I couldn't even finagle a ticket into an invitation-only journalism job fair.) Fingers crossed, I might soon be able to put an end date on my own personal downturn.

For the nightstand: weekend reading

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

In the interest of exercising brain cells this weekend, I offer this worth-reading list:

"Pressure Cooker Journalism" (Newspaper Death Watch): The pace of the online newsroom is leading some to worry about burnout. Blogger Paul Gillin links to the New York Times article about life in the fast lane at Politico in Washington, D.C., and talks about the use of traffic stats to keep the stories coming.

"Increased Worker Productivity Has Destroyed Millions of Jobs, and We Should Be Grateful" (Carpe Diem): Economics Professor Mark Perry posts charts on manufacturing output and jobs to argue that "Any time we can get more output with fewer workers ... it's a sure sign of economic progress and a rising standard of living." (Tell that to the nearly 15 million unemployed, half of whom have been out of work for six months or more. Their standard of living is not rising.)

"The ‘Great Recession’ Earns Its Title" (Economix): Statistics bear out of use of the moniker, even if "great" at first seemed ill-advised.

"No Fed Plans to Give More Support, Bernanke Says" (New York Times): The Fed chairman sees the unemployment rate remaining above 7 percent through 2012, and said it would take “a significant amount of time” to gain back jobs lost in the recession.

And from the Fed's own mouth: "Current Economic Conditions," the so-called Beige Book (Google docs) assessment of the state of the local economy in the 12 Fed districts. Bottom line: the economy continues to improve, but at a s-l-o-w pace.

These days, you need a job to get a job

Although some recruiters pooh-poohed it, others saw it as being on point: A CNN Money story this month that pulled back the curtain on the dirty little secret that it takes a job to get a job. Or, as the headline stated, "Looking for work? Unemployed need not apply."

While it may not be a new story, it deserves a periodic revisit so we can get upset about it all over again.

Remember that the Great Recession that began in December 2007 has created a huge class of long-term unemployed -- workers who have been jobless for six months or more. In May, the latest month with available statistics, their number stood at 6.8 million, or about 46 percent of the country's 15 million unemployed, according to the government. (The numbers for June will be released at 8:30 a.m. Friday.)

To Jesse Rothstein, chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, these jobless workers were "unlucky enough to lose jobs in 2008 or 2009 when there weren't any other jobs to be had."

His comment came during a program hosted by the Economic Policy Institute to draw attention to the extension to unemployment insurance due to run out this month. You can see Rothstein's "unlucky" remark here, at about 2:10 into the video:




He also made another interesting point, at about 2:20: that today's long-term unemployed worker is different from his/her predecessor.

"Ordinarily, they look like a very disadvantaged group with very low education, other measures, other things that are indicative of disadvantage," he said. "Right now, that's much less true.

"You see relatively many college-educated people who are long-term unemployed. It's not so much that these are people who are not qualified for jobs, it's that there aren't any jobs to hire them."

Indeed, the statistics from May show that 4.7 percent of the civilian labor force that was unemployed, or about 2.1 million people, held a bachelor's degree or higher. During the 2001 recession, that same group had an unemployment rate of just 2.1 percent in May and numbered 771,000.

Despite that measure of being qualified, employers still aren't willing to take a chance, says one recruiter, because if the jobless were really good at what they did, they'd be collecting a paycheck, not unemployment benefits. Jeez.

UPDATE: The government reported Friday that the number of long-term unemployed was unchanged in June at 6.8 million. The unemployment rate declined slightly for the month to 9.5 percent, and the number of unemployed overall dropped a bit to 14.6 million.

Unemployed restaurant critic now 'food stamp foodie'

Take a listen. It's a short video that accompanied a piece in the Seattle Times on Saturday about a former newspaper restaurant critic, now out of work, who has a new relationship with food: making sure he uses his monthly food stamp allotment well so his cupboard and refrigerator aren't empty.



The piece he wrote for the paper is riveting because it offers another anecdote on how a job lost to the Great Recession has cost someone his/her middle-class lifestyle. The New York Times has written about the many affected this way in an occasional series it calls The New Poor.

Some readers' comments on the Seattle Times piece aren't charitable: "A talented man with skills and the ability to work is, instead, mooching off the taxpayers. Get a job," wrote one.

Let's not forget, though, that the U.S. still isn't adding jobs at a fast clip (neither is journalism).

The trend in long-term unemployment is up: those jobless for 27 weeks or more went from 39.8 percent of unemployed workers in December 2009 to 45.9 percent in April. The total number of people unemployed in April was 15.3 million.

The numbers for May are due out Friday.

Newspaper layoffs ebb but don't end

Last week, The Oklahoman in Oklahoma City laid off 57 employees paper-wide, including an undisclosed number in the newsroom.

The Kansas City Star did likewise, laying off 12, eliminating 12 open positions, and telling everyone else they must take an unpaid week-long furlough this summer.

It was the second layoff since January at the Star; earlier, a dozen workers also were let go. At the Oklahoman, the cuts were about a third the size of the last round of layoffs in October 2008.

At each paper, the publisher blamed the layoffs on soft advertising due to a still-weak national economy. Stated the Oklahoman's David Thompson, "Like most media companies, we are trying to adjust to our environment.”

But economic indicators are pointing up and surveys say the average American is feeling better about the economy -- even if the official government group that dates recessions hasn't ruled yet that the Great Recession is over.

So what gives at newspapers? After two years of brutal personnel cuts, aren't publishers awfully close to the bone by now?

Paper Cuts, the blog run by a St. Louis newspaper designer that keeps a running tally of layoffs, says the industry lost at least 1,726 jobs in the first quarter this year. That compares to at least 970 in Q1 last year (heavier layoffs occurred in the second and third quarters of 2009) and 1,984 in Q1 2008.

Scroll through the blog and you'll see an indication of one new tack that seems to be gaining momentum: consolidation. At Media General, all of the copy editing and designing functions for the chain's weekly and daily papers are moving to just a few newsrooms; it's happening, too, at Tribune Co. and at E.W. Scripps. Booth Newspapers is consolidating printing while outsourcing ad production work.

One bright ray in all this, though, may be the U.S. Department of Labor's mass layoff report. On Wednesday, the agency noted an improvement in numbers for the first quarter: Big whacks at payrolls by employers (50 or more jobs) were down significantly from the record highs reported a year earlier.

The numbers, also tracked monthly, cover 18 industry sectors, from manufacturing and mining to retail and health care. The government said 12 of the sectors reported record declines in the number of announcements -- called "events" that put workers out of jobs for at least 31 days -- in the January-March quarter vs. last year.

The industry sector that includes newspapers (and a bunch of other information publishers like magazines, broadcasters, software and directories) reported 44 mass layoffs in the quarter, according to the government, down from 98 in Q1 last year and 62 in the final quarter of 2009. The number of affected workers, 6,290, was less than half of a year ago (14,688) and the fourth quarter (12,264).

But before we all breathe a sigh of relief, remember this: A massive layoff may be in the offing -- as many as 500 workers -- as the daily newspapers in Honolulu combine. And there could be some change in staffing this year at newspapers that just came out of bankruptcy reorganization with new owners in Philadelphia and in Orange County, California.

UPDATE: Officials now say combining the Honolulu papers will cost nearly 400 jobs.

Who suffered more in the Great Recession?

The 2.5% gap between male and female
unemployment in May 2009 was then
the highest in history, according to Mark Perry.

So it wasn't a "man- cession" after all? Or it was, but now it's morphed into a "she- cession"?

For most of last year, Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan-Flint who blogs at Carpe Diem, has written extensively about the man-punishing characteristics of the Great Recession: that more men than women have lost jobs since the economic downturn began in December 2007.

In June 2009, he cited government data to show that the gap in the male vs. female unemployment rate was the widest it has been since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started keeping track in 1948. (Some suggest it's because men worked in sectors hit hard by the recession -- manufacturing and construction; others say it has more to do with who has college degrees vs. high school diplomas.)

But while the numbers early on showed men losing 80 percent of the jobs killed by the recession, the focus now has turned to who's going back to work sooner. And according to a report released today by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, it's men.

Between October 2009 and March, men gained 260,000 jobs while women lost 22,000, according to the report. (In April alone, women gained 86,000 jobs -- but men added 204,000, says the report, citing the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers.)

Still, the report worries that "As job losses slowed in the final months of 2009, women continued to lose jobs as men found employment." And for single mothers in the work force, the recession took a heavy toll: their unemployment rate jumped from 8 percent to 13.6 percent between 2007 and 2009.

Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-NY, who chairs the joint committee, told the Associated Press she was concerned by those numbers because families were more dependent on women's earnings as spouses lost their jobs or as more one-parent households with children were headed by women.

Of mothers who were working last year, one-third were the family's sole breadwinner, the report said, while two-thirds were in dual-income households. (And mothers as the only job-holder in the family rose from 4.9 percent of married-couple households to 7.4 percent between 2007 and 2009.)

Rather than offering any policy options, the report (timed to Mother's Day) seemed more interested in drawing attention to the recession's impact on working mothers. Or, as one member of the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues told the Associated Press, "We have no safety net for these women."

As for the mancession, Perry blogged in January that he saw signs of its easing; yesterday, he pointed to improvements in the latest jobs numbers in the construction and manufacturing sectors.

Simplistic recovery: just talk it up

It was the kind of exchange on the economy that was dumb on the face of it. And coming in a TV exchange among journalist, I cringed:

"... but let's not forget, the President is our leader and the consumer looks to our leader for some kind of indication that things are getting better. If he were to just take a more positive tone and really stress the optimism there with this GDP report, might that not sort of become somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophesy where people feel better and therefore spend more, and the economy moves forward more quickly?"

Argh! I wanted to lunge at the television after hearing it. (You can listen for yourself, at about 11:17.)


 
 So all President Barack Obama has to do is talk up the economy and it will take off? Yeah, sure.

The occasion was Obama's response to the report today from the Commerce Department that the U.S. economy grew in the first quarter at an annual rate of 3.2 percent, better than what was seen during the depths of the Great Recession but still just so-so.

"Our economy as a whole is in a much better place than it was one year ago," Obama told reporters in a statement and photo-op outside the White House. But he also acknowledged that while a positive number for the gross domestic product is good, "it doesn't mean much to an American who has lost his or her job and can't find another."

For the unemployed -- now totaling 15 million, with a record 6.5 million out of work for six months or more -- " 'You're hired' is the only economic news they're waiting to hear," Obama said.

I'm in that latter group -- long-term unemployed (nearly 10 months) and doing my best to hear "you're hired" -- so I'm neither willing nor able to boost my consumer spending, whether Obama flogs the GDP numbers or not.

So the anchor-reporter exchange on "The Call," the mid-morning CNBC business show, struck me as ludicrous -- as it also seemed to the reporter on the segment, chief Washington correspondent John Harwood.

"I doubt it personally, Trish," he responded to Trish Regan's comment that the president can influence the economy by being more upbeat. (Regan anchors the hour-long show with Larry Kudlow, who, by the way, suggested after the Obama statement that the president sounded "downbeat.")

Continued Harwood, "I'm not sure a president's words can talk up or talk down the economy. We do see the consumer coming back [the Commerce Department report also highlighted an improvement in so-called personal consumption expenditures] -- that is something that is helping this recovery."

But with unemployment still near 10 percent, he said, Obama will walk a fine line in taking credit for programs that are aiding the recovery without seeming to convey the message "mission accomplished."

Give Obama points for offering some empathy to those of us who are still unemployed; happy talk on the economy provides no comfort.

And send Regan back to school for an economics refresher course.

Why not resurrect parts of the WPA?

A traveling exhibit featuring photographs from the Great Depression recalls a segment of FDR's New Deal that put creative types to work alongside the millions of unemployed who built roads, swimming pools and museums as part of the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Which begs the question: Why not do it again?

The exhibit, "This Great Nation Will Endure: Photographs of the Great Depression," was curated by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, according to the New York State Museum, which hosts the 150-photo show through March 14 in Albany. (It moves in April to the Northern Illinois University Art Museum in DeKalb.)

The photos include many of the iconic images now associated with the Depression -- such as the one here by Dorothea Lange -- which were taken as photographers, writers, musicians and actors were employed under various New Deal initiatives. Some 5 percent of WPA expenditures intended to lift the country out of the Depression went to cultural programs.

That same kind of prime-the-pump spending is present today in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, sending aid to states to repair roads, to communities to weatherize homes, and to the unemployed through extended jobless benefits.

So why not lend a hand again to creative types, to the thousands of reporters, editors and photographers who have been displaced by efforts at their newspapers to stanch Great Recession red ink through layoffs and buyouts?

Yes, I do have a vested interest in the suggestion, being a purge alum myself. But I didn't originate the idea.

Indeed, Mark Pinsky wrote about it in The New Republic in 2008; Robert McChesney and John Nichols mention it in their new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, as does the report last month from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism on "Public Policy and Funding the News."

Pinsky, a former newspaperman, would create a kind of current-day WPA Federal Writers Project, under which grants would go to journalists to undertake specific assignments (listen to an NPR interview here). McChesney and Nichols would focus more on budding journalists by expanding an idea from media analyst Ken Doctor and others to create a journalism division of AmeriCorps that would subsidize the entry of young scribes into the field.

I'd add a complementary, me-too notion: Don't overlook us career journalists -- as mentors and editors to the budding journalists, as teachers of "news literacy" in schools, as skilled workers at the magazines and websites of nonprofits that now beg for volunteers.

But make sure, please, that we get a living wage. Just as the field of journalism needs a hand as it transitions to some new revenue model not underwritten by big ads from car dealers, retailers and cellphone companies, so, too, do we need help in this in-between period.

I promise to give the job my all, happy to be gainfully employed again and out of the menacing shadow of the Great Recession.

Why we're getting 'mad as hell'

Another day, another couple of résumés sent off into cyberspace, never to return to Earth again.

Or so it feels.

Which is why I took such absolute joy at reading this item from a former financial services guy who has been laid off longer than I.

The headline (not his original) certainly speaks to those of us who share his situation: Hey, Employers, It's Time You Got Some Manners And Started Responding To Job Applicants Who Take The Time And Effort To Apply.

It's something anyone/everyone who is/has been unemployed would like to yell at least once.

I'll blame the current jobs picture for the urge to be uncivil.

The country still is losing jobs month by month, although at a slower pace than at the height of the Great Recession. In January, the unemployment rate dropped a bit, the Labor Department said last week, but revisions made to 2009's numbers now indicate we've lost 8.4 million jobs since the recession's start in December 2007.

What's more, says a report from the Economic Policy Institute, "In a testament to both the enormity of the current crisis plus the very weak jobs growth of the 2000-07 business cycle, the U.S. labor market started 2010 with fewer jobs than it had a decade ago..."

That's pretty astounding.

The EPI report included this diagram:

So, yeah, we job-seekers (there now are 6.1 of us for every available job, according to EPI) can get a bit testy.

Our applications go unacknowledged; the references you ask for aren't contacted; you choose to hire someone else and we hear about it when the successful candidate announces his new job online (happened to me); we show up for a scheduled interview only to be told the job was just filled (also happened to me).

I'll resist the temptation to embed a clip from the 1976 movie "Network." Instead, I'll leave you with this really creative take on the famous "mad as hell" speech by Howard Beale (Peter Finch), as posted to Vimeo by a young guy from Texas.


Mad As Hell! Kinetic Typography from Aaron Leming on Vimeo.

It's a buyers' market for wages

It was the first time I had run into the question in an online job applica- tion, and so I hesitated.

"Current salary" (fill in the blank); "Desired salary" (fill in the blank). What numbers should I offer, particularly to the latter?

Online forms are the rage these days. They ask the usual kinds of questions like name, address and past employer(s), and allow you to upload or cut and paste a resume and cover letter. Hit "send," and off it goes. In return, you usually receive an emailed acknowledgement of your effort -- something often lacking when employers seek a paper or email package in response to a job posting.

But the online forms can be frustrating. On one, I was asked to supply the names of five previous employers when I only had four -- without reaching back to my time bartending in college. And the program would not let me submit my application without the required five.

Same with supplying a number for "Current salary": If I try to answer "NA," since I'm unemployed, I get an error message. So what do I say to "Desired salary"?

Recruiters and human resources professionals will advise you not to talk salary if at all possible, although it's generally recognized that if no mention of money is made, you and the prospective employer both may be wasting time.

But should you low-ball yourself when it appears the labor market is already doing that for you?

An Associated Press story that ran in many newspapers Sunday recounts the tales of laid-off workers who, when they finally returned to work, found themselves earning less than they had before. It's what happens with economic calamities like the Great Recession, according to labor experts.

Even more troubling, though, is that it will take these workers years to get back to their previous salary levels.

In a study last year published by the Connecticut Department of Labor, researchers found that workers who lost their jobs during a recession were still suffering lower-wage effects years later. “What it shows is that if workers who have held a job for at least three years lose that job during a recession, they still have earnings losses of 20 percent or more six years afterwards,” said Kenneth Couch, an associate professor of economics at the University of Connecticut and lead author of the study.

These days, though, lower pay seems to be a given -- especially in journalism, where so many have been laid off or bought out. A lot of candidates are competing for the same jobs -- even freelance ones -- and the media companies that are hiring are doing so cautiously and watching their pennies.

One prospective employer I spoke to informally tested my interest in a job that would pay 20 percent less than I had been making before I was laid off; another quoted me a salary that I had started my last job at a decade ago.

It's discouraging and demoralizing, but apparently it's the new normal.

The club you don't want to join

Apparently, I'm in good company.

Those of us severed from our jobs by the Great Recession now are spending a longer time out of work: 29.1 weeks, according to today's December jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor. That's up from 28.6 weeks in November.

And the Labor Department said the percentage of workers who found themselves unemployed for six months or more also was up last month -- to 39.8 percent, vs. 38.7 percent in November. These so-called long-term unemployed -- 4 in 10 jobless workers -- numbered 6.1 million in December. (The total number of unemployed workers last month was 15.3 million.)

Meantime, for those of us in the job category known as "information," which includes newspapers hammered by buyouts and layoffs over the past year, our time out of work averaged 30.4 weeks in December, according to a separate report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's more than seven months without a job.

The Labor Department report -- showing another 85,000 jobs lost -- was seen as disappointing after some improvement in November: "U.S. Job Losses in December Dim Hopes for Quick Upswing," said a New York Times headline; "Economy Still Bleeding Jobs," said the Wall Street Journal.

And the talking heads on CNBC's "Squawk Box" this morning sounded concerned as they cited some of the data deep in the report: that the labor force was declining rather than growing; that the U6 rate -- the broadest measure of unemployment that includes workers discouraged by few job prospects and part-timers who'd rather be working full time -- "ticked up for the first time in awhile." (Listen in particular to Mark Zandi at about 5:20 into the segment and Steve Liesman at 5:42.)

Yesterday, I hit the six-month mark in my unemployment. The shock and embarrassment of being laid off has been replaced by the shock and embarrassment of not being hired.

I bet I'm in good company there, too.

Local knows best

I have a bone to pick with Thomas Friedman.

The New York Times columnist Sunday talked about a childhood friend, pummeled by the Great Recession, who has learned to become more innovative through what Friedman calls the Great Inflection: relatively cheap, abundantly available services delivered via the Web.

His friend, who owns a marketing agency, had to "radically downsize" because of the deep recession that began in December 2007, but found he could still take on projects -- and deliver them more economically -- by outsourcing many of the steps to a finished product.

He has learned to be innovative, Friedman wrote, and if only banks would lend again, the marketing agency -- and many other companies -- would take off, reinvigorating the economy. That was the column's purpose: to plead for loosening the vice grip on credit. The Great Recession and Great Inflection have made companies "ultralean" and more productive. "But we're like a superfit track star with a weak heart," Friedman says. "We've got to get credit pumping in our industrial muscles again."

Yet to be innovative, Friedman's friend passed over local voice talent for a film the agency was doing for a nonprofit and went online to find stock photo images it could use. Doing the former, the friend indicated, cost the agency just 10 percent of the $250 to $500 an hour the local voices would have charged. The latter cost a few bucks, vs. $100 to $2,000 per image in normal royalties.

And there's my beef.

Remember the "Think Global, Act Local" sentiment? Nowadays, it seems local be damned.

The Toronto Star decided last month that it needed to move copy-editing and page-layout duties outside the company -- affecting nearly 80 workers -- to save money. On Friday, Alan Mutter, a former newspaperman turned Silicon Valley CEO, warned in his Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, that others likely will take up that mantle:

"The jobs of news editors, photo editors, copy editors and page designers may face wholesale elimination at some newspapers in the new year as publishers seek to cut costs by outsourcing editorial production to cheaper vendors," he wrote.

Criminy!

Mutter says outside vendors promise papers savings of up to 55 percent to take over production: editing stories, writing headlines, cropping pictures, laying out pages. But if they're not ready to take that step, owners might look to have just one dedicated desk handle production across several papers in their chain, Mutter says -- which still will cost the jobs of workers involved in production at each paper.

Yes, savings are realized, but at what cost? Jobs are lost, of course, but oftentimes credibility takes a hit, too. Just ask any editor on the other end of a reader tongue-lashing for not putting an event in the proper, known-to-all-locals neighborhood. You might as well mix up Manhattan and Queens.

Let's be locovores of more than just our food.

I know I'm addicted (to print)

I went cold turkey for about two days.

Then a telemarketer (working in a very busy boiler room) called and I re-upped.

You see, I had set aside the bills when they came, so the local papers had every right to cut me off from daily delivery.

One newspaper kept coming, though, weeks after my subscription had lapsed; the other was less forgiving about my nonpayment. But then one day neither of them was at their usual early-morning spots on the driveway and the front porch.

So I thought: Do I really need them?

It was sacrilege, I know, coming as it did from a longtime newspaper reporter and editor. But when you've been laid off in the Great Recession and you're among thousands of journalists in the same predicament, every expense needs scrutiny.

I had subscribed to one of the newspapers for years, even before I started working there. I had needed to keep an eye on what its business reporters were covering when I worked at a competitor.

I began getting the other paper earlier this decade. At the time, a then-assistant managing editor liked to harass me when that paper had stories my section didn't. I figured if I saw at home what I'd been beat on, I could be proactive about a second-day treatment when I got to work. (But, as I half-jokingly told the then-AME, if the crosstown rival's circulation numbers ever beat us by one, he was to blame because of the subscription I felt compelled to take.)

I'm unemployed, not 'damaged'

Now that sentiment is growing that the Great Recession likely ended in June -- and ignoring the idea of a jobless recovery -- will those of us who were laid off have an easier time soon finding new work?

I sure hope so. I've been bothered by the news reports and commentary that employers are less interested in out-of-work candidates than in so-called passive ones -- workers who have remained employed and aren't necessarily looking for a new job. Companies will approach an engineer attending a professional conference, for instance, rather than combing through resumes.

A Wall Street Journal story in June (the headline said it all: "Only the Employed Need Apply") riled up one recruiter, who on her blog criticized the practice, saying it was the economic meltdown that put many of those laid off on the unemployment line, not their job performance.

"We’re so far past the point of equating the unemployed with damaged (goods)," she wrote. "This kind of short-sightedness in this marketplace makes my blood boil."

But even in the case of obvious economic layoffs -- a manufacturing division closed and its workers dismissed -- the Journal story said a client of one search firm looking for an executive wanted to talk to still-employed candidates, rather than consider the head of the closed division.

Another JOLTS jolt

The number of job-seekers per available opening continues to rise, says Heidi Shierholz (right) of the Economic Policy Institute.

Dissecting the Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey -- JOLTS -- Shierholz reports that the U.S. in August saw 6.3 job-seekers per available job, up from 6 per job in July.

JOLTS, published monthly, showed the country had 12.5 million more unemployed workers than job openings in August, Shierholz said. The math played out like this: job openings down 21,000 to 2.4 million, ranks of unemployed workers up by 466,000 to 14.9 million.

While the drop in job openings has slowed, Shierholz says, "it is nevertheless getting harder every month for job-seekers to find a job as more people continue to become unemployed and openings for new jobs continue to drop."

Here's her chart showing the rise in job-seekers per available job. Note the sharp increase since the start of the Great Recession in December 2007.