{"id":4713,"date":"2012-02-09T16:00:17","date_gmt":"2012-02-09T23:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/idaho\/?p=4713"},"modified":"2013-05-13T16:32:44","modified_gmt":"2013-05-13T22:32:44","slug":"jobless-in-idaho-back-to-work-and-scraping-by","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/idaho\/2012\/02\/09\/jobless-in-idaho-back-to-work-and-scraping-by\/","title":{"rendered":"Jobless in Idaho: Back To Work And Scraping By"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Molly Messick \/ StateImpact Idaho<\/p>

Single mom Kelly Barker has found short-term work, and hopes the job will last.<\/p><\/div>\n

The unemployment rate has ticked down in recent months, nationally and here in Idaho.\u00a0 Two of the people StateImpact Idaho<\/em> has followed through its \u201cJobless in Idaho\u201d series <\/a>are among those who have made progress in finding work.\u00a0 But they haven\u2019t simply landed jobs and resumed the lives they had before unemployment.<\/p>\n

When we first met Kelly Barker<\/a>, a single mom in her mid-40s who lives in Meridian, she had been out of work for seven months.\u00a0 She talked about the \u201cwhat-ifs\u201d \u2013 the fears she couldn\u2019t shake from her mind.<\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object>Jobless In Idaho: Back To Work And Scraping By<\/a><\/p>\n

“What if my car doesn\u2019t start?” she asked.\u00a0 “What if I get sick and have to go to the doctor?\u00a0 I don\u2019t have that, you know, money to do it.\u00a0 I have enough to pay my house payment, and to pay my utilities, and to put food on the table.”<\/p>\n

Barker said she and her eight-year-old daughter were getting by on a daily food allowance of about five dollars.\u00a0 Transportation was also a problem.\u00a0 “Gas is a little iffy \u2013 car gas,” she said.\u00a0 “I have to be very careful about where I go.\u00a0 Ride my bike!”<\/p>\n

That was just before Thanksgiving.\u00a0 Weeks later, just after Christmas, Barker sent an email full of exclamation points.\u00a0 She\u2019d found work.\u00a0 We met again to talk about it.\u00a0 “I\u2019m working in human resources,” Barker said.\u00a0 “I do filing, I do background checks, put together new hire paperwork.”<\/p>\n

She\u2019s at Idaho Power, a company she\u2019s wanted to work for for a long time.\u00a0 But there\u2019s a catch.\u00a0 It\u2019s through a temp agency, and it\u2019s short-term.\u00a0 “I\u2019m so thrilled and I feel so good about it, but at the same time you have that uneasy feeling of, \u201cGosh, at the end of six weeks do I have to start this process all over again?\u201d and it\u2019s just \u2013 I dread having to do that,” she says.<\/p>\n

Barker is glad for a chance to prove herself with a good employer, but her situation is far from stable.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Molly Messick \/ StateImpact Idaho<\/p>

Nathan Bussey now makes much less than he did more than a decade ago, when he first began working for Hewlett-Packard.<\/p><\/div>\n

Nathan Bussey<\/a>, a former Hewlett-Packard employee, has gone through a different kind of adjustment.\u00a0 At HP, Bussey worked his way up from the company call center to a good job setting up printing systems for Fortune 500 companies.\u00a0 Now, he\u2019s back to where he began: call center work, but no longer for HP.\u00a0 “The big difference, I think, is just that when I started my call center with Hewlett-Packard, that was before I even finished my undergraduate degree the first time, and I actually am making significantly less money today than I was when I first started my job at Hewlett-Packard,” Bussey says.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s saying something, considering that Bussey went back to school and earned an MBA after he got laid off in 2008.\u00a0 He started at the new call center in November.\u00a0 He hopes he\u2019ll move up over time.\u00a0 His wife also works, and they can get by, for now.\u00a0 But Bussey can\u2019t help thinking about the time that\u2019s been lost.<\/p>\n

“It\u2019s kind of a sigh of regret, but it\u2019s not something that I wallow in it\u2019s just \u2013 ‘Okay, so this is starting over, almost.'” he says.\u00a0 “And yeah, the degrees and education is there, but it might as well be the day after I graduated from college the first time, because there\u2019s nothing that\u2019s been built up now.”<\/p>\n

The course of his life has shifted, and Bussey expects to feel the economic effects of that for years.\u00a0 Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution, says that will be the case for many American workers who lost jobs in the recession.<\/p>\n

“On average, looking across the experience of many thousands of dismissed workers, what we see is that the earnings loss that people sustain when they lose good-paying jobs tends to persist for quite a while,” Burtless says.<\/p>\n

According to a Brookings study<\/a>, workers who lose their jobs during recessions experience a 19 percent earnings loss over the next 25 years.\u00a0 That\u2019s not the only broad trend of the labor market that applies to Nathan Bussey and Kelly Barker.\u00a0 Another hard truth is that there\u2019s less and less demand for workers like them \u2013 people with mid-level skills.\u00a0 “The kinds of positions they once held are declining in number relative to jobs at the bottom of the skill distribution and jobs at the very top of the skill distribution,” says Burtless.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s due to outsourcing and mechanization, which chip away at the need for mid-level workers and increase competition for the jobs that remain.\u00a0 Nathan Bussey says he knows that reality is part of what he\u2019s living through.\u00a0 In fact, he says, he wouldn\u2019t be surprised if he and Kelly Barker have applied for the same jobs as they\u2019ve looked for work \u2013 positions that require organization and initiative, but a fairly generic set of skills.<\/p>\n

Despite those grim observations, Bussey and Barker both say there\u2019s nothing to do but keep trying and hoping and trusting.\u00a0 But Barker can\u2019t help that each workday is laced with a feeling of yearning.\u00a0 She can\u2019t help looking around at work, noticing who is permanent and who is a temporary.\u00a0 “I look at the badges.\u00a0 You know, everybody wears badges on a lanyard,” she says.\u00a0 “And because I\u2019m a contractor \u2013 they call me a contractor \u2013 I have red around the edge.\u00a0 And I really notice that.\u00a0 Everybody I meet in walking or in passing, I look at their badge.”<\/p>\n

She gravitates toward the other temporary employees.\u00a0 She wants to know what they\u2019ve been through.\u00a0 But she hopes, very much, that she won\u2019t be among them for long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The unemployment rate has ticked down in recent months, nationally and here in Idaho.\u00a0 Two of the people StateImpact Idaho has followed through its \u201cJobless in Idaho\u201d series are among those who have made progress in finding work.\u00a0 But they haven\u2019t simply landed jobs and resumed the lives they had before unemployment. When we first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":4737,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[106,74,133],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/idaho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4713"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/idaho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/idaho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/idaho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/idaho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/idaho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/idaho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/idaho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/idaho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/idaho\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}