Unemployed Between Ages Of 45 and 54 Must Accept Agony Of Defeat

I love where it says "...and may never be able to in their chosen fields." As in...work. In their chosen fields. Imagine if you couldn't play baseball anymore and all those baseball players had to get real jobs. Man that's a scary thought. What would they do? They might form gangs or go pirate. Who knows.

If you are 45 and 54 you are too cool for school. The world has passed you by, but you would still demand too much money, even if Superman came back and spun the world backwards to reverse time and save Lois Lane, so there's nothing we can do.

Knowing that there's nothing we can do, it's still not very comforting. You would think knowing how things will turn out would give you a sense of relief but it doesn't. You know you're doomed and it just pisses you off. These people will just have to lower their prices or jump on the scrap heap of history. Or just walk into the scrap heap. I don't know how that works.

Jobs are back. Just not for everybody.

Like many other things in the stutter-step economic recovery, the job market is finally recovering, but progress is uneven and some people are being left out. The latest jobs report, for example, shows that the economy created 216,000 jobs in March, for a total of about 1.9 million new jobs since employment levels bottomed out at the end of 2009. That's a healthy pace of job growth that will help bring down the uncomfortably high unemployment rate, and, with luck, cement the recovery.

But digging into the numbers reveals some of the unusual ways that work and retirement may be permanently changing for millions of Americans. Most of the new jobs created since the end of 2009, for one thing, are going to workers under the age of 34, or over the age of 55. Employment levels for middle-aged workers, meanwhile, are stagnant or still falling.

The overall job market is clearly healing, but middle-aged workers aren't part of the revival. Workers between the ages of 45 and 54 are still losing jobs on net, with a decline of about 364,000 jobs in this age group so far this year. That seems remarkable--and worrisome--given that these are people in their prime earning years, and they also ought to be at peak levels of expertise in their fields or careers. Yet they're not yet participating in the jobs recovery, perhaps because their pay requirements are too high in an economy where employers still aren't willing to bring back the most expensive workers. Many are most likely middle managers whose ranks were severely thinned during the recession, or construction and manufacturing workers who still can't find work, and may never be able to in their current fields.

[U.S. News]