Letter to the next president

An open letter to the next President of the United States:

Dear Mr. President:

The election will soon be over, and whoever wins, I congratulate for winning a difficult race. Now your real work begins. And as someone who was laid off, I'd like to offer my advice on what you can do as president to help me and the many others who are out of work in this poor economy that is quickly becoming a Recession.

Create jobs. Fast. Put all of your other campaign promises aside for now until you explore every possibility for getting more Americans to work again. Once more people get back to work, the economy will improve and most of your other issues will start to take care of themselves. Consumer spending is down becasue, surprise, people either don't have jobs or are worried about losing their jobs. That leads to more companies cutting jobs because people aren't buying their products. It's a vicious circle. Create jobs and the spiral will stop.

Before being laid off in June, I worked as a journalist at newspapers my entire professional career. I should have seen the end coming and started looking for a job earlier, so now I'm depending on unemployment insurance payments, and five (yes, five) part-time jobs that I currently have to stay afloat. My wife went from part- to full-time at her job, and we worry that her job may also be eliminated. We have a 4-year-old daughter, a mortgage that we're not in default on, and other expenses that make the constant job hunt an urgent goal.

As for where to create jobs, you can help solve a multitude of issues -- reliance on foreign oil, creating renewable energy, creating jobs that pay well -- by going green and having the federal government help finance renewable energy businesses such as solar and wind power. Those kinds of jobs would lead to a long-term solution to America's economy and energy needs, and should help lessen our military need to protect oil fields across the globe. Maybe like the New Deal era, it's time to federally fund energy programs and national infrastructure to bring the energy to where it's needed.

The jobs should be full-time with benefits such as health care. Improving the nation's health care system should be your next priority. It's one of the main reasons, besides a steady paycheck and retirement plan, that I want a full-time job again. I'm slowly making enough money to equal a part-time job with my five part-time jobs that range from a few hours per week to maybe 20 hours of work every few months. But none of them offer benefits because it's easier and cheaper for employers to hire part-timers, or contract for a few months, than to hire them for 40 hours per week.

It has been a long campaign and I'm sure you're tired. But now is the time to get to work and get the country back to work. And if your name isn't Barack, then good luck getting these deals done with Congress. I'll let you know how you're doing when I find a job. Or e-mail me at this blog if you find any jobs I'm qualified for.

Sincerely,

Aaron "The Journalist" Crowe

My first tri-mester

Saturday, Sept. 27, will mark three months since I was laid off at the Times. It's a milestone for me because it means the end of my severance, the end of my healthcare coverage (unless I want to pay the full COBRA cost), the start of my wife working full-time to pay for healthcare, and is longer than I thought it would take me to find full-time work. Even in this lousy economy.

I guess I was naive or at least hopeful, but three months ago I thought I'd find something by now if I worked as hard as I could in my job search. I joined one of the biggest networking groups in the Bay Area, quickly got my resume together with the help of an HR professional, and attacked the job postings by applying for jobs I thought I was qualified for. I've since learned that my resume needs to better showcase my skills and how they apply to writing or editing for something other than a newspaper. I know in the grand scheme of things three months without work doesn't seem like much time, but time crawls.

I've heard the reality: Finding a job after losing one can take a year, six months, 18 months, whatever. It all adds up to much more than three months. A lengthy study that is at least 20 years old points out that eight months after the unemployment rate peaked during the 1981-82 recession, the mean unemployment figure reached 21.2 weeks, or five months. In October 1986, 47 months into the recovery, time spent unemployed dropped to 15.2 weeks, or almost four months. In other words, today's economy isn't near a recovery yet and I'm only at 12 weeks of unemployment, meaning another two months of looking if this recession is at its peak. So take the poll at the top of this blog and let's see how long blog followers have been out of work; or comment below.

I still want to beat the average, and even if I don't, I think the best way of finding the best job is to continue aggressively looking for a job.