Not being hired - 50-somethings in Louisiana

Judith Martin - "My friends who came back to Harahan after Katrina tell me that no one is hiring anyone over the age of 50."


This is the poignant comment
shared with me by a New Orleans area contractor, whom I will identify as
David L., who has been a good friend of my immediate family since he
restored my house from termite damage in 1993-1994.



Harahan is a predominately rural suburb in southeast Louisiana, just to the west of New Orleans.



I had written to David some time
ago about how 60-somethings are having very little luck in finding
employment in post-Katrina New Orleans. Never had I told him about my
suspicions that 50-somethings were getting overlooked in the hiring
process as well. Yet, here was David, confirming for me what I had
suspected since 2007, that 50- and 60-somethings are being frozen out of
the local job market, at least in New Orleans.



This suspicion about 50- and
60-somethings has been confirmed through comparing notes with friends
all across the city. The big question is whether we who fall into that
age range can continue to scrimp and save and live off of our savings
and investments while we look for work.



We make jokes about how if
financial circumstances become any tighter for us, and we cannot
continue to pay the insurances, taxes, and utilities required of us to
stay in the houses we own...well, we may have to sell all that we have
and go live under a bridge...to become homeless. Maybe that is the way
to get a job; social welfare agencies are eager to put the homeless to
work and make them productive members of society.



What is tremendously puzzling
about this highly evident prejudice is that it is so prevalent in the
Metro New Orleans Area. David is as much at a loss about how to account
for it as others are in similar situations. He is self-employed in
construction and home repair.



Many people chose to return to the
city to rebuild and live once again.  Those 50-somethings, including
me,  thought that jobs would be plentiful, that people with experience
in the culture and mind-set of New Orleans would be welcomed back into
the workforce.



Instead, disappointments come to all of those over 50 at job interviews, if any of us get job interviews at all.



The interview becomes a dreary
formality that has but one message, "You're not a whiz kid just out of
college, all full of the latest information and technology. Go home and
sit in the rocking chair on your front porch. Fade away. Furthermore,
you're not cute and perky, and we want cute and perky."



People are now asking in the comment forums of the New Orleans TimesPicyayune about a jobs creation program, similar to the Work Progress Administration of the 1930s. 



Do we face the example set from
the 1920s and 1930s when the unemployed pitched tents to form
Hoovervilles right near the front steps of the White House.



Here is a whole generation worth of
people who are willing to work, and they are being turned away. Like
David they feel not "the greatest generation" but more like "the lost
generation."