... Broome County, State of New York. Yes, we have a bus system; no, it isn't worth a damn. Good luck using it to get to work (or to escape our local food desert) unless you have a few hours to spare.

There are many men now who don't have driver licenses because they have been out of work & couldn't pay child support. You can get a work license if you have a DUI, but not if you owe child support, at least in Florida. I don't know how that is supposed to help their children. There are the temporary agencies who don't make their contractors follow the rules - there were major complaints to our Labor Ready office about the local garbage services whose drivers liked to try to throw the workers off the truck by driving & taking corners fast, even in the rain. One guy finally busted his head, but nothing has seemed to change. Many of those guys have a little weed in their system, so unless they can afford a good lawyer who can fight that (and a good one can), they are SOL. Transportation IS a big one here. We're a small city with a jitney type bus that never seems to go where you want it when you want it. You may sit for 2 hours waiting for one & it only runs until 6 pm. The cab services here make their money mostly on people going to work - you can work out a deal with a cab driver to charge less for a regular pick-up sometimes. One temp services used to provide transportation - a lot of the jobs are in nearby towns 30-45 miles away - but stopped when their business dropped during the recession. Or you take your chances on riding with a drunk or drug addict who still happens to have his license, paying $5 each way on a little over $8 an hour. And some of those guys decide to walk off the job & leave you without a ride. Many jobs are only 4 hours (minimum required by the agency), so you earn about $32 before taxes, then have to pay $10 transportation & possibly taxes, so if you owe child support, you end up with about $12 for back-breaking labor that no one else wants to do. One contractor's regular employees even thought it was funny to steal my ex's lunch that he brought & were puzzled when he was so angry. Jobs for dishwashing & other low-level jobs refuse to take ANYONE with a record, no matter how old the charge is, no matter that his rights have been reinstated & that it had nothing to do with drugs, sex or violence - possession of a stolen car at 19 (which would have been dropped if he'd had a good lawyer). He was covered in sewage at one job because the supervisor thought it would be funny to have him open the wrong valve. We have had a few good people who even fed the workers or tipped them, but they are few & far between. Most of the guys who work at the labor hall live behind the Winn Dixie where they are harassed on a regular basis & their clothes and other things are thrown out. Even trying to keep clean clothes is a problem. Now there is a 20-hour work requirement per week for food assistance, so if the temp services doesn't have anything that week, you're out of luck. There are food banks, but you need transportation to get there. Many of them change their hours without posting the info, so you may pay for a ride & get there & no one is there. You need phone service & internet access to look for work or get called for jobs. They have now instituted the pay cards if you want to get paid the same day. If you want a check, you have to wait a week. The cards charge fees to get their money at all but a couple of places, and you can wait up to 9 pm at night to get your money. These are just a few of the hardships those at the bottom of the ladder face.

Public transit sucks most places. Working class people can't "afford" to take the bus because it takes five times as along to get anywhere and isn't reliable and way too expensive.

Who can afford to be late 20 minutes 4 times a week? It's a job killer. Our Max train line stops before most of the shows, restaurants and bars are closed. What about the customer... and the employers? One of the main reasons I don't go into the city for shows. I don't want to be stuck in Portland because the damn Max stopped before the evening started.

My son uses public transit because he's disabled and there are times the damn bus just drives by.

I posted in an earlier thread about my 18-month experience job hunting at 58. Had all the professional experience in the world, but employers apparently want a 20-year-old PhD with 30 years of experience who can juggle flaming cats while riding a unicycle blindfolded, neither eats nor excretes (or whatever other arbitrary bullet points some HR person has typed in to set up the filters for a position), and will also work for minimum wage. Every bullet point *must* be present. Nothing less will make it through the online resume processing systems to be looked at by an actual human being any more...

HR people don't give a shit if 20,000 nearly-perfect resumes go on the floor unread, as long as that one unicyclist turns up sooner or later (H1B visas welcome!). That's the beauty of the online resume processing age, apparently: you can look, see that nobody has met all the requirements, and go play golf. Easy, no?

Faugh. Shoulda been born in a country that put more emphasis on the circus arts in primary education. Next time around, I'm by-Gawd-well gonna pick my parents better...

To the OP: Brilliant topic. Thank you.

It pays to be frugal and not a materialistic person. I have what I need and require little to enjoy what life has to offer.

You also, rather obviously, have had the good fortune to have been continuously fully employed or near so. Nurses of our age (I'm 58) had that going for them for the prime of their work lives.

I was an analog electronic technician. Most American jobs for our kind of folks dried up by the time we turned 40. Folks didn't repair stuff, and they didn't make it here in the USA, either. The story of my adult life is one of ever-decreasing wages in ever fewer jobs suiting my talent set. And, like yourself, re-training was out of the question for cost reasons. Even in my economic "salad days", a bachelor's degree of any kind was miles out of my reach even with available government aid. (Colorado, being a good little Republican State in the 1970s, started the Reagan-Gingrich privatizations and death-by-a-thousand-budget-cuts early.)

So, Pricknick, I'm glad you managed to make it out OK. Some of us weren't so fortunate -- through no fault of our own. And today's youth are simply fucked.

The hospital where she is employed (since a year after her associate's degree) gave her no raise, or pennies per hour, can't remember which. They are contributing over $1K/semester to her tuition. So she's FT RN, FT grad student. Nice. Not.

Henry Ford raised worker pay so they could buy the Ford they were building:
http://www.henryford150.com/5-a-day/

They do this same shit and run these same phony stories every time they want Congress to give away more visas. Studies have shown that 1/2 of all graduates with tech degrees each year can't even get hired in their field.

And I point out that the foreign workers these companies hire to fill those vacancies that Americans "are unqualified" for, those foreign engineers or whatnot go to the same schools and get the same marks as the Americans who "are unqualified."

Actually, most of the H1B's these corporations are seeking attended schools with the same accreditations as the corresponding American schools, but they did it in their home countries where education is fully or mostly socialized, which is why they can work more cheaply than Americans who are completely equal in every other respect.

At one company I worked for, there was an H1B application posted which demanded a Master's degree in Computer Science (MSCS) with a UNIX emphasis and familiarity with the whole GNU/Open Source world at a level only available via experience in that world. Salary: $40,000 per year before taxes.

A typical non-rich American with that MSCS degree is paying a significant part of that amount in student debt service; such an American would be working that job in essence for free or at less net wage than minimum. Such an American would be better off flipping burgers without ever having seen the inside of a college. This, of course, is why the employer couldn't find "qualified Americans" to do that job: they can't exist.

Pissed me off right imperially, needless to say.......

And please never forget, friends: any time someone complains that "Americans aren't willing to work", what he really means is that he can't get any to work for him, for free.

I have worked my job for over 30 years, yet if I were to apply for it now, despite my experience, I'd be rejected. Age would be the biggest reason, but that's against the law to discriminate on that basis! My past income would be another, for I now earn at least twice the rate my employer pays to a successful new hire. I am grandfathered into coverage with certain benefits new hires cannot have. And, there are other factors which would discriminate against me.

I watch as my employer manoeuvres me into a corner where they can decrease or eliminate all of this without me being able to fight back. I'm still too young to retire at a comfortable level and not have to scrounge for a midnight Del Taco shift somewhere. My health isn't good enough for me to start a starving business for myself.

Many are in similar straits to mine, which is why they support Trump [For the record, I do not]. They want to believe his "straight" talk will deliver the past to them, for there is no future.

That is all long gone.

and less, that lowers those businesses' profits even more, so they cut even more people, so they make less, & so on. I thought this when I was in my 20's but thought maybe I was just naive, although it seemed to be common sense. Now the chickens have come home to roost, and many businesses that cater to lower income & middle income people are going out of business, so now we have more people out of work. This whole world is being turned into one big 3rd world country.

They are already doing this. And most of their the money is going overseas. Which is why many companies that cater to low & middle class income are going out of business.

It's an article I would be very interested in reading, and the Penn Gazette has online archives of back issues from 1997 onward. I did find a very interesting report on the problems of software-based hiring systems from January/February 2013.