Leaving out the fact the DET (Dept of Employment & Training) forces people (or they lose their benefits) to accept jobs of lesser pay based on the amount of time they've been unemployed, you still have to take into consideration that many people are dropping out of the middle class into poverty due to job losses overseas in many cases. For example, here in VT IBM six months ago let 2,800 people go and sent those jobs to India. They paid an average of $15.00 to $25.00 an hour. Those IBM people who are now working, are making $8 to $10.00 an hour. Sure they're employed, at wages that will keep them in poverty. The average rent around here is $900.00 a month not including utilities. If you get 40 hours a week at ten bucks an hour, you aren't able to pay the rent and live. If you own a home, you're likely going to lose it to foreclosure. If you have a new car, that''s probably gone too. And of course, there are no benefits like insurance, retirement, or 401k. Thats the reality of the job situation all over the place. Sure, people are going back to work, for 20 hrs a week at miserable wages. The majority of highpaying jobs are gone. They ran one ad for a training program for medical transcriptionists, they'd be in training, for no wages for 14 months, at the end of the training, if they were chosen, they were going to make $15.00 an hour for forty hours a week and full benefits at a major hospital in central vermont. Guess how many people applied to that one time ad? 5,000, yep, 5,000. Know how many positions they were training for? 20, yep 20. One of my clients was accepted, so we celebrated, 4,980, they weren't accepted. That's how bad the job market it is here.
