50 and Fired (Fortune Magazine)

[Dover]

50 and Fired

Getting fired during your peak earning years has always been scary. You’d scramble for a few months, but you’d find something. Today it’s different. Get fired and you can scramble for years—and still find nothing. Welcome to the cold new world of the prematurely, involuntarily retired.
By John Helyar

When Zurich Financial let Bob Miller go in February 2003, he wasn’t worried. His résumé was impeccable. He had 20 years of experience under his belt and plenty of references describing him as a high-energy, highly accomplished financial-services marketer. From his home base in Chicago, he’d racked up 100,000-plus frequent-flier miles a year, working a vast network of contacts among insurance agents and financial planners to generate millions of dollars of revenue for financial giants like CNA. Sure, it hurt to be let go. It always did. But he’d been there before—five times, in fact. "And in every situation I ended up in a better place," he says.

Two years later he’s still looking for that better place. Or any place, for that matter. His wife, a real-estate agent, encourages him to think of his unemployment as a respite between sprints. "Enjoy your downtime," she says. "This is your reward." But since he doesn’t know when or how it’s going to end, it doesn’t feel like one. Money isn’t the problem: The Millers have neither kids nor mortgage payments (they paid cash for their downtown Chicago co-op). The problem is Miller’s sense of uselessness, which is barely alleviated by his service on nonprofit boards and his occasional pro bono consulting gigs. Miller wants a real job, a sales job—something that gets him back to where his previously scheduled career left off.

So Miller, 55, whiles away the days making phone calls, doing a lot of reading, and mulling what the hell happened. He keeps up with fellow members of MENG (Marketing Executives Networking Group), a national organization of 1,300 members who once held top corporate marketing jobs and now, for the most part, don’t. And he sees a lot of people out there like himself, trying desperately to keep up appearances: "You go into upscale suburbs, and what you see is lots of guys with laptops and cellphones, trying to look busy at the Starbucks." Miller and his peers are members of a flourishing species: the involuntary retiree. When these anxious white-collar exiles aren’t trying to look busy, they’re going to support groups. Or worrying about the bills. Or reading advice columns about the résumé risk of fudging their age or taking a sales job at Home Depot. Or hoping that a recent Supreme Court decision on age discrimination will give them some kind of legal recourse to sue the bastards who fired them. Or all of the above, in which case their internal terror alert has hit code red. After Linda Stalely, 52, lost her job as an information-technology manager at an Atlanta pharmaceutical company in 2003, she was all jagged nerves and pent-up energy. At five o’clock one morning toward the end of her 16 months between jobs, Staley’s husband got up for a few minutes and came back only to find she’d made the bed. "What are you doing?" he asked, dumbfounded. She was, Staley now realizes, at the breaking point, feeling if she could just get her house in order, maybe her career would follow. "Your self-worth, your self-confidence just takes a nosedive," she says. ..cont'd

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/careers/articles/0,15114,1056189,00.html

[Carolab]

1. Yeah, it sucks, and then * decides we don't need our Social Security.

What a farce.

People in their 50s are great workers--skilled, reliable, and experienced. To put them out in what should be their peak years is a very dumb decision.

[EvolvedChimp]

2. God Bless the Elders, The greatest teachers of all

Your post is quite tear jerking to say the least. It is sickening that the professionals who know how to do do their job better then any, are being "let go" by higher paid yuppies. This age of instant information has aided the evolution of a country that appreciates new advice more then REAL advice. Mr. Miller's 20 years of expierience is the greatest asset any competing force would not. Unluckily they are thinking of the future instead of the present. There are so many more college degree holders now that companies can pay less for newbies of the same job. Specialized jobs are now are so much more competetive, that companies can save money by paying new employees less and firing veterans more. The obsession with bringing in more money is handicapping the companies (or for the conservatives, hindering our ability to compete in the global market). The involuntary retirees should not feel unimportant, and more importantly should not invoke sympathy. They all have something we should be envious of, knowledge. Real usefull knowledge. Not the kind you can learn in a college lecture. Nor the kind you obtain by participating in a liberal discussion board. Instead they have the practical knowledge that can only be achieved by living it, or learning it from a veteran co-worker. A lesson that corporations will soon learn. I wish I could only tell Mr. Miller to not feel unimportant, but to feel accomplished. From a man who doesn't even know what he wants from life, I envy you. Take is for what it's worth.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. Been there. Done that.

I was a code jockey.

A good one.

After being let go, my health took a nosedive, and my insurance decided they didn't want to pay any medical claims.

Now I'm lower than sea-worm shit.

--p!

[yella_dawg]

10. Dumb Idea

What if a bunch of over-the-hill code monkeys got together and went into business for themselves. Given that I'm dead broke, I don't see how it could happen, but I keep seeing this same story over and over. Experience, skills, and dumped in the garbage.


Me: MSCS 10 yrs experience high-performance, high-reliability military software, current position, 2.6 yrs unemployed, lost it all, no prospects.

[Warpy]

11. Corporations have well developed strategies

for making your skills and experience part of a team's skills and experience, so that when you start costing them more money than it would take to train some twentysomething right off the street, they dump you without bothering to let you down easy.

This is why unions always had such strong seniority rules, rules that caused all younger workers to resent them horribly. Unions knew damned full well that older workers, once they hit that magic 5-0, would be dumped very quickly unless there were some strong contractural mechanism to force the corporations to retain them. Layoffs affected the younger, less experienced workers, which worked out better for the corporations, since the older workers were retained to do all the retraining when the company started to hire again.

Wimpy age discrimination laws are a poor substitute, since they put the financial onus on the illegally fired older worker to sue the corporation and face a phalanx of highly paid corporate attorneys. It's no wonder so few of us bother to pursue it.

Either this country is going to have to lower the retirement age to 55, or they're going to have to get tougher on corporations. Since I don't see either happening, I've resigned myself to extreme poverty for the long term.

If you're in your 20s and reading this, be assured that it will happen to you, too.

[eridani]

4. If someone like that is financially OK--

--then why not be a full-time activist? Starting out working on outsourcing and economic issues, of course.

[jbnow]

5. Age discrimination is especially a concern

with the rising retirement age (and talk of increasing it even more). The people in the article have jobs where age is likely to be an asset due to experience and increased "wisdom". But in money savings time it makes financial sense to let go of those at the top of the pay scale. It might also keep down insurance costs.

These are bad times for anyone to be laid off.
But imagine physical labor jobs that require some speed, strength and other things that dwindle with age more often. Who will hire the 55 year old waitress or construction worker? And they'll have a dozen years before they can get their full social security.

For those in lower or middle income class if they are laid off and do get another lower paying job for their last decade or so of work, the way retirement is determined by SS their payments could be much lower after retirement too.

[Carolab]

6. Some truth to this.

However, I think it's more likely that 55-year-olds in construction have "moved up the ladder" (so to speak) and are supervising rather than doing the hard, physical labor.

I see lots of waitresses who are well past 50 and they seem to do just fine.

The point is that age should not be a factor in determining one's ability to do a particular job.

[jbnow]

8. I agree with that point

Age shouldn't be the factor. When it is factored in, in many jobs it should be a benefit since experience means so much.

Of course there are good waitresses over 50 but if they get laid off they are going to face great discrimination. But as we age bad knees and backs act up more and more, especially if we are on our feet and moving and lugging things. Lower paying jobs are usually harder work. Even if people still CAN do them if they are out looking for a physical labor job employers assume the younger people will be hardier and faster and stronger.

I am thinking of people with little likelihood of moving up. There are people who will work hard but just aren't very bright, they don't have a lot of move up potential.

The age discrimination is what worries me with social security age being moved up. It is already going to be 67 for those born after 1960 and they talk about the option of raising it further. If you lose your job at 60...you have a lot of years of work before you can retire at full benefits. That's a problem in a good job market, in a bad one the effects of the discrimination are devastating.

It's horrible to have been a good worker and suddenly feel so devalued, along with the financial devastation.

[Carolab]

9. Again, good points.

It leaves a "gap" in wage-earning years that won't be easily made up, or made up at all.

[Robert Oak]

7. age discrimination

It's gotta be the most under reported and institutionalized discrimination of them all.

I watched it personally at an "unnamed" but notorious "high tech large corporation" where they changed the rules to basically dump off
any engineer over 40.

What killed me at the time was I perceived "there for the grace of God
go I" yet my "co-workers" managed to find fault with the person and blame them...as if they would never reach 40 from the withering heights
of age 25.

I couldn't believe the sociopathic response from my co-workers.

No solidarity and no realization that this was them in 15 years.