Steve Corrick: 50 Year Olds are Unemployable Without a Public Option | BuzzFlash.org

Steve Corrick: 50 Year Olds are Unemployable Without a Public Option | BuzzFlash.org
BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY | by Steve Corrick

I have a friend my age (56) with impeccable credentials: She has a Master's Degree; 18 years experience as a successful college administrator; glowing recommendations; she shows up for work every day and is hardly ever sick; she's a team player and works selflessly for whomever she's employed by.

She also has a pre-existing medical condition (as does virtually everyone by the time they reach 50).

Therefore, she is almost completely unemployable by American companies.

Well, not quite. Store clerk jobs, entry level temp jobs, manual data entry jobs, real estate and consulting jobs are all available to her -- as long as they don't offer benefits.

In this experience my friend is like virtually every other 50+ year old. Unless we make a company a couple hundred thousand a year, increased medical premiums make us too expensive to hire.

When a job offers benefits -- like, oh, say, every single job that her many years of successful service qualify her for -- by the end of the training period, employers find that she's just "not quite right for the job," that they were looking for a different kind of experience, and gosh darn it if every person who replaces her isn't about 25 years old with virtually no experience.

However, these 25-year-olds hold one credential my friend will never hold again. They have clean medical records and, at their age, they don't make insurance companies nervous and they don't increase a company's group rates.

I had a similar experience. After 4½ years with a national telecommunications company and the year after I was one of the regional sales leaders, I had a third two-day circulatory problem that landed me in the hospital. When I returned, instead of concern or some assistance in helping me get back on my feet, suddenly everything I'd been taught to do by my company was wrong, and I was suddenly being written up again and again for providing the same exceptional customer service I'd received awards for the previous year -- and, within five months, I was out of a job. ...