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Recession Blues

  • NPR is laying off 64, including Ketzel Levine. I have had mixed thoughts about her “American Moxie” series, but I do hope they let her finish it. She is a good reporter.
  • Gannett laid off ten percent of its people earlier this month, including (quite rudely) syndicated political cartoonist Brian Duffy in Des Moines and our own local cartoonist Bob Patton.
  • A coworker—who, incidentally, also went to camp just a few years before I—told me her husband, a nuclear lab technician, has been laid off to half-time. He is currently on the market.
  • Finally, K, who quit her half-time go-nowhere nonprofit job in September, has seen few good prospects. Few are advertising; fewer still are hiring. You know how they talk about people who unemployed but not on the roles, not counted in the national statistics? K is one of those people.

What is there to do in a time like this but pray things don’t get worse?

 

Comments

Ha! The only thing worse than being a statistic is being a non-statistic!

As least when you’re the former you can be a rebuke to the Bush administration.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is tripped out. It was also fully subsidized by the U.S. government.

hey you can always hope in obama… i mean the boy is still asking for all kinds of money…

..the boy..

Racist.

I spend a fair amount of time these days being glad I landed in Wyoming, land of the “recession? what recession?” energy industry boom, which, while devastating in a variety of ways, does pretty well insure my job.

The irony that I’m employed now and was one of those uncounted unemployed people for much of the late ’90s boom amuses me, but the current situation is not amusing at all.

At least I’m not on the MLA job market:

Today the Modern Language Association is releasing information on just how bad the situation is: The number of job postings in the MLA’s Job Information List will be down 21 percent in 2008-9, the steepest annual decline in its 34-year history. For English language and literature, the drop will be 22.2 percent and for foreign languages, 19.6 percent.