Don't Let The Bad Economy Get You Down!
Jan 9, 2009 7:43 pm US/Eastern
Underemployment Becomes Unemployment's Ugly Twin
HIALEAH (CBS4) ―
There is another "most " in the news on the economic front ,and it is not the kind you want to hear about: The federal government says 2.6 million jobs disappeared in 2008, and that is the "most" since World War II.
The nation's unemployment rate hit a 16-year high of 7.2 percent in December. In Florida the jobless rate is slightly higher at 7.3 percent, based on the latest available numbers. That translates into 680-thousand of your fellow Floridians without jobs.
Those numbers would be sobering enough on their own, but they do not tell an often overlooked part of the story. We are talking about underemployment. Those are the people laid off from once well-paying jobs and now working for wages that barely help make ends meet. David Oliva is one such person. He's a workman now, cutting granite tabletops and cutting corners in Hialeah. Only a year ago Oliva owned his own granite-cutting firm, supplying homes and homebuilders across the region. Then the mortgage and foreclosure crisis tanked his company.
Oliva says, "Construction got so bad I had to let go of it. I couldn't keep it. I had to let go of six(employees)."
A truck driving job didn't last, but Oliva finally found shop work at a Hialeah granite-cutting shop weathering the economic downturn. The husband and father of three makes $12 dollars/hour and counts every single penny. You can also count Oliva among the growing ranks of the underemployed. Oliva told
CBS4's Michael Williams, "When you are used to taking two to three grand a week home and you're (now) making 400 bucks a week, it is a big difference."
He and his family had to give up a three bedroom home for far tighter quarters. Oliva says, "We squeezed into a two bedroom apartment. We have two used cars now. We used to have three new cars, and now two used cars."
For all of that painful downsizing Oliva knows he is lucky to have work at all. He hears from many friends who simply cannot land a job. That is the stark reality in South Florida and far beyond. It is also one with no end in sight, and people can only hope that the incoming Obama administration might be able to take the economy out of a nosedive that is getting steeper all the time.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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