Remember "Get Smart" in the '60s? Me neither, since I grew up with it on reruns; but I remember watching Don Adams and Barbara Feldon fight the nefarious agents of KAOS in half-hour installments of slapstick hilarity every afternoon. And Hollywood, always happy to recycle old ideas for the sake of both nostalgia and the DVD rental market brought it back recently with Steve Carrell as the buffoonish Smart and Anne Hathaway (see photo) as the long-legged Agent 99.
But apparently there is now another meaning of that double-niner identity.
According to no less a source than
60 Minutes, the term "ninety-niners" now refers to the increasing numbers of people who have exhausted their unemployment benefits but who have still not been able to find work. Even more surprising, many of them not only have college degrees, they often have masters and PhDs as well. Some highlights (lowlights?) of the most recent episode which featured discussions with many LTUs (long-term unemployed) include:
- At least 1.5 million Americans have exhausted their unemployment benefits but still can't find jobs
- Twenty percent of the unemployed have at least one college degree
- Unemployment is officially 9.7% at this time; however, if people whose jobs have been cut back to part-time are included along with those who have simply given up the job search completely, the number is actually 17%
- Some food banks are seeing requests for assistance reach levels that are eight times what they were a decade ago
Taken together, these numbers point to a grim picture that will probably not be brightening all that much in the near future. What's most frustrating is the fact that most of these people have probably been pounding the pavement nonstop since they were let go but have now fallen - through no fault of their own - into the designation of being long-term unemployed, a term that rightly or wrongly carries a certain stigma. ("There must be something wrong with him or her if they've been out of work this long. Probably too proud to take a lower-paying job or maybe has some kind of personality issue.") In other words, simply being out of work for an extended period impedes one's ability to find and land a job. And the longer one is unemployed...
To view the
60 Minutes piece, click
here. But keep the Kleenex handy.
A coworker of mine, and former coworker of yours, however briefly, told me that when she watched this she had to stop eating dinner because it caused her to lose her appetite. But she kept watching because none of us can afford to look away from this problem at the micro or macro level.
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