A great point on highly educated people who are part of the working poor due to lack of employment opportunities in their field. So you just take a job so you can make some money and you are downgraded not just in terms of pay, but also opportunities because you are perceived to be on a different job track.
from Tell Me More on NPR
MARTIN: I take your point that a lot of the people who are really experiencing the harshest effects of this economy are people who don’t have the most education and who are vulnerable. But one of your reports suggests that there are a substantial number of people in the working poor who do have education. In fact, a lot of education.
Could you talk about that? You had a story about a gentleman in Wisconsin. Could you talk about him?
REDDY: Exactly. I talked to a man in Wisconsin, in Milwaukee, who he had been a manufacturing worker and lost his job during a round of job cuts and started looking for work. He has two Master’s degrees, actually, and had been a manager in a plant and just had so much difficulty finding work. After a couple of years, after severance was long gone, he decided he just had to do something and on a lark went and applied for a job cleaning schools as a janitor.
And so he got that job and he has stayed in that job while also looking for a manufacturing job. But once you basically downgrade into a position that for him is paying him about half as much as it was before, you end up on a new track and you become part of a different trajectory. And it’s very difficult to break out of that. That’s one of the lasting legacies of not only this recession but any recession here or around the world, is that people get placed into different categories that are very difficult to break out of. And it takes decades to actually recover the lost income.
The Changing Face Of The Working Poor-Tell Me More-NPR: