Word: cottin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Jonathan Cottin, 61, a longtime journalist and Washington lobbyist who has been without full-time work since 1993, says, "We intimidate people who are younger than we are and who might be our boss. They see their parents, and if they've had a bad relationship with their parents, that counts against us. Secondly, the human-resources departments in companies do the math and figure out that in five to seven years we might be a burden on health or pension programs. There isn't much attention paid to the merit we can bring...
Over a three-month period this year, Cottin reports, he sent out more than 400 applications, including many for positions for which he thinks he is overqualified. But in the past five years he has been able to find only part-time consulting work, some of it reviewing documents for law firms (he has a law degree) for $22 an hour--a far cry from the $100,000 or so a year he earned in his last full-time job as director of external relations for EG&G Inc., a big global-technology firm. Even some parts of the Federal...
...those who feel their abilities and experience are worth more? They can only echo Cottin, the former lobbyist: "When I read the figures on the unemployment rate I'm very troubled, because no one is seeing the real problem in this country. Someone needs to tell Bill Clinton that some of the most talented people in the country aren't working simply because they were born before 1950." Someone should convey the same message to employers who moan about how hard it is to find qualified help in today's tight labor markets...
Some days I look in the mirror, see my mother looking back and, after the shock passes, give in to it. Why was I so sure I could do it better? As Letty Cottin Pogrebin says in Getting Over Getting Older, it's not so much our fading youth we worry about as our fading future. Hillary may have talked wistfully about adopting a child just as Chelsea was planning to leave home, not for the family-values vote, as cynics suggested, but to duplicate her one unambiguous triumph, the most successful and important enterprise of her life...