Bucks County job fair targets older workers

Some came in business suits, others in jeans. There were those who were dejected, and others who held out hope that their luck would turn.

Patricia Schramm, 59, of Morrisville, was one of the latter. She lost her order-entry job at a Bucks County millwork company in late August, and on Tuesday she came to a 55-plus job fair at the Bensalem Senior Center. Schramm was one of about 760 older job seekers - double the attendance state officials had forecast for the event - and she was talking up her skills and older-worker attributes.

She wasn't "eye candy" like a 30-something hire, but, Schramm said, she would bring experience, dependability, and loyalty to a workplace.

"I'm not to the point where I'm willing to throw my hands in the air and give up. You have to have faith that someone will latch on to you and be glad they did," Schramm said, noting that two employers at the fair had asked for her resumé.

Nearby, Rod Carleton, 64, a carpenter from Bensalem, wasn't so chipper. He surveyed the room of tables of employers distributing pamphlets. "There are no jobs here," he said matter-of-factly. "They want someone to sell Avon products?"

Carleton is hammering nails in the carpentry trade, but his shoulder hurts. The day could come, he thinks, when he'll have to switch careers. "I was inquisitive to see what it looks like in the future, and it doesn't look good," he concluded, saying he was a friendly guy and perhaps could be a Wal-Mart greeter.

The job market, despite some improvement in 2010, remains in the dumps and is possibly the most distressing sector of the U.S. economy. The only other sector that comes close is housing.

On Friday, the Labor Department will update the state of the national job market. The consensus view, according to Bloomberg News, is that the economy added about 75,000 jobs to payrolls in September, which is essentially good news.

But 75,000 jobs won't absorb all the new workers constantly streaming into the economy and won't bring down the national unemployment rate, which was 9.6 percent in August. Economists say the economy has to add 120,000 to 150,000 jobs monthly to keep pace with the new workers. Thus, the nation's unemployment rate could have risen to 9.7 percent in September, Bloomberg said.

And the broader view is not encouraging. Though the job market is slowly recovering this year, the United States still has 7.6 million fewer jobs now than it did when the recession began in December 2007.

At the Bensalem Senior Center, the 33 tables of prospective employers were filled Tuesday with service agencies and diversified companies, including the Labor Ready day-labor placement firm, TRG Staffing Solutions, and the Sears department store chain. The job fair was organized mostly by a coalition of 15 retirement communities in Bucks County with about 15,000 residents.

One participant was a 63-year-old woman from Holland, Bucks County, who lost an accounting job in March. "It's very disheartening because there aren't any jobs," said the woman, who did not want her name used because she did not want to reflect badly on the fair.

"The market is zip," agreed Ronald Kliniewski, 66, of Bensalem, a mechanical engineer who has been out of work for two years. "I do want to work," he said. "I've been working since I was 8 years old. I was a bootblack. I shined shoes. I feel like I have talent and I can give back to my community, and I want a chance. You know, you apply online and it's like feeding a big black hole."