Last month, Over 50 and Out of Work completed the interviewing portion of our multimedia project, and we are now editing our feature-length documentary. The film will focus on three of our original 100 interviewees, who are all over 50 years of age and lost their jobs as a result of the Great Recession.

The film’s three main characters struggle with the most common difficulties that our 100 interviewees have experienced – the shock of sudden, unexpected joblessness; worries about paying bills, especially mortgage payments; loss of health insurance; a prolonged and frustrating job search; depleted or exhausted savings, as well as diminished optimism about the future. They each resolve or adapt to the devastating impact of extended unemployment on their lives differently, but the issues of health insurance coverage and homeownership dominate their concerns and fears, as they do for many Americans who are 50-plus and jobless.

To read more, click here.

At the end of 2011, the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University published a research paper Out of Work and Losing Hope:  The Misery and Bleak Expectations of American Workers (posted in the Resources section of our site).

Carl Van Horn, director of the workforce center, is one of our Over 50 and Out of Work expert interviewees.

The center began a nationwide survey of the unemployed in August 2009 of 1200 respondents and has repeated the survey three times, most recently, in September 2011.

Although the center questioned many more individuals  than Over 50 and Out of Work (100 interviewees),  the devastating impact of the Great Recession on both groups is comparable and grim.

Here is a quick 10-fact summary of the center’s findings:

• Only 23 percent of workers over the age of 50 are working full-time.
• A total of 42 percent are either unemployed (35 percent) or working part-time, but looking for full-time jobs (6 percent).
• Slightly more than 20 percent of workers over 50 have dropped out of the labor market.

Re-employment, for those older workers who have had successful job searches, has not been easy.

• Almost half (48 percent) did not find a job for over a year.
• The majority (60 percent) of the re-employed workers accepted a pay cut, frequently substantial.
• Many of the older workers (42 percent) said that their new job was “very different” from their prior employment.
• The job search for older workers is prolonged:  80 percent of older workers have been seeking jobs for over one year and 50 percent for more than two years.

The impact of the recession on both unemployed and re-employed older workers has been drastic and negative.

• Their financial situation has worsened; most (85 percent) have less savings and income than they did before the recession.
• Their retirement plans have changed – 40 percent said they would have to work longer than they expected and almost half (46 percent) predict that they will have to file for Social Security earlier than they had previously planned.
• One-third of workers over 50 do not have health insurance and 50 percent said they have cut back on health care expenses.

In the short clip above, Sewin Chan, an economist and associate professor of public policy at NYU Wagner, talks about how the last 10 years have changed Americans’ perception of homeownership.

In her full interview, posted in the experts section of our site, Chan discusses the U.S. housing market, the recent foreclosure crisis and its impact on homeownership, saving and accumulating wealth.

Sewin Chan, Associate Professor of Public Policy at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, discusses the U.S. housing market, the recent foreclosure crisis and its impact on homeownership, saving and accumulating wealth.

We recently interviewed Sara Rix, senior strategic policy advisor at the AARP Public Policy Institute.  Her work focuses on labor force issues and the problems of older workers. Her complete interview is posted in the experts section of our website.

In the brief clip above, Rix talks about how difficult it is for unemployed older workers to determine what skills they need to become re-employed, how to figure out where they can obtain those skills and the need for resources targeted at older workers so that they can obtain training for the job skills they need.

Sara Rix, Senior Strategic Policy Advisor at the AARP Public Policy Institute, describes the impact of the Great Recession and the slow recovery on older workers.  She explains the changes in the duration of unemployment and the labor force participation rate for older workers and calls for greater training for all unemployed workers, but especially for long-term unemployed workers who are 50+.

Here’s the start of our April Stay Thirsty column:

It has been two years since we started interviewing unemployed older Americans for our multimedia documentary project Over 50 and Out of Work. When we began, the Great Recession, which lasted from December 2007 until June 2009, had already been declared over.

Yet in early 2010, millions of Americans of all ages were still unemployed. Jobless older workers confronted the highest rates of unemployment that their age group had ever faced in the United States. They worried about their futures. They knew they had less time to recoup their lost income and rebuild their savings than younger workers, especially when the average value of their homes had declined precipitously over the course of the recession.

Between February 2010 and June 2011, we conducted video interviews with 100 Americans, age 50-plus, for our project. We focused our interviews in the states with the highest unemployment rates at the time, including Michigan, California, Florida and Rhode Island.

How are our interviewees faring in 2012, given the passage of time since the end of the Great Recession and the recent uneven improvement in the economy?

Over the past two months, we reconnected with our 100 original interviewees to answer that question. In short:  Not well.

Click here to read more.

Last week, we interviewed Jo Ann Jenkins, President of the AARP Foundation, and her full interview has been added to the experts section of our website.  In it, she discusses the Foundation’s mission to help Americans 50 and older manage their incomes and find re-employment.

In the short video clip above, Jenkins directs individuals seeking help to the AARP Foundation’s website and talks about the Foundation’s new low cost debit card.

Jo Ann Jenkins, president of the AARP Foundation, describes the Foundation’s mission to help Americans 50 and older manage their incomes and find re-employment.

Earlier this week, the Over 50 team traveled to Washington, D.C.

We returned to the Urban Institute and re-interviewed Richard Johnson, senior fellow and director of the director of the center’s program on retirement policy, to update the information about unemployment among older workers that he provided in 2010.

We will be adding his complete interview to the expert section of our site soon, but above is a brief video clip from our recent interview in which he compares the current level of unemployment among 50+ workers to the level in 2009, when the Great Recession was declared over.