plus 2, Lister Hill's political career recaptured in wife's letters, diary - Everything Alabama Blog

Lister Hill's political career recaptured in wife's letters, diary - Everything Alabama Blog
Middle class downsizes as its jobs vanish, move away - Lexington Herald-Leader
Don't let your age keep you from competing for jobs - AZCentral.com

Lister Hill's political career recaptured in wife's letters, diary - Everything Alabama Blog

Posted: 14 Nov 2010 05:22 AM PST

Published: Sunday, November 14, 2010, 7:26 AM Updated: Sunday, November 14, 2010, 7:56 AM

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The daughter of the late U.S. Sen. Lister Hill of Alabama has compiled her mother's letters and diary into a book that tells of memories of Alabama and national politics from the genteel pre-World War II days and afterward when serving in Congress became a full-time job.

"A Senator's Wife Remembers, from the Great Depression to the Great Society," by Henrietta McCormick Hill, was compiled by Henrietta Hill Hubbard of Montgomery and published by NewSouth Books.

Hubbard was born in 1928 and grew up in Alabama and Washington, a different place than today. "Back then Congress only met five months of the year and we would spend seven months in Montgomery and five months in Washington," she said in a recent interview. "It meant you had to rent a furnished apartment. When the war broke out, Daddy bought a house and I lived there until I married in the 1950s."

Hubbard explained how the book came to life: Henrietta Hill had written letters to her husband and her own mother and had kept a diary. After her grandmother, Henrietta "Etta" Copeland McCormick Dent, died in 1956, Hubbard's mother found a box labeled, "For Henrietta, for her book." Hubbard said she moved and took the box. Then, 21 years after her mother's death in the mid-1980s, she rediscovered the box and started looking through its contents. Included were three manuscripts, rough drafts for a book.

Hubbard decided that as a labor of love to her late mother, she would publish the manuscripts. "I tried several publishers and they turned it down, and it was too expensive to self-publish. Someone said give the manuscript to Randall Williams," she said.

Williams is editor-in-chief and co-founder of NewSouth Books.

Hubbard said she had final editing control, to make sure no mistakes crept in. "Several books out there have things wrong," she said. "One said my father belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. He was never a member of the Klan." (That membership belonged to another Alabama U.S. senator, Hugo Black.)

Lister Hill was a significant force in national and Alabama politics during the Roaring Twenties, Depression, World War II and the post-war era. He started early, founding the Student Government Association at the University of Alabama and serving as its first president. He was elected to Congress in 1923 and was appointed to the U.S. Senate when President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Black to the Supreme Court in 1938.

Hill co-sponsored the Hill-Burton Act, or correctly the Hospital Center Construction Act of 1946, that provided grants to improve public health. He sponsored the TVA Act and the National Defense Education Act, or the G.I. Bill, among other legislation. He served as Senate Majority Whip from 1941-47.

Hill retired in 1969 and was succeeded in the Senate by Jim Allen. He died in 1984 at age 89.

Hubbard said the nation is much changed. "Oh gosh, it was a totally different situation," she said. "When father was in Congress, Democrats and Republicans worked together."

Among the tidbits in the book, Hubbard said, is a fact about her uncle, Luther Hill, a West Point graduate who became a general. She said he told the family "a dark secret that we had a bomb that was going to end the war."

Hubbard said she, her mother and grandmother were very close and shared stories on the family's front porch in Eufaula. Now her mother's letters and stories will become part of Alabama's history of the first half of the 20th century.

"I started last fall going over making corrections, ensuring things were right," she said. "I did (it) in loving memory. My grandmother was named Henrietta, my mother was named Henrietta and I was named Henrietta. It took three Henriettas to put this together."

(This report was written by Dana Beyerle of The Gadsden Times.)

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Middle class downsizes as its jobs vanish, move away - Lexington Herald-Leader

Posted: 14 Nov 2010 12:14 AM PST

WASHINGTON -- The good paying, predominantly white-collar jobs that once sustained many American communities are disappearing at an alarming pace, keeping the unemployment rate stubbornly high despite the end of the Great Recession.

More troubling, these jobs in accounting, financial analysis, commercial printing and a broad array of other mostly white-collar occupations are unlikely to come back, experts predict.

There isn't a single cause to the trend. Some of it is explained by changing technology, some of it is the result of automation. Sending well-paying jobs to low-cost centers abroad is another big part of the story. So is global competition from emerging economies such as China and India.

The result is the same in all cases, however. Jobs that paid well, required skills and produced vital communities are going away and aren't being replaced by anything comparable.

"Unfortunately, the evidence is that you see a form of downward mobility of workers who are displaced from middle-skilled, stable career occupations," said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview.

Autor published a much-discussed paper in April, suggesting that the U.S. labor market has become polarized, with employment growth in the high-skill, high-wage end, and the low-skill, low-wage end. The vast middle, he concluded, is shrinking.

"The Great Recession has quantitatively but not qualitatively changed the direction of the U.S. labor market," Autor concluded, pointing to an accelerating trend that he said has been underway for more than a decade.

As it stands, 14.8 million Americans were unemployed in September, 6.1 million of them for six months or longer. The unemployment rate has hovered around 9.6 percent for half a year, and few economists expect it to dip below 8 percent for years to come.

Lois Williams-Norman is on the upper end of what could be called a middle-skill job, working her entire career in corporations as an internal financial and budget expert. Like millions of Americans, she's had to swallow her pride and step down the income ladder.

"I've gone from a six-figure income to seriously looking at positions that are going to be paying probably half as much. So over the past 10 years, my income has continued to decline year after year," Williams-Norman said during an interview in the western New York city of Rochester, in between networking events where she searched for employment.

Her problems began in 2001 when she was downsized out of a job at Xerox Corp. after 20 years with the iconic company. Williams-Norman, who holds an MBA degree, was forced to take a 20 percent salary cut when she landed her next job at a pharmaceutical firm. She stayed there four years until her company was bought during the frenzy of mergers and acquisitions in the middle part of the last decade.

Finding work at corporate headquarters with eye care company Bausch & Lomb in Rochester, Williams-Norman was put on the street just 18 months later after private equity firm Warburg Pincus bought the company in 2007. She eventually landed with a small local manufacturer that tapped her strategic planning skills, but the economic downturn ended that job last year.

After going through four corporate employers in 10 years, Williams-Norman, who's in her 50s, has been out of work for more than a year. She's sober about her job search.

"I know a lot of them aren't going to come back, and the new jobs aren't going to pay as much," she said.

While older workers fight it out for a scant number of jobs, younger ones are voting with their feet, departing what once was prime turf for corporate America.

"We've had this white-collar work force, highly educated ... nevertheless, we've gotten almost no (employment) growth. In fact, there's been a decline; young people are leaving," said Ron Hira, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a co-author of the 2008 book "Outsourcing America," which warned about larger dangers from sending jobs abroad.

Don't let your age keep you from competing for jobs - AZCentral.com

Posted: 13 Nov 2010 06:31 PM PST

by Daryl Bjoraas - Nov. 13, 2010 07:20 PM
Special for the Republic

There's no denying that in today's competitive job market, job seekers over 50 often feel at a disadvantage when compared with younger applicants.

But career experts say older workers have the skills and work experience employers clamor for, and that they just need to learn how to market themselves to secure work.

"Just because you're old, doesn't mean you can't find employment in today's job market," said career expert Jory Butler of Jory Butler Coaching in Phoenix.

Butler, who coaches many older job seekers, said the best way to find work is to believe in yourself and approach job searching in a lively manner.

"If you have energy, it's going to come out during the interview process," he said.

But some challenges faced by older workers can include:

- Social media. Older workers often struggle with social media, a necessary tool for networking, Butler said.

"It's one of the biggest fears," he said. "Someone who's not used to going to Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter is going to feel uncomfortable with the whole process."

But there are ways to overcome that obstacle. He suggests having your son, daughter or grandchild teach you how to use social media.

It's important to display who you are online, which allows you to make connections you wouldn't be able to make otherwise - connections you can use to get a job.

"There are jobs out there. They're just not advertised," Butler said.

- Lack of confidence. Gary Recchion, principal of Recchion and Associates Inc. in Phoenix, works with clients over the age of 55 on a regular basis and believes that older candidates need to have more confidence in their abilities.

Like Butler, he said it's important to realize what skills you can bring to the table and then look for jobs affiliated with those skills.

"Once you are able to do that, things start to roll and you start to see your value," Recchion said. "You're much more effective in interviewing and networking."

- Dated looks. Looking and feeling young is often key to securing jobs. You can accomplish both by freshening your look, which can boost your confidence and thus improve your rapport with potential employers during the interview process.

"You have to make an effort from a grooming perspective, a physical perspective and a health perspective," Recchion said.

- Saying too much. Having an up-to-date resume will play a key role in whether or not you land the job you're looking for. But be careful of aging yourself by listing too much information. Limit the work experience on your resume to within 15 years. If you have more than 15 years of experience, don't list it.

"It's the kiss of death," Recchion said.

Instead, pepper the cover letter and resume with words like "experienced" or "strong background in" without listing the actual time frame.

At the end of the day, age shouldn't be an impediment to landing a coveted job, Recchion said.

"We put that limitation on ourselves."

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