March 28, 2024

Preoccupations: Older, Unemployed, and Landing the Job

In 2011, I was an account executive with Scor Global Life Americas Reinsurance Company, in Plano, Tex., near where I live. When Scor acquired Transamerica Reinsurance, I was laid off along with several other people that October.

At that point I called Mike Pado, a former colleague at Scor who had left the company several months earlier for a job as president and C.E.O. of Aurigen USA Holdings. Aurigen is based in Bermuda, and Mike had been hired to look at starting a life reinsurance company in the United States.

Mike, who works out of Red Bank, N.J., was still in the planning stages for the new venture when I spoke to him. He said that at some point he’d need a person who knew the reinsurance industry and its top executives and could contact them for a snapshot of the United States market. He knew I fit that bill. But he was hoping that the person he hired would also be an actuary. I’m familiar with risk assessment and risk management in that field, but I’m not an actuary. So besides my age, I was worried about that.

I had done a good job at Scor for 12 years, and I was disappointed that I had been laid off. My level of anxiety was fairly high. The Aurigen venture sounded like a great opportunity if it worked out. But the business world often has certain misperceptions about workers 55 and older. Some people think we’re set in our ways, we don’t have the energy we used to have, or that we’ve lost our drive. They may worry about offering us a lower salary than we earned previously. I knew I’d have to address these concerns when job-hunting.

I told Mike I was interested in working for him, and we left it that we’d stay in touch while he continued to develop a business plan and consider a staff for the United States company. In the meantime, I sent out 300 résumés. I heard back from about a third of the companies and had about 12 or 15 interviews, but no luck.

By June 2012, eight months after Mike and I first talked, I still hadn’t found a job. Then Mike called and said he could offer me a three-month position as a marketing consultant, and that we’d see what happened after that. I was excited, but a consulting job was not ideal for me. I told him I would do the best job I could for him but would continue looking for a staff job with benefits, and he understood.

Consulting works well for people who like short-term projects and freedom, but I’ve always liked having a staff job. I like the feeling of belonging, and benefits are important.

I started talking to executives right away to gather the information Mike wanted and help him determine whether there was room for another entrant in the United States life reinsurance industry. I spoke to a vice chairman, 11 company presidents, 25 chief actuaries and 30 life underwriters and sent Aurigen’s annual report to customers and others, sometimes with a handwritten note.

My work helped Mike make a case to his board that another United States life reinsurance company could do well. In October I got the news that Mike’s proposal had been accepted. He was finally able to hire me as an account executive on staff for his new-business development team. I was able to stay in Texas for my new job at Aurigen.

Right after hiring me, Mike had me join him and the Aurigen pricing team at the October 2012 conference of the Society of Actuaries in Washington. Many industry executives attend, and I’d help sell prospective clients on the benefits of working with the new venture.

When word got out that I’d been hired, my former colleagues gave me a warm reception, which was nice. Several welcomed me back to the industry, and one asked about my sales territories. It felt great to know that I hadn’t been forgotten.

Rather than start a new company from scratch, Mike began looking at United States insurance companies to buy, choosing one that Aurigen closed on and renamed this past spring.

Some people might have no problem retiring after being laid off at 59. Maybe they tell themselves it’s not what they would have wanted, but they make the best of it. Or maybe they are ready to retire, so it turned out to be perfect timing. I’ll be 61 in September, but I want to keep working, so getting a chance at this job worked out well for me.

It’s easy to get depressed about being an older job seeker. You have to keep your eyes open, stay focused, and be open to possibilities. You never know when and how an opportunity may come along.

As told to Patricia R. Olsen.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/jobs/older-unemployed-and-landing-the-job.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

French Lawmakers Loosen Labor Rules

The criticism, which was both pointed and indirect, seemed to increase pressure on Mr. Hollande to reorganize his cabinet soon, though it has been in power only a year. Mr. Fabius, a former finance minister himself, referred to divisions within the vast ministry, known as Bercy for its location.

“I ran Bercy in the past, and it’s true it needs a boss,” Mr. Fabius told RTL radio. “At the moment you have several bosses. Whatever the quality of the men and women and their level of agreement, I think that stronger coordination would be more useful.”

Asked if he expected changes soon, Mr. Fabius said that if there were changes to the cabinet, “this question will be dealt with.”

His comments on Tuesday took some of the glow off Mr. Hollande’s legislative success.

The upper house of Parliament easily passed a version of the labor bill already passed by the lower one. It is the culmination of months of painstaking negotiations among the government, employers and trade unions that ended in January. The law also signifies a success in Mr. Hollande’s strategy of avoiding strikes through dialogue and compromise among what he calls social partners.

The law makes it easier for companies to lay off workers or to reduce pay and working hours in economic downturns. But it also increases benefits for workers on short-term contracts, which have been popular as a way for companies to avoid hiring full-time employees, and which represent up to 80 percent of all new job contracts in France.

“This is one of those moments in which a great step forward has been made,” said the labor minister, Michel Sapin, who led the negotiations and is close to Mr. Hollande. The main opposition center-right Union for a Popular Movement abstained in the vote, and the Communists voted against the legislation.

The law’s passage prompted some rare praise for the government from the business world. Laurence Parisot, president of the Medef employers’ association, hailed it in a statement as “an event in the economic and social history of our country.”

The “flexicurity” law gives companies more freedom to hire and fire, as well as the right to demand that workers take pay cuts and work shorter hours in a crisis in exchange for job security. About 3.5 million mostly lower-wage workers will gain additional employer-paid health benefits, and businesses will have tax incentives to hire under long-term contracts. Measures also encourage worker mobility.

While two of France’s more militant labor unions opposed the accord, the more mainstream ones signed on. There is wide agreement that the country has to bring down its relatively high labor costs if it is to compete with lower-wage destinations overseas and even with Germany, which underwent its own painful labor-market restructuring over the last decade and currently has a jobless rate of just 5.4 percent.

It is the kind of structural overhaul that European Union leaders are urging to increase employment and growth in France, which is being given two more years to get its budget deficit down to the European Union-mandated 3 percent of the gross domestic product. But even the government acknowledges that more must be done, including further changes to pensions.

France is in the midst of an unemployment crisis, with nearly 11 percent of the work force unemployed in a period of near recession. Among people under 24, the problem is even worse, with more than 26 percent jobless.

Already under pressure from the European Union to address France’s high public-sector spending, Mr. Hollande has seen his approval rating sink to historic lows in opinion polls. He is scheduled to hold a news conference on Thursday.

But on Tuesday, no government official would respond to Mr. Fabius’s comments. The government spokeswoman, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, was described by her office as “too busy to comment.” Requests for comment from Mr. Hollande’s office were not returned.

Mr. Moscovici, the finance minister, is considered a moderate and pragmatist on the center-right of the Socialist Party. He has struggled with his junior ministers. Jérôme Cahuzac, the budget minister, resigned in disgrace after lying repeatedly about an undeclared foreign bank account, prompting much criticism of Mr. Moscovici. Arnaud Montebourg, the junior minister for industrial renewal, comes from the left of the party and ran for president himself on a platform of “deglobalization.”

Mr. Hollande’s efforts to pacify all wings of the Socialist Party have thus created constant tensions within Bercy, with Mr. Montebourg calling for protectionist policies, while Mr. Moscovici is trying to convince the world that France is open to investment and competition. This month Mr. Montebourg blocked Yahoo from buying a 75 percent stake in the French video Web site Dailymotion, owned by French Telecom, in which the state has a minority stake.

Mr. Moscovici criticized the move, as he criticized Mr. Montebourg’s angry and public dispute with an American businessman over French working habits at a threatened tire factory.

Mr. Fabius, who in 1984, at age 37, became the youngest prime minister in modern French history, was also finance minister from 2000 to 2002.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/world/europe/french-lawmakers-loosen-labor-rules.html?partner=rss&emc=rss