What's Wrong With the U.S. Job Market?

Joey Griffiths grew up in the western New York town of Dunkirk and left home at 17. Now he’s 30 and working as a bill collector in Jackson Heights, Queens. He has bills of his own to pay. Says Griffiths: “I’m good at collections because I understand what they’re going through. Just surviving.”

You hear a lot of just-surviving talk on the sidewalks of Jackson Heights, a polyglot neighborhood just south of LaGuardia Airport. Rajesh, a limo driver who declined to give his last name, says he’s barely scraping by in spite of driving or waiting for fares at least 12 hours a day, seven days a week. “One day ends, the next day is coming,” he says. Klaus Bauer, a 24-year-old immigrant from Cape Town, South Africa, is trying with little success to make it in computer science. He’s homeless. “Right now I might be moving somewhere,” says Bauer. “Another city. Another state. Trying to find some seasonal work, off the books. Get my own IT business together.”