STEVE INSKEEP, host:
Many Americans out of work right now face a tough choice. They can accept a lower paying job that is available in this tough economy or they can hold out for something closer to the paycheck they lost. NPR's Larry Abramson reports on the choices facing many unemployed workers.
LARRY ABRAMSON: After a year of negative economic growth, a lot of workers out there are going through the various phases of unemployment from I'm going to get a job tomorrow enthusiasm to a kind of Zen patience to total despair. Andrew Stettner of the National Employment Law Project says this recession has swept in a lot of workers who are totally new to this mind-numbing ego-bruising exercise.
Mr. ANDREW STETTNER (Deputy Director, National Employment Law Project): Most people you talk to will say I've never had this problem before.
ABRAMSON: If you're a go-go salesman like Rick Carter(ph) who's been unemployed since August, the waiting can be hard to take.
Mr. RICK CARTER (Unemployed Salesman): I'll be honest with you. Looking back at it, I'm a little surprised that something didn't happen because there was a lot of activity and there was a lot of interviews. A few things came very, very close. You know nothing's happened quite yet.
ABRAMSON: Carter lives with his wife and 11-year-old daughter in a spacious home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. He used to earn six figures selling security technology and was laid off after a takeover. At first, he saw this as an opportunity to do even better, but after four months he's wondering whether he may have to settle for less.
Mr. CARTER: I'm finding now that there's opportunities out there that when you first are presented them, you know, it may be that it could be a significantly lower, what we call, base salary.
ABRAMSON: Meaning that it would be up to Carter to earn more money through commissions. That could be tough to do in slow times. But Carter at 53 years old still sees himself as young and aggressive. In addition to the spiritual downer, being unemployed during the holidays, Rick Carter says many companies just stop hiring from Thanksgiving on. In interviews they told him they would reassess after the first of the year. But when I spoke to him just before the holidays, he was determined not to let this drag on.
Mr. CARTER: It may happen, but I want to be more aggressive than that. I would like to be back to work sooner than that.
ABRAMSON: The recruiter who introduced me to Rick Carter is Brock Boyd. As CEO of CMI Careers in Vienna, Virginia, he sees a lot of successful executives and marketing people who spend months refusing to think about a job with lower pay.
Mr. BROCK BOYD (CEO, CMI Careers): The trouble is that once they do, oftentimes they've now been out of work for five, eight, 10 months. And now it becomes extremely challenging to find even the compensation that five to eight months ago would have been achievable.
ABRAMSON: Boyd says there's no magic number of months workers should wait, but he says white-collar types may be viewed as damaged goods if they're out of the workforce for too long. Some workers say as long as their unemployment insurance keeps paying out, they don't feel the need to look at lower paying jobs. But after a full year without work, Ken Stalma(ph) of South Plainfield, New Jersey, says he's feeling the pressure.
Mr. KEN STALMA: I used to eat at the Four Seasons in Manhattan in the '80s when money was falling out of your pockets. Now I'm relegated to cooking meals back at home by myself.
ABRAMSON: Stalma used to do custom kitchen and cabinetry work. Now that the home renovation market has disappeared, so has his income. He says the market in his area is so bad his unemployment supervisor left him alone. There just weren't any offers to entertain. But now that his insurance has run out, and he's having health problems, he's a lot closer to taking a minimum wage job.
Mr. STALMA: Listen, if the money runs out, I'm going to do whatever I've got to do.
ABRAMSON: It's a choice each worker has to make on his or her own terms. For Rick Carter, our unemployed tech salesman, a good offer came just before the New Year. The salary is a lot lower than what he was hoping for, but he likes the company, and he was getting tired of waiting. Larry Abramson, NPR News.