Why an Interruption in Employment may be the End of the Road

At the end of just about every year I figure out what movies I want to watch in the coming year.

In recent years I've had a bias towards Korean movies.

The review for No Other Choice stood out.

The challenges finding another job after an interruption in work are serious. Especially for middle-aged (or older) workers.

There's always some delight when life imitates art: At a gathering of CEOs organized by the Yale School of Management, 66% of leaders surveyed said they planned to either fire workers or maintain the size of their existing teams in 2026. Only a third indicated they planned to hire. That on top of the fact the unemployment rate is at its highest in four years.

Once we set something bad in motion, we don't know how it will turn out.

But we're responsible for what we've done. (We sent out a newsletter about wildfires and concussions that explored this theme.)

That applies to injuring someone and having them miss work.

What if missing work for a month leads to losing a job? And what if losing a job means not being able to find another job even if they've recovered from their injuries?

Injuries hit the most vulnerable the hardest. That's both physical and also in adjacent things like work.

There's this saying that if you take a little from someone with very little to lose you leave them with nothing.

And that's the reality for people who are in their late 50s and early 60s. They may have been at the same job for decades. But an interruption in work can be vocationally fatal for an older employee in an economy like this one.

There's a huge emphasis on AI. There's discrimination against older workers. Employers are reluctant to hiring someone fresh off the injured reserve (IR) list.

This combination of factors means that a neck or back or brain injury that initially puts an older worker out of the game for four or five weeks may really spell the end of their employment.

That changes the calculus from something like four or five weeks of lost wages to maybe four or five years of lost wages.