If you are able bodied, hard working, and reasonably bright, then contact local apprenticeship programs. They are almost always desperate for new people these days. These sorts of jobs cannot be outsourced and are in high demand since the society in America these days so highly encourages everyone to seek university education.
Food service jobs are actually quite difficult for most people to land compared to most jobs. The reason people use it as an example of where unemployed people could work is because lots of teenagers can get those jobs meaning that people who say that are remembering back to when they or their buddies got those jobs.
EDIT: I'm not pulling this out of my ass here, I say this from personal experience. For about 5 years before I got into uni I worked a few jobs in demo (gutting, nothing specialized, just swinging a sledgehammer) and as a migrant farmhand (most of that work as general labour at various processing plants down the coast). Most of my friends from that time went on to get apprenticeships in various trades. I don't care to think about how many pounds of asbestos I probably inhaled, but it was work.
Two extra points:
1) At the age of 55, I am not sure how vast a swath of jobs are available in construction. I know crane operators make major bucks, but there is a long waiting list for the training. Perhaps someone with more experience knows of other non-labor intensive jobs in these industries a 55 year old man could find. But maybe in this instance, for this man, it's not the right fit.
2) Regarding asbestos: I hope you're joking. Having three degrees does not entitle anybody to any job. But everyone in America deserves safe working conditions at the jobs they can find!
I know people with the opposite experiences. I know people who are just gutting, cleaning, sledgehammering and etc that are constantly looking for more work, taking it where they can find it, and living paycheck to paycheck. There is a work drought. We're talking people without high school educations who have worked jobs like this for years but have been having a harder time now than ever.
On a higher level, I also happen to know the owners of a construction firm. They make solid money (don't know how much for sure but over $150K/yr) who have complained about how they are dipping into savings, investing more than ever in advertising, and still having problems finding projects to do.
I think there is reason to be suspect about the guy in this article, but that doesn't mean times aren't really tough all over.
The fact is, computers and large-scale engineering projects are really fucking interesting and siphoning off talent from other areas. The dreaded brain drain. Meanwhile, our grid is crumbling and we're playing it conservatively--minor fixes, if anything. If there was some serious thought and excitement put back into it, to not just modernize, but futurize our utilities--we'd see a lot more people start to join.
NIMBY is a problem: no micro-wind farms, no upgraded rail projects, no weird bio-tech projects, nothing new or innovative. If anyone's intellectually curious, why the hell would they want to join something as boring as a public works project?
That sounds almost exactly like my last programming job. Except it was more like 90% male. :-)
No one wants to admit that nearly every business except tech is sitting on cash and just working their existing employees to the bone because they can (and because it's more profitable). The real hiring is overseas, as it should be.
People like the guy in the video and 99ers may need to start their own businesses if they can't find anything. Necessity is the mother of invention (and entrepreneurship).