Word on the Street: “Now We’re Just Trying to Survive”
Russ Meyer — Portland, Oregon
My name is Russ Meyer. I live in Portland, Oregon with my wife Stephanie and my 4 year old son Wyatt.
I’m a college grad and have spent my career as marketing copywriter. I was laid off in October of 2008 and, aside from freelance or contract work wherever I can find it, I’ve been without consistent employment since. My wife stays at home with our son. And without an extension, we will lose unemployment insurance in a couple of months.
I never dreamed I would be without work for this long. I didn’t know the door that shut behind me that day would stay closed indefinitely. For many like me, getting back to the jobs and the income we had is a fantasy. Now we’re just trying to survive. We’ve come to grips with the reality that, for now, for today, we just have to find a way to get by.
We’re acutely aware of our situation. We know exactly which bills can’t get paid and exactly how much food and gas is going to cost this week. And we know exactly how far we can stretch our benefit amount. This isn’t about finally dipping into our savings. Those savings are long gone. It’s not about finally putting our pride aside to ask our family and friends for help. They’ve helped. They’re tapped out.
Unless you’ve been in our shoes, you can’t imagine the despair we feel knowing that we’ve reached the end of the line despite our best efforts.
We’ve learned we can do a hell of a lot with a little. Now is not the time to take that help away from us.
You’re not the only one! Read more stories at http://disposableamericans.net and hang in there
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One of the reasons long term unemployment is persisting is that policymakers and lawmakers are refusing to understand what every employment candidate understands: that unemployment is a qualitative problem more than a quantitative problem. Economists can make sure that the economy as a system moves in a stable direction. However, the presence of jobs does not matter until we address the problem of how jobs are filled.
The narrative we are accustomed to is that the loss of jobs was caused by irresponsible risks taken on Wall Street. But that ignores another problem that working people are very familiar with. During the past fifteen years the people getting the promotions have been the ones who treat their coworkers the most, schemers and sociopaths who will go to any length to advance themselves and their own power. In management language, this is called putting effectiveness before efficiency. Women, minorities and anyone with a conscience have been blocked from the upper echelons, as evidenced by the reports of a glass ceiling in Silicon Valley.
These people have grown into senior management roles. They have hired employer-side labor lawyers to design their human resources policies. These lawyers’ #1 goal is to prevent lawsuits. Lawsuits could be prevented by obeying the law – hiring older workers, women, minorotoes and the disabled, but that is not what the executives have in mind. That want to neutralize any regulations and to do whatever they want and bully anyone who might complain.
Employers are trying to create a workforce that is male, age 24-45, able-bodied and coming from authoritarian cultures, i.e. people who can and will work enormous emounts of overtime and who will never ask for anything. Bringing in a pool of immigrants who are desperate for a visa is a way to prevent complaints.
In order to carry out this policy, employer side labor lawyers have designed hiring processes that are designed to intimidate job applicants and to provide legal defenses for not hiring them. Every step of the job application process is designed to find a “gotcha” that puts the job applicant on the defensive and justify a negative hiring system.
Resume screening throws a “gotcha” at anyone with a gap or job changes on the resume. Interview exams throw a “gotcha” at older workers who don’t remember the arcane details of the courses they took. Credit checks throw a “gotcha” at people who don’t have inheritance and ran into a financial problem. Being interviewed by 10 people throws a “gotcha” because there is someone who will vote against you. Reference jobs throw a “gotcha” if you had a bully boss or if you worked for a defense contractor that forbids references.
The result is the systenatic creation of a class of people who are excludent from employment. Meanwhile, employers can claim that they cannot find “qualified” or “perfect” candidates. This allows them to use Indian employment agencies to bring in masses of young, male, able-bodied workers from India who will tolerate salary cuts, no benefits, forced overtime, and miserable office space conditions beause they are desperate for a visa.
Policymakers need to view the proble of mong term unemployment from the point of view of the job seeker. Job seekers have to stop having battered woman syndrome and stand up for their self worth in the face of a hiring system that is designed to attack their self confidence.
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Mr. Meyer, I understand exactly what you are going through because I have experienced it myself. I was a journalist – veteran of a career in editing, writing and photography that spans half a century — but I have not been employed since early 2009, and it is now obvious I will never work for pay again.
In this context it is important for both of us to note that the downsizing of the newspaper-and-trade-publication workplace (the realm in which I functioned since 1956), is obviously the fulfillment of a long-range plan to minimize public access to information. Its clear intent is proven by the (mostly unreported) fact the vast majority of the publications that were permanently padlocked or hopelessly reduced to reportorial ineffectiveness were notably profitable – often obscenely so – at the time we workers were herded into abandonment.
I need not tell you that the field in which you worked was reduced accordingly: with fewer outlets for print advertising, there are fewer jobs for copy writers, photographers, artists, creative directors and art directors. I know the realities of advertising because for two years – 1985 and 1986 – I was the editor-in-chief of the magazine Art Direction; before that – though most of my career was on the editorial side – I had also occasionally worked as a freelance creative director and had even been a partner in a small advertising agency.
Indeed I suspect the one major difference between us is that I am 70 years old and thus (for now) receive an (already meager) Social Security retirement pension.
I say “for now” because here in the deepening and ever-more-toxic darkness beneath the ObamaBush, our president Barack the Betrayer – the closet Republican who ran for office as a Democrat but now reveals his true self by governing as the most vicious sort of Big Business/Wall Street reactionary – is already attacking Social Security. By reducing the Social Security withholding tax, the fraudster who hid behind a dark skin and a Democratic party label to con us into believing he would protect our socioeconomic interests has instead launched the most devastating assault on Social Security ever.
Given the emergent political reality of a now truly permanent Republican majority – the direct result of the same Obamanoid legacy of betrayal that handed the Republicans an unprecedented victory in November – the entire Social Security insurance program is now obviously doomed.
In my mind the one remaining question is which scythe will terminate my pension: the scythe of another Obama/GOP “compromise,” or the scythe of Death. I can only pray it will be the latter; the now-horribly-real specter of a Social Security cutoff – of abandonment to homelessness and starvation – is literally too terrifying to contemplate.
What, then, might we do to fight back?
Earlier generations – the parents of people my age and the grandparents of younger men and women – understood a truth we Americans today have been deliberately, methodically denied. Our parents and grandparents knew that whenever people are thrown out of work, the bottom-line cause is an economic system in which infinite greed is defined as maximum virtue and relentless selfishness is upheld as the ultimate human good: in other words, capitalism.
Yes, capitalism has its apparent benefits – especially the seductive possibility anyone might somehow strike it rich – but the Great Depression had shown our parents and grandparents the venomous serpent lurking in the Eden of capitalist prosperity, and they had responded accordingly: they recognized that if capitalism were to truly serve the people, it had to be caged like some ravenously predatory beast, lest its insatiable hunger destroy us all.
Such was the New Deal: the cage of regulations and safety nets that (seemed to) transform capitalism from tyrannosaur to thoroughbred – not a lizard-brained monster that would eat us alive but a gentle, proud-gaited horse we could all ride to comfort and happiness.
But now the New Deal is slain and gone forever. Its slaying was begun the moment World War II ended, was radically accelerated by the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and was finished by Lyndon Johnson, Dick Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton and George Bush’s son Bush II.
Barack Obama, the most treacherous (alleged) Democrat in U.S. history, then nailed the lid on the New Deal’s coffin – doing so in such a way there is no possibility it will ever be resurrected.
Based on the unprecedented contributions Obama received from Wall Street, this hitherto-unimaginable betrayal is no doubt fulfillment of the exact purpose for which he was hired – just as the shouts of the Republican noise machine are merely the distractions behind which he imposes his pamper-the-rich agenda.
And now of course the tyrannosaur of capitalism is uncaged and again running amok – the casualties of its savagery apparent in joblessness, bankruptcy, foreclosure – and above all else in our own personal wretchedness and desperation.
For most of us, this is a new and indescribably wrenching experience. Hence if we are to mount an adequate defense – if we are ever again to enjoy the security of a regular paycheck, a roof over our heads, food on our tables – it seems only natural we should turn to the now-forbidden knowledge that bolstered our parents and grandparents in their struggles against the tyrannosaur.
Their resistance started with a couple of guys named Marx and Engels, teachers who showed our mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers and great grandmothers and great grandfathers the underlying truth of capitalism: that when push comes to shove, we working people have nothing to lose but our chains.
This is the same truth that has become so hideously evident again today.
Which means, Mr. Meyer, that there’s still plenty of work for us writers. The capitalists won’t pay us – not now, not ever again – but that doesn’t mean the work isn’t there. As a first step, Marx and Engels need to be re-written in language modern Americans can understand. And as long as we bear in mind that’s a beginning not an end – the embryo of a solution and not the solution itself – who knows where we might go?
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My buddy Bob lost everything, I mean everything! I took him over to the Human Services (State Department) and got a form for emergency aid, it covers everything from rent to insurance coverage or what ever you need.
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As a merchant who had been dealing with small to mid-sized business owners I think the problem is that Now small business owners in America are the people who are creating two out of three jobs here in America. These are also the people especially in today’s economic environment that are being frowned upon by banks that originate traditional small business loans. If this keeps on going I fear that this will get more worst! read more…
Charles Baratta
Co-Owner
Express Funding Group
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