Hi, my name is James and I am unemployed. Well, I was unemployed. I lucked myself into a job that I more or less enjoy, but it is a paycheck. I no longer have to sweat bullets if I am going to be able to heat my apartment for the winter, or if I am even going to have an apartment for the winter.
A short bio, I am a 40 year old college graduate with a degree in chemistry. A BS degree to full meaning of the BS it means to have it. It has not served me well at all since most companies want a PhD to play with their chemicals, but I did work at various times and in various roles in various companies with that degree. I was a mediocre student at best. I got a few B’s and C’s and the occasional A, but it was a nightmare getting that degree and I had and still have no interest on going any further with my chemical education. So, since that degree has served me so well, I decided to return and get another one. This time in the degree is in Political Science and for no better reason that it did not involve a lot of math. Plus, learning things is fun.
OK, the last job I worked that related to chemistry was as a technician in a chemical repository. I prepared samples and inventoried samples as they came in. It was about as boring as you could get and a real heartbreaker since I learned that the person I was working with had no degree in chemistry and in fact, had no degree at all. After a few months, the project I was hired for ended and I was let go due to seniority. I had initial bitterness, but I had grown to like my coworker very much and figured he deserved the job more than I did since he had a family to take care of and I had only my fat mouth to feed. Also, I had never –to that point, been without a job for any period longer than a week or so, as a result I had no worries. I left to enjoy my weekend and update my resume and began thinking about what adventures awaited me.
If I could only have seen the future, I would have been a little less careless with things. A week came and went and I had no prospects. Then another week went by, and then another. Soon, my meager savings was dwindling fast and bills were coming due. I bit the bullet and filed for unemployment. I hated doing that. Not that I disagree with getting it or even its existence, I just felt it was not for me. After a while, it was all I could do stay afloat. I had to make changes on how I did things, turned down the heat and started leaving lights off as long as I could. I needed internet access so I could look for a job, or at least assist in the task. I changed my phone plan to the bare minimum and cable got reduced to minimum. I still thought I could pull it through.
After 5 months of this, I landed a temp job that ended up lasting a year, after the job was overI was in the same boat as before. This time, however, I had more responsibilities to deal with. I had acquired things like a car, a few credit cards and a fiancé, which in retrospect all was foolish to do as a temp, but I felt good about things. When I was told that a year was too long for that company to have a temp on its rolls and with no way of making it a permanent position, I had a sinking feeling. I still felt as before that I could find something quickly, and compared to others I know and have read about, I did find a job in a month and half. That it took a fraction of the time to find a job, it took a lot of cajoling to get it. I had lucked out as this was summer of 2007 and by that fall, the whole world would be turned on its economic ear and a year after that it was only going to get worse.
During my unemployment period, I began to collect reasons for not getting hired. What was the motivation behind not hiring me? Why couldn’t a man of my education and experience land a job anywhere? Here I will write in a little more detail about my experience and the experience of those dear to me who have been unemployed. I will dispel of the idea that all unemployed people are lazy deadbeats who want to suck off the public teat. I will talk about some of the factors as to why the unemployed stay unemployed, what happens to their lives and why what formerly worked for them, is now working against them. I will go into the notion that the numbers and percentages you hear rattled off on the news are no way indicative of the actual numbers of people really looking for work. Finally, I will offer up some clear and simple solutions for getting people back to work.
First, let’s get one thing that should be obvious to everyone, being unemployed sucks. Barring a health disaster or the loss of a loved one, it is the worst feeling many of us will ever have. To be unemployed is not so much as a forced lifestyle change as it is a forced lifestyle reboot. I had a professor tell me if you are married, with a partner or whatever and lose your job, that is an instant recession, if you are single and lose your job, then that is an instant depression. If you were lucky enough to put some money away, then that will give you a little breathing room, but believe me that money will disappear very quickly. If you were to lose all your possessions due to some natural disaster or accident, you will still feel sadness and uncertainty, but at least you can plan for rebuilding your life. If you lost everything due to a job loss, then you do not know when or even if you will be able to rebuild your life. (I will not judge, unless you really screwed up at your job, losing your income for any reason is going to be bad) Let’s go over a few myths about unemployment and the unemployed.
Myth number one, they [the unemployed] bring it on themselves and are personally responsible for the mess they are in. The people who say this are the old-school types who seem to think that there is still such a thing as job security and if you lose your job and find yourself without a home or car or whatever then it is your fault for angering your employer and your fault for living outside your means. My wife is Taiwanese and I have this argument with her from time to time. I guess it is ingrained in the Asian conscious that savings is the way to go and just pay cash for everything and to various degrees I can accept this. But this is not the reality we live in. Oh, I can hear you say it does not matter, you should still live within your means and I agree, but let me paint a picture that is not uncommon in today’s world. Let’s say you have a decent education and you have a good job that pays about $100,000 per year. After taxes and deductions such as health insurance and your 401k, that brings that to about $50,000 a year. Luckily your student loans are paid off and you waited till then to buy a new car and a house. You are married or otherwise in a committed relationship, and your significant other (“other”) works as well, but makes significantly less than you do for whatever reasons. Your income allows you to have one or two credit cards with limits of about $1000 each. You like it that way since it allows you be spontaneous without going overboard and you always pay it off at once. You are able to save about 20% each month and over the past few years have a nice safety net squared away in the bank. All is going good for you, even after all your bills are paid and savings accounted for, you still have enough on hand to go do things on weekends like take day-trips here and there, go to new and trendy restaurants that charge $100 for the cheese plate. You are living good and well within your means.
But then the hammer falls. You go to work on a Friday and before you leave, you are called into the HR office to be told that your position has been cancelled due to cut-backs. They thank you for your service, make you sign a piece of paper that says you will never divulge what you learned from your company and maybe a non-compete form (this is more common than you think. Your company spent time and money fine-tuning the knowledge your brought with you and training you to fit nicely in the market place of your company, they do not want to think they gave a competitor a freely trained employee) and you get your last check, which they graciously gave you a month’s salary. Then you give them your badge and get escorted out. They will mail you your personal affects since they want to make sure you do not take anything that belongs to them. Welcome to your new reality.
On your way home you do not think much about it. You are educated and have experience and so, this is just a temporary setback and you will be back among the working crowd before you know it and you have savings to cover what you think will be at best a two-week lag in getting a pay check. Using the Kubler-Ross model of the “5-stages of grief”, this is stage one, “denial”. What you do not know is that your job and your field is changing and that many people who did what you did are now in the same boat and that all that work you took so much pride and pleasure in doing is now being done by someone on the other side of the planet for a fraction of what you made. You will never work in your field again.
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