Tales of Woe on Multiple Fronts

Sounding the Alarm

1. Craig's List ads chronicle the desperation of out-of-work construction workers:   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/business/economy/for-craftsmen-craigslist-is-a-slender-lifeline.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
2. Romney embraces the Ryan budget proposals. First victims to be the aged who will see their out-of-pocket medical costs soar as a result.   http://baselinescenario.com/2012/05/03/mitt-romney-and-paul-ryans-budget/
3. Koch Brothers donate $68million to Deerfield Academy (and tout their largesse as a good reason they shouldn't pay more taxes) to incubate more right-wing, freeloading despoiler creeps like themselves.   http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/30/stephen-king-tax-me-for-f-s-sake.html
4. Unemployment numbers, while they appear to be improving, are increasingly skewed because they ignore people who have fallen off the rolls and are no longer looking for work. Actual unemployment is getting worse, way worse, not better.   http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/03/news/economy/unemployment-rate/index.htm?hpt=hp_t2
5. Spirit Airlines CEO says dying ex-Marine should have  bought insurance. Industry observers say Spirit has a 'history of cruelty' to its passengers. Still, its the airline's right...right? This is why I cringe whenever some conservative dweeb like Romney announces that government should be run more like a business.   http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/05/03/spirit-airlines-outpaces-competitors-regarding-passenger-complaints-statistics/?test=latestnews
6. Race is still a deciding issue for some voters. Come on. It's 2012 for crying out loud. There are plenty of real issues dividing the candidates. This shouldn't be one of them.  http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47290132/ns/politics-the_new_york_times/#.T6Ps7Ot5GSo  

None of this is helping my depression very much. How about yours?

Class Action

When you've got the blues, you need to blow the horn.

 My friend, David Kaa, who blogs at ManWife Chronicles about the trials and tribulations of long-term unemployment received a cease and desist order from an attorney representing his former employer. You can read the details here. 

It seems that David's employer was upset that he was making disparaging comments about them in his blog and on a video commentary that he put up on YouTube. The lawyer said he had to quit. Not only did the lawyer insist that he quit, but also that he remove the offending posts and dismantle his website. To give legal weight to this demand the lawyer cited a non-compete agreement that David had been required to sign when he was first employed. Also cited was the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

This last seemed a bit over-reaching to me. At issue was the fact that David's video included shots of the employer's office building with its logo displayed prominently on the side. Wait...what?! Displaying a picture taken on a public thoroughfare of a sign on a building is copyright infringement?

David called bullshit on this one, but it turns out that the lawyer is right. You can't do that, at least not for commercial purposes or private financial gain. Neither can Google it would seem, but nobody is making an issue of it with them. David's former company's logo is displayed for all to see on the street view of Google maps. Google presumably has more lawyers than God.

David did take the video down though. Who wants to waste the precious hours of blissful unemployment (no longer working for assholes) fighting with a lawyer? As my hometown pharmacist and soda fountain operator used to say, 'You can wrestle with a turd all day long, but no matter how bad you whup it you're still bound to get a little on you.'

Copyright issues aside, I think the proscription against making disparaging comments is an actionable offense on the part of David's employer, and many others as well. My former employer did it too—not in a non-compete agreement but in the termination letter I was forced to sign in order to get any severance pay. I'm not only prohibited from making disparaging comments in any public forum, I'm also prohibited from acknowledging that any severance agreement even exists. Good luck enforcing that one.

Here's my point. The ability to make disparaging comments is a necessary adjunct to the continuing mental health and well-being of an unemployed individual. This fact is, I think, well established in modern society on another front. For instance people who have just gotten out of bad relationships are allowed, expected, even encouraged, to say all manner of perjorative things about their former significant others. It's part of the healing process. It's an expression of the anger that is one of the five necessary steps in the grieving process.

Nothing more closely parallels a divorce or break-up than losing one's job. The longer you've had the job, the more effort you've invested in the relationship, the harder it is to adjust to being terminated and escorted out of the building like a trespassing derelict. This is a hurtful experience. Anyone who's been through it knows that you need all the healing tools available to weather the turmoil and get your life back on track. One of those tools is the ability to work through the natural feelings of anger and betrayal.

Taking this a little bit further, the continuing mental health and well-being of the unemployed is a necessary adjunct to their ability to get another job.

This is and has been an extremely difficult job market. Three years after the CDO- and derivative-fueled real estate bubble burst and brought our economy to the brink of collapse, unemployment is still running above 9%. There are an estimated 25 million unemployed, underemployed, and displaced workers who need jobs. Conservatively there are 6 people actively looking for work for every one available job.

A job seeker in this market needs to be on top of his or her game. There's no room for self doubt or depression. The slightest sign of weakness is going to get you culled from the herd of available applicants for any job. A job seeker needs to be positive, confident, assertive, self-possessed and optimistic. None of these is very likely while you still have unresolved issues regarding your former employer. In other words you've got to work through your anger to be sane, and you've got to be sane to have a chance of getting a job, especially in an employer's market.

Seen in this context, any effort on an employer's part to circumvent the natural process of healing can be viewed as unfair and injurious. Proscriptions against disparaging remarks, public or private, are deliberate attempts by employers to protect themselves from the consequences of their decisions at the expense of the very people they harm the most. It is adding insult to injury. It is kicking a man when he is already down. It is therefore objectionable. It needs to stop.

I propose a class action lawsuit on behalf of every unemployed person who has been forced to agree to place their mental health and future financial security in this kind of jeopardy in order to make it easier for their employer to fire them. It's only fair.

...and 10 Surprisingly Good Things about Being Unemployed

Better than a knife in the back   

One of my sisters-in-law thought my last post was depressing. She felt bad for me, immersed as I am in self-perpetuating misery. I thought the post was hilarious, although I did point out to a commiserating commenter that, while misery makes excellent blog fodder, it's still freaking misery. Once again, apparently, I have missed the humor mark.

In the interest of balance, I thought it would be a good idea to address the positive aspects of losing one's job. The fact is not everything about losing your job sucks. It won't be rosy by any stretch of the imagination, but there are a few pleasant surprises along the way.

1. You can now finish a library book before it comes due.
2. You won't overflow the hard drive on your DVR with recorded shows and movies that you don't have time to watch.
3. No paycheck you sold your soul for is ever quite as satisfying as a severance check when you know you were offered up to appease the capricious gods of commerce.
4. Your daily exposure to fools, charlatans, pirates, and thieves is at an all-time low.
5. You have an automatic and very effective response for solicitors and telemarketers. “I lost my job” shuts them up almost every time. I say almost because you are still going to have to deal with the religious whack jobs who want to pray with you.
6. If you were thinking about a career change while you were still working, you now have time to realize your ambition. Just because it didn't happen the way you envisioned it doesn't mean it's not an opportunity. A word of caution though—there are already a bazillion people out here trying to monetize social interaction by blogging, tweeting, and booking their faces. There may not be any barriers to entry, but it's a bitch to get noticed.
7. You can bond with your pets in ways you never dreamed possible. All your dogs and cats and whatever elses are firmly in your camp when you're home all the time. They will be connected to your hip or ankle. This may seem an annoyance at first, but you will soon realize that your pets are an improvement over the jerk-wads at work. A cold nose up the butt is way better than being stabbed in the back by an ambitious co-worker with a self-serving agenda.
8. All the self-improvement plans you neglected when you were working are now within reach. You used to be too tired to go to the gym when you came home from your ball-busting job. Now you can go in the morning when the poor schmucks who are still working for your old employer are just stumbling into their first mind-numbing meeting of the day. You can read the books on your list instead of hundreds of e-mails from management wanting you to explain why the company is not meeting sales targets without telling them that their targets were set to satisfy unrealistic directors rather than being based in any objective, quantifiable data. The smartest manager you ever met could not have written a mediocre novel, and even vampire romance is better than the last business memo you had to read.
9. No more buzzwords. No more jargon. No more obfuscated business-speak. If you are a big fan of jargon, doubletalk, and ambiguity, you can get your fill by reading the congressional testimony of Goldman Sachs executives regarding their actions during the recent financial turmoil and alleged Great Recession.
10. So long as you can keep your blood pressure under control, there is a lot of entertainment value to be had in following the rants of ignoramuses who still believe, variously, that: the sub-prime mortgage crisis was caused by dead-beat borrowers who failed to honor their obligations because they are bereft of any moral backbone, that anyone drawing unemployment compensation benefits ought to suck it up and just get a job, that Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner are heroic civil servants who saved us from financial ruin at the eleventh hour, that George W. Busch tanked the economy by military adventuring in Iraq and Afghanistan, that Barack Obama is spending our future to further his own political aspirations, that Lady Gaga is stylish and talented, that the Real Housewives are either real or interesting, that Charlie Sheen is winning, or that Anthony Weiner is less reprehensible than, say, Mark Sanford or Arnold Schwarzenegger because he didn't actually reach out and touch anybody. Really, the number of things with the capacity to amuse us grows exponentially every day. I don't know how I ever found time to work.

Beached White Male

The Blues - not the usual province of middle-aged white males.

I was standing in the check out line at Publix the other day when I noticed a copy of Newsweek on the magazine rack. The cover article, “Dead Suit Walking” by Rick Marin and Tony Dokoupil, caught my attention. The cover lead posed the question, “Can manhood survive the recession?” The picture featured a hapless middle aged white guy pasted to the wall under a gigantic 'X' of electrical tape. I felt an immediate pang of recognition. I knew the feeling. I knew the guy. He was me. Son of a bitch! I made the cover of Newsweek!

Of course I had mixed emotions about this development. It's nice to have your plight recognized in a national forum—not so nice to have a plight that requires recognition. It was kind of like when I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal on Thanksgiving Day last year in an article about people who had filed for bankruptcy. My problems are not exactly the things that I want to be known for. Losing is not the thing that I want to characterize my fifteen minutes of fame, although I have to consider that my losing is at least marginally more respectable than Charlie Sheen's winning, and my tiny $800 a month rental house is more luxurious than Osama bin Laden's million dollar hideaway villa.

I'd rather be recognized for the breezy, personal, and engaging style of these blog posts, or the stunning vibrancy of the photos I have up on Etsy, or the amusing poignancy of the short story collection, Buses & Bears, Bullets & Stones, that I have for sale in Amazon.com's Kindle Store for a paltry 99 cents. Instead, it seems, my singular defining fate is to serve as poster boy for Newsweek's 'Beached White Males' who've been made 'toast' by long term joblessness.

The gist of the article seems to be that we educated white males, once at the top of the food chain, are ill equipped to deal with our new station at the bottom. We're not used to coping with lack of privilege. We don't know how.

What's worse, nobody cares much. Our wives and children might care a little, at least to the extent they still depend on us to marshal our paternalism, but everyone else thinks we've got what was coming to us. We've been too long screwing the world up and skimming the cream for ourselves while everyone else has suffered for our ascendancy.

Now we're to be washed up on the shores of some vacation paradise to rot...and good riddance to us. Maybe this is just the way things are. Maybe it's even fair. We had our turn. Now it's time for somebody else to take their shot.

And maybe it's retribution. Several months ago I posted a comment at on an accounting forum, only to have some Gen Y hothead take me to task for causing all his problems. He blamed my generation for the failure of everything from the War in Iraq to the dismal financial condition of Social Security. When I suggested that maybe he should have paid closer attention in his high-school history classes if he actually thought that Baby Boomers had created the Social Security Administration, he responded by changing his online identity to 'ihatejonahgibson'. For a while I thought I was on the road to fame and fortune, having scored my first public detractor, but it seems that I have outlived him in cyberspace. I don't know whether to be happy or sad about that.

My problem is that I personally have not seen much in the way of cream that we middle-aged white guys are supposed to have skimmed for ourselves. I worked my ass off for 40 years, suffered abuse and disrespect and a monumental lack of appreciation, and today I've got nothing to show for it. It's disheartening to find out that this is a common experience.

Change of Status

Regular readers will have noticed that I changed the subtitle of this blog from 'life on the dole' to 'life after work'. This is because I have officially changed my status from 'unemployed' to 'retired'. This actually happened some time ago, but I've still been referring to myself as unemployed because I felt the mantle of victimhood would advance the cause of this blog. Regular readers will also have noted that nothing has advanced the cause of this blog. This blog languishes in obscurity.

The change from 'unemployed' to 'retired' has not altered my circumstances one bit. I am still impoverished, uninsured, and useless. It has, however, changed attitudes, my own and those of others, in peculiar ways:

	Unemployed	Retired
Status	Flawed loser	Reaping the rewards of a lifetime of productive work
Compensation	Unemployment benefits: being overpaid to avoid work	Social Security: being underpaid for a lifetime of contributions to a fund that doesn't work
Leisure	Idle hours that should be spent looking for a job spent instead on listlessness, depression, and diminished self-worth	Idle hours that should be spent on heretofore neglected hobbies spent instead on listlessness, depression, and diminished self-worth
Dress	Wearing the same crusty pants every day for six months because I am lazy, shiftless, and insensitive to my own odiferousness	Wearing the same crusty pants every day for six months because I damn well can
Driving	Impeding traffic because, except for the rare job interview, I have no particular place to go	Impeding traffic because, except for the rare trip to Walgreens for Metamucil, I have no particular place to be
Personal philosophy	Bite me	Might be Oh, hell! It's still bite me

Acknowledgement

Something unusual happened this week. I got e-mails from two places that I had submitted resume's to, telling me that they were moving forward with another candidate. Although I'm no closer to getting a job, at least I won't be wasting any time following up with these employers to see if they got my application and what its status might be. It is rare to get any kind of acknowledgement at all in this market, and by rare I mean that I have been sending out dozens of resume's and letters every week for two years now, and this week marks the first time that I have received anything indicating that a potential employer knows I exist. That I am encouraged by this indicates how low my expectations have sunk.

Tin Foil Hat Republicans

          A couple of months ago a guy posted on Freep (Detroit Free Press Online) that there needs to be a spokesperson or champion for the unemployed. The people commenting on his post think he didn’t have a right to say anything at all because he wasn’t from Detroit. They also took exception to his lack of proof or corroborating evidence for the observations he made when in fact all he did was recount his own personal experiences from being unemployed for 17 months. One commenter even faulted his math because he said he’d worked for 22 years and been a journalist for 23—like make up your mind dude which is it? The commenter wasn't smart enough to realize that it could in fact be both. Why do people this ignorant insist on being heard? They’re just clogging up the bandwidth.

          I note this morning, in the same vein, that the new Republican House majority is already throwing its weight behind a cut in jobless benefits. I guess I knew this was going to happen. Even so it saddens me that millions of displaced workers are going to suffer further in the name of fiscal responsibility when it was fiscal irresponsibility in the form of deregulation and shortsighted policy making that cost them their jobs in the first place. I say this even though I am a freaking Republican. I'm all for deficit reduction and judicious spending cuts, but when we undertake these things in service to an overarching ideology rather than common sense we have the capacity to do a lot of harm to innocent people.

          If you see a guy wearing a tin foil hat sitting on a street corner with a cup and a sign that reads “please help,” or “homeless and hungry,” or even “unemployed and beerless,” and you are motivated by the sight to remark that he should get a job, then I would suggest to you that it is already too late for you to don a tin foil hat to protect your brain from being stolen by aliens. That ship has sailed. Honestly I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you this. That ship has sailed.

Fox News (I used to like these guys) Perpetuates the Myth that Unemployment Benefits Make Joblessness Worse.

John Lott of Fox News put up a post on Fox Forum blaming the Democrats passing of extended unemployment benefits for recent increases in unemployment claims. You can read his post here.


Sorry, John, but this is pure drivel. The number of people qualifying for unemployment benefits may have changed, but the number of people actually unemployed has not. There is a relationship between length of benefits and average length of joblessness, but it is not a causal relationship as you would have us believe. The increase in benefits, which by the way did not actually increase the total length of benefits but only extended the eligibility window for the full amount, is a response to the real needs of the long term unemployed, not the other way around.


As Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post puts it: "What won't work as an economic solution -- indeed, it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment -- is blaming the unemployed for their failure to find jobs. There are now roughly five unemployed Americans for every open job, according to the Economic Policy Institute's most recent calculations, and that ratio isn't likely to decline much if we leave it to the corporate sector to resume hiring. Corporations have figured out a way to make money without resuming hiring. Their model is premised on not resuming hiring. If the public sector doesn't fill the gap, the era of American prosperity is history."


While extending unemployment benefits is not a viable long-term solution to the problem of unemployment, especially in the current circumstances, it is the humane thing to do, and certainly makes more sense than lining Lloyd Blankfein's pockets with multi-million dollar bonuses while the rest of us strive to crawl out of the smoking ruins.