Unemployed, and Not Getting a Job Anytime Soon? Why Not Build a Better World?

By Barbara Ehrenreich, Madison Capital Times. Posted May 11, 2009.

The blue-collar unemployed are subjected to gerbil-like exercises of their own. While white-collar layoff victims are encouraged to polish the "brand called you," blue-collar people are told they have nothing to offer unless they start all over with "retraining." Hence, in part, the current surge in community college enrollments.

But in his 2006 book "The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences," Louis Uchitelle raised the obvious question: "Retraining for what?" At the beginning of the decade, computer skills were all the rage; then the low-level computer work vanished to India. Air-conditioner repairing is popular right now, and big-rig truck driving is a perennial favorite. There are no guarantees, of course, of eventual jobs. In a recent report for the organization Food AND Medicine on laid-off manufacturing workers in Maine, Steve Husson, who himself was laid off as a DHL driver, found paper-mill workers stuck with intermittent seasonal work and low-paid service-sector jobs despite stints of retraining.

Even two or three years ago, when the economy was apparently healthy, average layoff victims "landed" in new jobs paying 17 percent less than the old ones -- if they landed at all. Today, with the country losing more than a half-million jobs a month, both white-collar job searching and blue-collar retraining are becoming surreal exercises in futility. No matter how smart you are -- how flexible, personable and skilled -- you can't find a job that isn't there. At least until the unemployment benefits run out and the credit cards are canceled, you might as well devote yourself to "Madden NFL" and "Minesweeper."

Of course, there are a few constructive, work-like alternatives. You could join one of the emerging efforts to organize the unemployed, such as Food AND Medicine in Maine, the Unemployed and Anxiously Employed Workers Association of Allen County, Ind., or the nationwide group United Professionals, which I helped start. Or you could pitch in with one of the several organizations fighting for single-payer health insurance or at least a huge expansion of public health insurance for the unemployed. You could get together with laid-off friends and co-workers to discuss how you would design an economy that made use of people's precious skills instead of periodically tossing them out like so much trash.

But the first step, as in any 12-step program, is to overcome denial. Job searching is not a job; retraining is not a panacea. You may be poorer than you've ever been, but you are also freer -- to express anger and urgency, to dream and create, to get together with others and conspire to build a better world.

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Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida.

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