Archive for January, 2008

From The St. Petersburg Times:

“Finding a job in Florida is the toughest it has been in three years. State officials said Friday that Florida’s unemployment rate jumped to 4.7 percent in December from 4.3 percent in November. The basic problem: a slowdown in job creation. The economy is creating jobs, but not enough to keep up with growth in the labor force and to offset job losses in construction, manufacturing and publishing. …”

Click on link to read entire article.

I am a 59 y/o white male who originally came from Brooklyn NY, where I had lived the first 38 yrs of my life and for the last 18 have been living in NJ. I have two college degrees; a B.A. in Sociolog (1983) and an A.S. in Math (1979); the former from Hunter College, the latter from Kingsborough Community College. My work for the last 17 yrs was in the field of mental health, in which I have held various positions, the last being the most lucrative and clinical, that of an emergency psychiatric screener.

The “mental health” field, like all other jobs I’ve worked in, has strict heirarchies; all creativite ideas are checked by higher ups, YOU and your work are being evaluated by the higher ups –but THEY are not being evaluated by you, certainly not in any serious way, even though whatever they do impacts directly on you and your work . You’re told when to take your lunch break, when you can take off, what holidays you may take off on and the procedure for this; it is YOUR background that is being investigated during the interview process and MUST sign a “consent” to what ever conditions of employment they stipulate, including giving a urine sample.

You have no say in the rate of pay offered nor whether you’re “hourly” or “salaried”. Ideologies about what they are about are called “mission statements”. These statements rationalize and justify what I’ve found to be nothing but a thinly veiled disregard for human rights by the “mental health” profession and, are willing instruments of state authority. Collectively, this acquiescence severely impairs the help that (some) professionals want to give that is expressive of their own unique personalities.

In short, the policies and practices of the screening centers in combination with state intrusion, creates a work environment in this most sensitive of work environments–interviewing, evaluating and intervening in the lives of people in the midst of imminent crises that operates like manufacturing plants with their production deadlines, irrelevance of personality and the consequent absence of autonomy.

I’m joining this website to make contact, hopefully, with other people who share my positions on what life ought to be about (which I hope I’ve left some indication) and not confine myself to sharing termination stories, since work is, in my opinion, only one of several areas of significance; one’s work is part of a whole package resulting in what one feels about living life itself. For example, my unemployment benefits run out in 6 mos, I have no medical/dental or ANY kind of benefits, and, after those 6 mos. expire, I will find myself homeless if I’m not employed or being taken care of by someone else–why should this happen– if this society is truly democratic?

I certainly would NEVER have voted on ANY of the underlying economic and political conditions upon which the above outcomes will follow. These are political questions of the first importance; of what I want MY gov’t to do.

“It’s the perfect crime, so big and so reeking of establishment that few recognize the inherent criminality, but the results are the same as if some street thug held us all up at gunpoint. This country is spiraling toward recession. Huge amounts of wealth have disappeared with upward of 2-million families in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure, all because of the corruption of people in suits. …”

From the St. Petersburg Times. Click on link to read entire article.

I’m a marketing guy. Every day, I become so deeply involved in messages, vision, pitches, appeals, imagery and tactics that I notice them everywhere: in cereal box art, linoleum flooring, and tire treads. When watching television ads, I recognize permutations of the same few appeals: Vanity, Convenience, Quality, and Fear.

You’ve probably seen that FreeCreditReport television spot by now, where the guy sings about how his credit was ruined because of identity theft, and now he serves seafood. It’s an appeal to fear, specifically, the message is: “Use our service to check your credit because it can ruin your career.” We’re supposed to run to their website to keep this from happening to us, but something else occurred to me: “Why do we allow it to happen at all?”

Most people believe it is common sense: People who are bad at personal financial management will be bad at managing their work, may even steal, and should not be allowed to hold managerial or financial positions. Credit reports supposedly expose these high-risk employees, and help companies identify proper careers for them, like serving seafood. That’s why the right of employers to use credit was written into the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) of 1970.

“The world needs ditch diggers too.” - Judge Elihu Smails, Caddyshack

There’s only one problem with including employers in the FCRA: it enables class war.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act is mostly useful for consumers. It helps ensure the confidentiality of credit information and prohibits disclosure of credit files, other than for employment, insurance, and credit applications. It requires credit bureaus to give consumers a copy of their credit report, and it specifies procedures for disputing a credit report.

Sure, the FCRA requires employers to get your permission before digging into your credit history, and you can freely opt-out, but you’re not getting the job. Maybe the seafood restaurant down the street is more your speed. The effects of this kind of ‘common sense’ assumption can be seen here, here, and here.

Since it was enacted, studies like the 2005 bankruptcy study by David U. Himmelstein, Elizabeth Warren, Deborah Thorne, and Steffie Woolhandler have shown that credit problems mainly result from situations beyond most consumers’ control, such as health problems, job losses, or business failures. Another study by Dr. Jerry Palmer and Dr. Laura Koppes at Eastern Kentucky University even suggests that people with credit problems are better employees than their clean-credit counterparts.

No study has ever proven that credit problems correlate with bad worker behavior.

“What doesn’t kill you…”

If I might draw from my own experience and ruminate on why there is no correlation between credit problems and employee behavior: I believe the lessons learned in adverse financial situations can make an employee stronger and wiser than average. Employers should scramble to hire people who have gone through these experiences and are still standing.

Another, sadder, possibility is that people who have been through financial Hades simply don’t dream anymore. They no longer imagine hanging their own shingle, owning the big suburban house with the fast convertible and the greener grass. They know a good job is their only ticket to a better future, so they work harder to keep it.

What to do about the FCRA? The FCRA has been amended several times, and still contains many important protections such as the ones mentioned above, but it’s time for a new revision. We should eliminate the clauses that allow employers to look at credit ratings. People should serve seafood because they freely choose to, not because they have bad credit. As a native New Englander, I enjoy seafood, appreciate the people who serve it, and recommend ordering it whenever you can hear the waves.You may have noticed that insurers use credit reports too, to set policies and premiums. These clauses should get a second look as well.

After receiving UP’s latest email, this person writes: 

 I thought this was a message/website from my new employer UPS. But it’s not and I’m glad. I have been working since I was 14 years old. I’m smart, hard working, dependable, and now College educated. I have done everything in my power to get a decent wage and not sell my soul to work. I have had one job like that and I was laid off after two years. I would like to belong to an organization of people like myself because I believe there is strength in numbers.

With all the talk about how to stimulate it, you’d think that the economy is a giant clitoris. Ben Bernanke may not employ this imagery, but the immediate challenge–and the issue bound to replace Iraq and immigration in the presidential race–is how best to get the economy engorged and throbbing again.

It would be irresponsible to say much about Bush’s stimulus plan, the mere mention of which could be enough to send the Nikkei, the DAX, and the curiously named  FTSE and Sensex tumbling into the crash zone again. In a typically regressive gesture, Bush proposed to hand out cash tax rebates–except to families earning less than $40,000 a year. This may qualify as an example of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” in which any misfortune can be re-jiggered to the advantage of the affluent.

But even the liberal stimulus proposals have me worried—not so much for their content as their rationale. Most liberals want a stimulus package that includes an increase in food stamp allotments and an extension of unemployment benefits, which are both screamingly obvious measures. Currently, the food stamp allotment amounts to about $1 per meal, and when four Democratic congresspersons tried living on that for a week last May they ended up even crankier than if they’d had to sit through a week-long filibuster by Tom DeLay.

As for unemployment benefits: They last just 25 weeks in most states and end up covering only a third of people who are laid off. If ever there was a time to create a real working system of unemployment compensation, it is now. Citigroup has announced plans to eliminate 21,000; investment banks in general will shed 40,000. The mortgage industry is in a state of melt-down; and Sprint – how did they get into this?—will lay off 4000 full-time employees as well as 1600 part-time and contract workers.

The economic rationale for a more progressive stimulus package, which we hear now several times a day, is that the poor and the freshly unemployed will spend whatever money they get. Give them more money in the form of food stamps or unemployment benefits and they’ll drop more at the mall. Money, it has been observed, sticks to the rich but just slides off the poor, which makes them the lynchpin of stimulus. After decades of hearing the poor stereotyped as lazy, stupid, addicted, and crime-prone, they have been discovered to have this singular virtue: They are veritable spending machines.

All this is true, but it is also a form of economy fetishism, or should I say worship? If we have learned anything in the last few years, it is that the economy is no longer an effective measure of human well-being. We’ve seen the economy grow without wage gains; we’ve seen productivity grow without wage gains. We’ve even seen unemployment fall without wage gains. In fact, when economists want to talk about life “on the ground,” where jobs and wages and the price of Special K are paramount, they’ve taken to talking about “the real economy.” If there’s a “real economy,” then what in the hell is “the economy”?

Once it was real-er, this economy that we have. But that was before we got polarized into the rich, the poor, and the sinking middle class. Gross social inequality is what has “de-coupled” growth and productivity from wage gains for the average household. As far as I can tell, “the economy,” as opposed to the “real economy,” is the realm of investment, and is occupied by people who live on interest and dividends instead of salaries and wages, aka the rich.

So I’m proposing a radical shift in rhetoric: Any stimulus package should focus on the poor and the unemployed, not because they spend more, but because they are in most in need of help. Yes, when a parent can afford to buy Enfamil, it helps the Enfamil company and no doubt “the economy” too. But let’s not throw out the baby with the sensual bubble bath of “stimulus.” In any ordinary moral calculus, the baby comes first.

Far be it from me to make the revolutionary suggestion that babies are more important than profits. My point is just that our economy–with its dizzying bubbles, wild lending sprees, reckless downsizings, and planet-wide hyper-sensitivity – has gotten too far disconnected from ordinary human needs. We could take the current crisis as an opportunity to fix that, at least in part, by shoring up government support for the needy and the dislocated. Or we can wait around and watch while the appropriate imagery gets nasty, as this ghostly creature, “the economy,” starts acting like a nymphomaniac junkie in withdrawal.

The soothsayers have slaughtered the ox and are examining the gloppy entrails for signs: Rising unemployment, a falling dollar, weak consumer spending, the credit crisis, a swooning stock market. Could there be something wrong here? Could we actually be approaching a, god forbid, recession?

To which the only sane response is: Who cares? According to a CNN poll, 57 percent of Americans thought we were already in a recession a month ago. Economists may complain that this is only because the public is ignorant of the technical – or at least the newspapers’ standard – definition of a recession, which specifies that there must be at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth in the GDP. But most of the public employs the more colloquial definition of a recession, which is hard times. If hard times have already fallen on a majority of Americans, then “recession” doesn’t seem to be a very useful term any more.

 The economists’ odd fixation on growth as a measure of economic well-being puts them in a parallel universe of their own. WorldMoneyWatch’s website tells us that, for example, that “The GDP growth rate is the most important indicator of economic health. If GDP is growing, so will business, jobs and personal income.” And the latest issue of US News and World Report advises, “The key… for America is to keep its economy growing as fast as possible without triggering inflation.”

But hellooo, we’ve had brisk growth for the last few years, as the president always likes to remind us, only without those promised increases in personal income, at least not for the middle class. Growth, some of the economists are conceding in perplexity, has been “de-coupled” from mass prosperity. Growth is not the only economic indicator that has let us down recently. In the last five years, America’s briskly rising productivity has been the envy of much of the world. But at the same time, real wages have actually declined. It’s not supposed to be this way, of course. Economists have long believed that some sort of occult process would intervene and adjust wages upward as people worked harder and more efficiently.And what about the unemployment rate? The old liberal faith was that “full employment” would create a workers’ paradise, with higher wages and enhanced bargaining power for the little guy and gal. But we’ve had nearly full employment, or at least an unemployment rate of under five percent, for years now, again, without the predicted gains. What the old liberals weren’t counting on was a depressed minimum wage, impotent unions, and a witch’s brew of management strategies to hold wages and salaries down.

Now if those great and solemn economic indicators – growth, productivity and employment rates – have become de-coupled from most people’s lived experience, then there’s something wrong with the economists, the economy, or both. The clue lies in the word “most.” We have become so unequal as a nation that we increasingly occupy two different economies – one for the rich and one for everyone else — and the latter has been in a recession, if not a depression, for a long, long time. Not all economists can bring themselves to admit this.

I suspect that America’s fabulous growth in productivity is another illustration of the disconnect between economic measures and human experience. It’s been attributed to better education and technological advances, which would be nice to believe in. But a revealing 2001 study by McKinsey also credited America’s productivity growth to “managerial innovations” and cited Wal-Mart as a model performer, meaning that we are also looking at fiendish schemes to extract more work for less pay. Yes, you can generate more output per apparent hour of work by falsifying time records, speeding up assembly lines, doubling workloads, and cutting back on breaks. Productivity may look good from the top, but at the middle and the bottom it can feel a lot like pain. 

When employees are squeezed hard enough, then you have the possibility of a genuine recession as technically defined. People buy less, so growth declines, to the point where even the economic over-class has to sit up and take notice. This is happening in Japan, where a recent Wall Street Journal headline announces: “Growing Reliance on Temps Holds Back Japan’s Rebound: Firms Increasingly Add Part-Time Workers; Spending Power Lags.” The U.S., where consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of the economy compared to a little more than half in Japan, is even more vulnerable to a downturn in personal consumption.

What is this fixation on growth anyway? As a general rule of biological survival, any creature or entity that depends on perpetual growth is well worth avoiding, lest you be eaten alive. As Bill McKibben argues in his book Deep Economy, the “cult of growth” has led to global warming, ghastly levels of pollution, and diminishing resources. Tumors grow, at least until they kill their hosts; economies ought to be sustainable.

Apocalypse aside, the mantra of growth has deceived us for far too long. What it translates into is: Don’t worry about the relative size of your slice, just concentrate on growing the pie! Now, with a recession threatening even more suffering for those who are already struggling, may be the perfect time to get out the pie-cutter again.