Archive for March, 2008

55 years old, former corporate/university employee, now supporting husband (retired physician) and self on salary as medical transcriptionist. Threat of outsourcing jobs, medical debt to another hospital (and I believe politically on blacklist at my workplace for this as administrators are colleagues/talk). Many jobs including temp over the years, in NYC, DC, Los Angeles, and here in Midwest.

I am in my late thirties, and still searching for that perfect job. Been on the job hunt for about five months now. After countless hours on job sites, an occasional career fair, and once-in-awhile a “networking” party, I’ve come up with nothing memorable or promising, and it’s begining to get me down.

I’m joining the site for a sense of camaraderie in what is otherwise a very solitary process. As a professional teaching university sociology courses, I’m used to looking at the plight of the working-class or the lower-class unskilled person and rallying students behind their stories of struggle and plight, but very rarely had the nerve to take a look at my own…which is equally compelling. It’s time for a middle-class awakening, beginning with my own. Thanks for this, and am glad to join!

How much lower can consumer spending go? The malls are like mausoleums, retail clerks are getting laid off, and AOL recently featured on its welcome page the story of man so cheap that he recycles his dental floss – hanging it from a nail in his garage until it dries out.

It could go a lot lower of course. This guy could start saving the little morsels he flosses out and boil them up to augment the children’s breakfast gruel. Already, as the recession or whatever it is closes in, people have stopped buying homes and cars and cut way back on restaurant meals. They don’t have the money; they don’t have the credit; and increasingly they’re finding that no one wants their money anyway. NPR reported on February 28 that more and more Manhattan stores are accepting Euros and at least one has gone Euros-only.

The Sharper Image has declared bankruptcy and is closing 96 U.S. stores. (To think I missed my chance to buy those headphones that treat you to forest sounds while massaging your temples!) Victoria’s Secret is so desperate that it’s adding fabric to its undergarments. Starbucks had no sooner taken time off to teach its baristas how to make coffee than it started laying them off.

While Americans search for interview outfits in consignment stores and switch from Whole Foods to Wal-Mart for sustenance, the world watches tremulously. The Australian Courier-Mail, for example, warns of an economic “pandemic” if Americans cut back any further, since we are responsible for $9 trillion a year in spending, compared to a puny $1 trillion for the one billion-strong Chinese. Yes, we have been the world’s designated shoppers, and, if we fall down on the job, we take the global economy with us.

“Shop till you drop,” was our motto, by which we didn’t mean to say we were more compassion-worthy than a woman fainting at her work station in some Honduran sweatshop. It was just our proper role in the scheme of things. Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying. Remember Bush telling us, shortly after 9/11, to get out there and shop? It may have seemed ludicrous at the time, but what he meant was get back to work.

We took pride in our role in the global economy. No doubt it takes some skill to make things, but what about all the craft that goes into buying them – finding a convenient parking space at the mall, navigating our way through department stores laid out for maximum consumer confusion, determining which of our credit cards still has a smidgeon of credit in it? Not everyone could do this, especially not people whose only experience was stitching, assembling, wiring, and packaging the stuff that we bought.

But if we thought we were special, they thought we were marks. They could make anything, and we would dutifully buy it. I once found, in a party store, a baseball cap with a plastic turd affixed to its top and the words “shit head” on the visor. The label said “made in the Philippines” and the makers must have been convulsed as they made it. If those dumb Yanks will buy this…

There’s talk already of emergency measures, like making Christmas a weekly holiday, although this would require a level of deforestation that could leave Cheney with no quail to hunt.

More likely, there’ll be a move to outsource shopping, just as we’ve already outsourced manufacturing, customer service, X-ray reading, and R & D. But to whom? The Indians are clever enough, but right now they only account for $600 million in consumer spending a year. And could they really be trusted to put a flat screen TV in every child’s room, distinguish Guess jeans from a knock-off, and replace their kitchen counters on an annual basis?

And what happens to us, the world’s erstwhile shoppers? The president recently observed, in one of his more sentient moments, that unemployment is “painful.” But if a pink slip hurts, what about a letter from Citicard announcing that you’ve been laid off as a shopper? Will we fill our vacant hours twisting recycled dental floss onto spools or will we decide that, if we can’t shop, we’re going to have to shoplift?

Because we’ve shopped till we dropped alright, face down on the floor.

Here’s a healthcare horror story on a national level: 60 Minutes’ report on Remote Area Medical (RAM), which sets up emergency clinics in the world’s neediest areas. Recently, though, RAM set up its massive clinic, for a weekend, in an exhibit hall in Knoxville, Tenn. Founded to transport U.S. doctors to truly remote areas to provide medical service, RAM is now running weekend clinics in urban as well as rural U.S. areas.

As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, “Remote Area Medical sets up emergency clinics where the needs are greatest. But these days, that’s not the Amazon. This charity founded to help people who can’t reach medical care finds itself throwing America a lifeline.”

Patients, some of whom have to drive hours to reach the clinic sites, begin arriving in the middle of the night in order to make sure they get a number low enough to be seen that day. Those who have cars sit in them all night in the cold, running the motor just enough to take the chill off. Even gas approaching $4.00 a gallon is cheaper than the cost of medical services close to home.

The patients’ stories are heartbreaking, but, even more sadly, not surprising. The pain of an infected tooth, or glasses that are no longer strong enough to make out people’s faces, or it’s past time for a post-surgical checkup for cervical cancer (because the patient has 3 kids and her husband lost his job a few months ago). Ross Isaacs, one of the volunteer doctors, was asked who these patients are. “It’s the working poor … most with families, most not substance abusers and employed without adequate insurance.”

The clinics serve about 500 people each weekend day, the numbers are growing, and the clinic weekend documented in the piece had to turn away more than 400 people at the end of Sunday.

Stan Brock, the founder of RAM and originally a Brit, said he thought it really sad that the wealthiest nation in the world can’t take care of its own. When asked how RAM is funded, Brock explained, “We operate entirely on the generosity of the American people. I’d like to say that we had big corporate support in America but we don’t. So it’s the little checks from those people who send in the $5 and $10.”

Click on link to read entire article.