What has America lost besides jobs?

Thousands of Americans are out of work. Have we lost something else besides our jobs?

How many, and what kinds of, worthwhile projects are not getting done these days due to unemployment and underemployment? Have our all-consuming job searches or job-retention efforts kept us focused so tightly on the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – physical and material survival – that we’re sacrificing the soul-survival, self-nurturing activities of volunteer work, research in areas of personal interest, self improvement, and the like? Across the nation communities are poorer because the time and energy that could be channeled into charity, activism and artistry is going toward the full-time job search.

In May, United Professionals carried Barbara Ehrenreich’s Los Angeles Times article on Unemployment as a New Form of Work. In it, she says:

“In most parts of the world, from Paris to Beijing, mass unemployment brings the specter of mass social unrest. Not here, though, where 13 million people have accepted joblessness with nary a peep of protest. Many reasons — from Prozac to Pentecostalism — have been cited to explain American passivity in the face of economic violence. But the truth may be far simpler: In America, being unemployed doesn’t mean you have nothing to do but run around burning police cars. Unemployment has been reconfigured as a new form of work. Nowhere is this clearer than in the white-collar world, where the laid-off are constantly advised to see job searching as a full-time job. As business self-help guru Harvey Mackay advises: “Once you’re fired, you already have a job. The job you have is tougher than the last one. It’s more demanding.” How demanding? He says you need to “plan on 12 to 16 hours a day.” Picture it: People across America rising at the usual time, suiting up in full corporate regalia and setting themselves down at their laptops to fiddle with resumes, peruse Monster.com and pester everyone on their address lists for leads. Some people have no doubt found jobs in this manner, but there have been no scientific comparisons of the technique with, say, printing a resume on a sandwich board and parading around Times Square.” You can read the entire article here.

So the UP Board of Directors is asking you …

In a society with so much of our identity locked up in job titles, how does the new reality (freelance work, underemployment and full-time job search) interfere with personal development, artistry and work for the greater good?

Self-help and business gurus are pushing you to do more “developmental” things.  But they’re professional development tasks that you would likely have done anyway  (only with your employer reimbursing you for them). Activities like taking classes to maintain your professional skills and attending professional association meetings may or may not help you land the next position, but they most assuredly will use your time and energy.

What activities or projects would feed the inner you? Are there free or inexpensive “whole person” nourishing projects you could undertake … to strengthen your psychological health and physical health, as well as your professional health?

Please comment on this blog to help UP get a sense of how the recession is hurting U.S. productivity and community in ways other than the obvious decrease in job productivity and the downturn in consumer spending caused by continuing joblessness. Please tell us what you’re NOT doing because your time is consumed by job-searching. For example:

• Are you NOT able to afford charitable donations?
• Are you NOT able to afford the time/money to support your children’s extracurricular activities — sports, music, scouting?
• Are you NOT able to mentor newcomers to your profession through the professional organizations whose membership dues you can’t afford?

We want your story that demonstrates what America is losing out on because people can’t give time and attention to causes due to our constant focus on survival. We hope that your responses will provide some suggestions for the kinds of “job stimulus” the federal government is considering putting into place.

While you’re telling us what you’re not doing, we hope you also consider this: Any type of projects that you do, you can put on your resume for the time period you’re un- or under-employed. You never know what that next employer will be looking for. It may be some skills you learned or project-management ability you demonstrated in one of your personal projects. So, please don’t let feelings of guilt stop you from spending some energy on yourself. After all, whatever your next job is, YOU are your first job.

I certainly understand how quickly one can find herself on a sudden and unplanned track of “downward mobility,”  and I’m pretty sure that most of my readers understand exactly what Ehrenreich is talking about. Many of them are already there and are also part of the indentured educated class. That makes it even worse. (Edububble recently made a compelling argument about why it’s so bad to be a part of this new class).

Watch Barbara Ehrenreich speak about her new book, “Bright-Sided” in this excellent video:

http://fora.tv/2009/10/24/Bright-Sided_Barbara_Ehrenreich

To judge from most of the commentary on the Gates-Crowley affair, you would think that a “black elite” has gotten dangerously out of hand. First Gates (Cambridge, Yale, Harvard) showed insufficient deference to Crowley, then Obama (Occidental, Harvard) piled on to accuse the police of having acted “stupidly.” Was this “the end of white America” which the Atlantic had warned of in its January/February cover story? Or had the injuries of class — working class in Crowley’s case — finally trumped the grievances of race?

Left out of the ensuing tangle of commentary on race and class has been the increasing impoverishment — or, we should say, re-impoverishment — of African Americans as a group. In fact, the most salient and lasting effect of the current recession may turn out to be the decimation of the black middle class. According to a study by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling out of the middle class at the start of the recession.  Gates and Obama, along with Oprah and Cosby, will no doubt remain in place, but millions of the black equivalents of Officer Crowley — from factory workers to bank tellers and white-collar managers — are sliding down toward destitution.

For African Americans — and to a large extent, Latinos — the recession is over. It occurred between 2000 and 2007, as black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent. During the seven-year long black recession, one third of black children lived in poverty and black unemployment-even among college graduates — consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment. That was the black recession. What’s happening now is a depression.

Black unemployment is now at 14.7 percent, compared to 8.7 for whites. In New York City, black unemployment has been rising four times as fast as that of whites. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that 40 percent of African Americans will have experienced unemployment or underemployment by 2010, and this will increase child poverty from one-third of African-American children to slightly over half. No one can entirely explain the extraordinary rate of job loss among African Americans, though factors may include the relative concentration of blacks in the hard-hit retail and manufacturing sectors, as well as the lesser seniority of blacks in better-paying, white collar, positions.

But one thing is certain: The longstanding racial “wealth gap” makes African Americans particularly vulnerable to poverty when job loss strikes. In 1998, the net worth of white households on average was $100,700 higher than that of African-Americans. By 2007, this gap had increased to $142,600. The Survey of Consumer Finances, which is supported by the Federal Reserve Board, collects this data every three years — and every time it has been collected, the racial wealth gap has widened. To put it another way: in 2004, for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, the African American family had only one 12 cents. In 2007, it had exactly a dime. So when an African American breadwinner loses a job, there are usually no savings to fall back on, no well-heeled parents to hit up, no retirement accounts to raid.

All this comes on top of the highly racially skewed subprime mortgage calamity. After decades of being denied mortgages on racial grounds, African Americans made a tempting market for bubble-crazed lenders like Countrywide, with the result that high income blacks were almost twice as likely as low income whites to receive high interest subprime loans. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, Latinos will end up losing between $75 billion and $98 billion in home-value wealth from subprime loans, while blacks will lose between $71 billion and $92 billion. United for a Fair Economy has called this family net-worth catastrophe the “greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern U.S. history.”

Yet in the depths of this African American depression, some commentators, black as well as white, are still obsessing about the supposed cultural deficiencies of the black community. In a December op-ed in the Washington Post, Kay Hymowitz blamed black economic woes on the fact that 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers, not noticing that the white two-parent family has actually declined at a faster rate than the black two-parent family. The share of black children living in a single-parent home increased by 155 percent between 1960 to 2006, while the share of white children living in single-parent homes increased by a staggering 229 percent.

Just last month on NPR, commentator Juan Williams dismissed the NAACP by saying that more up-to-date and relevant groups focus on “people who have taken advantage of integration and opportunities for education, employment, versus those who seem caught in generational cycles of poverty,” which he went on to characterize by drug use and crime. The fact that there is an ongoing recession disproportionately affecting the African American middle class — and brought on by Wall Street greed rather than “ghetto” values — seems to have eluded him.

We don’t need any more moralizing or glib analyses of class and race that could have just as well been made in the 70s. The recession is changing everything. It’s redrawing the class contours of America in ways that will leave us more polarized than ever, and, yes, profoundly hurting the erstwhile white middle and working classes. But the depression being experienced by people of color threatens to do something on an entirely different scale, and that is to eliminate the black middle class.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the president of United Professionals and  author, most recently, of “This Land Is Their Land: Reports From a Divided Nation.”

Dedrick Muhammad is a Senior Organizer and Research Associate of the Institute for Policy Studies.

This is an email conversation between UP member Pamela Allee and UP site editor Diane Alexander:

Pamela writes:

Everyone deserves to earn a good living! Let’s stop the nonsense that people without degrees are less deserving of respect, etc. — so often by those with degrees. Possession of a degree does not necessarily indicate anything more than privilege.

I do agree with your site – up to a point. I think it is also very important to caution disgruntled members of the professional class against taking it out on those of us who are “merely” support staff. I’m speaking from 55 years of working experience, mainly in two fields (medical laboratory and marine engineering).

Diane writes:

Dear Pamela,

Thanks for your comments — I agree with you. But I hope that our site does not imply that people without college degrees are less worthy of respect or the opportunity to earn a decent living.

The idea for United Professionals, as you may have read on the site, came after Barbara Ehrenreich wrote “Bait and Switch: the (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.” She was overwhelmed by how many people she met on her book tours who had similar experiences with layoffs, age discrimination, and many other obstacles in trying to find work in their fields.

Before that, Barbara wrote “Nickel and Dimed,” where she went undercover to expose the futility of trying to get by on entry-level pay as a aid, Walmart worker, and waitress. I know that Barbara and UP’s entire board of directors are ardent advocates for a living wage and dignity for workers of whatever kind.

I understand that the terms “white collar” and “professional” can be seen as elitist, though in fact UP has members from all different income, job, and education levels. One fellow I’ve corresponded with asked if, as a truck driver, he could be a member of UP. I told him that he is a professional — a professional truck driver — and that UP doesn’t care what color anybody’s collar is. Our emphasis is really more on the endangered middle class than on white, blue, or pink collars.

I’d love to have you write your thoughts into a blog piece.

Pamela writes:

Hi Diane — Thank you for replying (and so quickly). I totally agree with the intro on your page, and yet I responded to a nerve that has grown ever more tender over my working life. I don’t know how much is “just me” and how much is “the times,” but I’m ever more aware (and resentful) of class distinctions based chiefly upon education.

I blush to realize that I’ve been resorting to classic scapegoating and muddling of related issues. My frustration is probably exacerbated by the continuous disregard for the public exhibited by our (degreed) public servants (sic), from the smallest town hall to Congress.

Thanks again, and I hope UP contributes to some much-needed social equality along the lines of an America that needs to be. (Langston Hughes said it best.)

Diane writes:

Hi Pam — I also feel somewhat uncomfortable with the terms “white collar” and “professional.” But there are lots of white-collar people who didn’t go to college, and plenty of college graduates who have working-class jobs.

I would love your perspective to be heard on the UP site. I bet you’re not the only one who feels that way.

Pamela writes:

All honest labor is skilled labor, and as such, deserves respect: both self respect and the respect of others. I very much object to ranking work as “peonage” or feeling that one’s job is somehow”beneath” one, simply because this mindset seems always to bleed over to condescension or worse.

The absence or presence of higher education is a crap shoot as far as predicting actual ability. It is becoming more of an indicator of privilege than anything else, unfortunately.

All of us — especially, I suspect, people who read and write for UP — can come up with an “in a better world” list around education, among other things.

That better world can start now, in the workplace, if we each begin to acknowledge what I began with: All honest labor is skilled labor and deserves respect. I know this is a bit simple, but I think it’s a very good place to begin questioning one’s own responsibility in the general scheme of things.

Pamela and Diane would like to hear other people’s comments on this subject.

Well, you are not alone.

How do you think it feels to be an autoworker right now? And I’ve spent time with plenty of laid-off paper mill workers, construction workers and miners. They’ve got skills; they’ve got experience. They just don’t have jobs.

So let me be the first to say this to you: Welcome to the American working class.

You won’t get rich, unless of course you develop a sideline in blackmail or bank robbery. You’ll be living some of the problems you report on — the struggle for health insurance, for child care, for affordable housing. You might never have a cleaning lady. In fact, you might be one. I can’t tell you how many writers I know who have moonlighted as cleaning ladies or waitresses. And you know what? They were good writers. And good cleaning ladies too, which is no small thing.

Let me tell you about my own career, which I think is relevant, not because I’m representative or exemplary in any way, but because I’ve seen some real ups and downs in this business.

I didn’t start out to be a freelance writer or a journalist, but after a number of false starts and digressions, I discovered that’s what I really loved doing. In about 1980, I was a single mother of two small children, and my work quota was four articles or columns a month. I did my research at the public library. I bought my clothes at Kmart or consignment stores. The kids did not get any special lessons or, when the time came, SAT prep courses.

Then came the fat times, in the ’90s, which I realize now were an anomaly in the history of journalism. The industry was booming; editors would take me out for three-course lunches in Manhattan. I’ll never forget one of those lunches: It was with the top editor of Esquire, and I was trying to pitch him a story on poverty. He looked increasingly bored as we got through the field greens with goat cheese, the tuna carpaccio and so forth – until we finally got to the death-by-chocolate dessert, and he finally said, “OK, do your thing on poverty — but make it upscale.”

It was still an uphill struggle to write what I cared about, but at least I was getting generously paid – up to $10 a word by Time magazine. Imagine that — $10 a word. Most Americans would be happy to make $10 an hour.

Then, bit by bit, it all began to fall apart. The news weeklies: Time let me go in 1997. The book publishing industry was in tatters by 2005. And then the newspapers began to shrink within my hands or actually disappear. I was beginning to feel a certain kinship with blacksmiths and elevator operators when the recession hit in 2008, and every single income stream I had began to dry up.

But it was the recession, of course, that saved me from self-pity. I began to get sick and tired of the typical media recession story — which was about rich people having to cut back on the hours they spend with their personal trainers. All right, I realize those are man-bites-dog stories compared to a story about a laid-off roofer being evicted from his trailer home. But it seemed to me that the recession had absolutely eliminated the poor and the working class from the media consciousness. Once again, they had disappeared from sight.

So a couple of weeks ago, I pitched a certain well-known newspaper a series of reported essays on precisely this topic. They took it — but at about only one-quarter of what they had paid me for writing columns five years ago, barely enough to cover expenses. That bothered me. But then I had a kind of epiphany and realized: I’ve got to do this anyway. I’m on a mission, and I’ll do whatever it takes.

Which brings me back to the subject of journalism as a profession. We are not part of an elite. We are part of the working class, which is exactly how journalists have seen themselves through most of American history — as working stiffs. We can be underpaid, we can be jerked around, we can be laid off arbitrarily — just like any autoworker or mechanic or hotel housekeeper or flight attendant.

But there is this difference: A laid-off autoworker doesn’t go into his or her garage and assemble cars by hand. But we — journalists– we can’t stop doing what we do.

As long as there is a story to be told, an injustice to be exposed, a mystery to be solved, we will find a way to do it. A recession won’t stop us. A dying industry won’t stop us. Even poverty won’t stop us because we are all on a mission here. That’s the meaning of your journalism degree. Do not consider it a certificate promising some sort of entitlement. Consider it a license to fight.

In the ’70s, it was gonzo journalism. For us right now, it’s guerrilla journalism, and we will not be stopped.

An excerpt from http://dailyrevolution.net/?p=5548:

“Fellow job hunters: isn’t it amazing how, just at the moment when you don’t have a dollar to spare for anyone, everyone’s hands come stretching out? Resume services, career coaches, training institutes, online colleges, interviewing experts, and one service after another that pitches to push your name to the very front of the line, straight under the noses of corporate deciders. Meanwhile, you’re probably a lot like me in terms of being able to pay for any of this shit: I’ve got $14.72 until Thursday; and every nickel the state ponies up for the next few weeks will go straight toward June’s rent.

One of the outstanding writers and journalists of our era, a woman named Barbara Ehrenreich, exposed this tragicomic folly in a book from a few years back, appropriately titled Bait and Switch.

Ehrenreich is also the moving force behind a new online movement called United Professionals. …”

United Professionals Asks New Members to Volunteer Skills, Donations

Washington, D.C. – United Professionals (UP), a national non-profit, nonpartisan membership and advocacy group for white collar workers, announces an immediate suspension of membership dues.

According to author and UP founder Barbara Ehrenreich, “It has become painfully clear in recent months that there is no real safety net for the nation’s middle class. Tens of thousands of Americans are feeling powerless under a crippling economy, but the unemployed, under-employed, and anxiously employed now have an opportunity to make important changes. By banding together through UP, the overlooked voice and needs of the nation’s white collar workers will be heard. Right now, membership matters more than dues.”

In lieu of membership dues, UP is asking for a voluntary donation of money and/or skills when new members join. Members are especially encouraged to spread the word about joining UP at no cost.

“There’s strength in numbers,” says UP board chair Bill Holland. “It’s time to put an end to ignoring the nation’s professional workers. The more members UP has, the more changes we can make.”

To sign up for free membership in UP, please visit www.unitedprofessionals.org/signup.

Jared Bernstein has just joined UP’s board of directors. He is a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and author of  just-released “Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries)” Below is an excerpt from the TPM Cafe Book Club at http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/tpmcafe-book-club/ where Jared, Barbara Ehrenreich, and others discuss today’s economy in terms of real people.

Let’s Talk “Crunch”

By Jared Bernstein – April 7, 2008, 9:56AM

First, I want to thank TPM’s Andrew Golis for setting up this book club. Second, I want to thank Brad DeLong, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Alan Viard for agreeing to post along with me on “Crunch” over the next few days (Tyler Cowan is a “maybe”—I’m hoping he will post some responses too).

A bunch of “Crunch” is me answering real people’s questions about the economy—not wonk’s questions, but actual questions gathered from folks who are interested in matters economic but not necessarily schooled in them. The questions range from the definitional: “What’s GDP; how’s unemployment defined,” and “What does the Federal Reserve do, anyway?” and the timely: “What are bubbles and what is a recession?” There are behavioral questions, like “Should I give money to a homeless person or hire an undocumented worker?” as well as policy questions and solutions, like “Do other countries really spend less than we do on health care with better results?” or “Are budget deficits really a problem?”

And, of course, “Why do I feel so squeezed?”

 Please click on the link to view the entire discussion:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/tpmcafe-book-club/

Until the beginning of this month, Americans seemed to have nothing to say about their ongoing economic ruin except, “Hit me! Please, hit me again!” You can take my house, but let me mow the lawn for you one more time before you repossess. Take my job and I’ll just slink off somewhere out of sight. Oh, and take my health insurance too; I can always fall back on Advil.

Then, on April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take – inaction. Faced with $4/gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking. On the New Jersey Turnpike, a convoy of trucks stretching “as far as the eye can see,” according to a turnpike spokesman, drove at a glacial 20 mph. Outside of Chicago, they slowed and drove three abreast, blocking traffic and taking arrests. They jammed into Harrisburg PA; they slowed down the Port of Tampa where 50 rigs sat idle in protest. Near Buffalo, one driver told the press he was taking the week off “to pray for the economy.”

The truckers who organized the protests – by CB radio and internet – have a specific goal: reducing the price of diesel fuel. They are owner-operators, meaning they are also businesspeople, and they can’t break even with current fuel costs. They want the government to release its fuel reserves. They want an investigation into oil company profits and government subsidies of the oil companies. Of the drivers I talked to, all were acutely aware that the government had found, in the course of a weekend, $30 billion to bail out Bear Stearns, while their own businesses are in a tailspin.

But the truckers’ protests have ramifications far beyond the owner-operators’ plight –first, because trucking is hardly a marginal business. You may imagine, here in the blogosphere, that everything important travels at the speed of pixels bouncing off of satellites, but 70 percent of the nation’s goods – from Cheerios to Chapstick –travel by truck. We were able to survive a writers’ strike, but a trucking strike would affect a lot more than your viewing options. As Donald Hayden, a Maine trucker put it to me: “If all the truckers decide to shut this country down, there’s going to be nothing they can do about it.”

More importantly, the activist truckers understand their protest to be part of a larger effort to “take back America,” as one put it to me. “We continue to maintain this is not just about us,” “JB”– which is his CB handle and stands for the “Jake Brake” on large rigs– told me from a rest stop in Virginia on his way to Florida. “It’s about everybody – the homeowners, the construction workers, the elderly people who can’t afford their heating bills… This is not the action of the truck drivers, but of the people.” Hayden mentions his parents, ages and 81 and 76, who’ve fought the Maine winter on a fixed income. Missouri-based driver Dan Little sees stores shutting down in his little town of Carrollton. “We’re Americans,” he tells me, “We built this country, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to lie down and take this.”

At least one of the truckers’ tactics may be translatable to the foreclosure crisis. On March 29, Hayden surrendered three rigs to be repossessed by Daimler-Chrysler – only he did it publicly, with flair, right in front of the statehouse in Augusta. “Repossession is something people don’t usually see,” he says, and he wanted the state legislature to take notice. As he took the keys, the representative of Daimler-Chrysler said, according to Hayden, “I don’t see why you couldn’t make the payments.” To which Hayden responded, “See, I have to pay for fuel and food, and I’ve eaten too many meals in my life to give that up.”

Suppose homeowners were to start making their foreclosures into public events– inviting the neighbors and the press, at least getting someone to camcord the children sitting disconsolately on the steps and the furniture spread out on the lawn. Maybe, for a nice dramatic touch, have the neighbors shower the bankers, when they arrive, with dollar bills and loose change, since those bankers never can seem to get enough.

But the larger message of the truckers’ protest is about pride or, more humbly put, self-respect, which these men channel from their roots. Dan Little tells me, “My granddad said, and he was the smartest man I ever knew, ‘If you don’t stand up for yourself ain’t nobody gonna stand up for you.’” Go to theamericandriver.com, run by JB and his brother in Texas, where you’re greeted by a giant American flag, and you’ll find – among the driving tips, weather info, and drivers’ favorite photos –the entire Constitution and Declaration of Independence. “The last time we faced something as impacting on us,” JB tells me, “There was a revolution.”

The actions of the first week in April were just the beginning. There’s talk of a protest in Indiana on the 18^th, another in New York City, and a giant convergence of trucks on DC on the 28^th. Who knows what it will all add up to? Already, according to JB, some of the big trucking companies are threatening to fire any of their employees who join the owner-operators’ protests.

But at least we have one shining example of defiance of the face of economic assault. There comes a point, sooner or later, when you stop scrambling around on all fours and, like JB and his fellow drivers all over the country, you finally stand up.

If you would like to help support the truckers in any way, go to http://www.theamericandriver.com/files/TruckersAndCitizensUnited.html