Life Among the Unemployed
COTTLE, THOMAS J.
SLOW DEATH Life Among the Unemployed BY THOMAS J. COTTLE IT ALL BEGINS with adults asking children that fateful question: What are you going to be when you grow up? Because it is "only natural"...
...McShane, 51 years old, out of work 39 months—and don't think he ever stops keeping track—glanced at me and grimaced...
...The reality, of course, is that Americans today confront a dismal job scene...
...Either you work every day in a normal job with a couple of weeks vacation, or you're dead...
...I don't want to come home anymore and have you be the first thing I see...
...But the period of the moods steadily lengthened, until all of daddy's life was one ugly mood...
...He's not depressed at all...
...Kaput...
...He'll listen to you...
...Their families despise being reduced to statisics, and doubt that anyone outside their immediate circle thinks of them at all...
...A man is supposed to hold down a steady job...
...Their words melded together as living definitions of guilt...
...In the course of writing about the nature of work, sociologist Kai Erikson remarked: "High rates of unemployment are thought to be not only inevitable but natural...
...Then I'm old-fashioned...
...To their wives they said, "If you can't stand the sight of me, you can always leave...
...Anyone in the household mentioning unemployment ran the risk of a head-on collision...
...I'm killing not only myself but my wife and kids, and they don't even know they're being murdered.' The shame often emerged as rage directed at the children: "What the hell you looking at...
...And all of them," George Wilkinson says, shaking his head so that his yellow-silver hair falls over his forehead, "could be saved...
...What is there to be proud of when all he does is sit or drink or mope around the house all day...
...I could have done it so it would have come out better...
...Working is breathing...
...You want to know how much time they're giving me...
...Hardly original, the words were the antithesis of what everyone knew to be the truth: They feared being abandoned by their families, despite the belief that they deserved no less...
...They couldn't face me, or themselves...
...I asked...
...The two of us worked pret-ty regular from the time we were 12 years old...
...You' re the doctor, so jou tell him...
...Throughout the literature of economic theory one finds such terms as "natural rate of unemployment" and "noninflationary full employment rate...
...They portrayed themselves as wrongdoers, transgressors, people who had committed grievous offenses...
...Early on, the children had been told not to speak about the family's situation outside the house, and certainly never to question dad about it...
...According to traditional values, that is all he is meant to do...
...No matter how hard the men I visited intially struggled to maintain control of their lives and destinies, in the end market forces, along with human decisions, combined to break them down—and in some instances kill them...
...But it 's my fault...
...So maybe I'm also a murderer, huh...
...They were dying men...
...I mean it...
...No one, for example, could assault Amos Payton the way he did...
...Driving home that afternoon, I found myself thinking about the death of my father...
...But he was dead.' At times the men did fight back, hardly valiantly, yet they tried...
...Individuals who once earned six figures stand in unemployment lines alongside those who, two months earlier, were in their employ...
...So lots of men living right in this community may be in the same boat I am, but most of' em ain't...
...In truth, most of them have moved far beyond anything resembling mere discouragement...
...Their masculinity and strength sapped, they acted childlike, as if they deserved to be the invisible, reclusive people they had become because of the utter mess they had made of their lives...
...A man like me wants to yell out, 'It's somebody else's fault...
...Nothing hurts them so much as affluent individuals far removed from their everyday circumstances debating the pros and cons of unemployment policies, while they go another day without work...
...I had an uncle who was out of work a helluva lot longer than you...
...They know that even 2 or 3 per cent unemployment means millions of human beings suffering as they are...
...Good-bye, Jack the bomb Blum...
...You got that right...
...I've known Toonie almost 40 years," Brian said...
...Tell him what, Mac...
...Ultimately, the men hunt for a single reason to keep going, and despair over the fact that the wives and children they so adore are no longer enough...
...The pattern, I suppose, bespeaks a form of chauvinism...
...The light dawned: People like Brian McShane were not feeling sorry for themselves...
...George Wilkinson put it as follows: "Men leave in the morning and come back at night with a paycheck in their hand...
...His children have no reason left to feel proud of him...
...Thomas J. Cottle, a longtime NL contributor, is a sociologist and a clinical psychologist...
...More recently, I have heard: "The government bailed the S&L boys out of trouble with our money, but it won't bail us out when we didn't break a single law, we didn't make one wrong decision...
...To be sure, human devastation caused by the lack of gainful employment is not new to our society...
...He's dying...
...Here's the real melting pot of this country...
...And they're saying, "We should be talking about you and me and about living and dying...
...Anything to show me he wasn't scared, that he was alive, that he had some energy left, some little bit of life...
...It was as if he wanted to say, You see, Doc, what I have to put up with every day...
...Poor people, all walks of life, ethnic types, black, white—you don't make money, down to the bottom...
...Whatever our personal exigencies, whatever the gloomy talk in bars or the reports on tele-vision, our seemingly inbred assumption is that we will be going to work the next morning, and every morning until retirement...
...Tell him I don't get out of this chair because there isn't a reason in the world good enough to get me out of this chair...
...I came to feel there was little difference between my visits to the homes of unemployed families and the visits one pays to the terminally ill...
...My asking them about their childhoods, their early career aspirations, how they would evaluate their lives, had become an opportunity for them to compose their own obituaries...
...Indeed, I hadn't been speaking with "discouraged" workers...
...Makes me old-fashioned...
...Small businesses are filing for bankruptcy in record numbers...
...If you want a show, go watch television...
...Their discussions of educational and employment experiences, and of philosophies of living, all were part of a final self-assessment...
...an unexpected visitor asked Brian McShane in my presence...
...There's no in between...
...Raising the subject only would cause him pain...
...Believe me, you don't move, you'll die in that chair...
...I want to respond that I do and I don't, that I'm not sure what we should be talking about...
...They had worked regular shifts, had rarely taken days off and hardly ever came late...
...I drown, it's my fault...
...In the first months, those who are laid off spew vitriol at the state and Federal governments and at their employers for letting them down...
...How do you explain that one...
...Yet judging from Congress' unwillingness to consider serious job-creation programs, there is little appreciation of the toll all this is taking...
...When you stop you die...
...The children learned to stay away from daddy when he was in "one of his moods...
...Men like 49-year-old Amos Payton, an unemployed cement worker, rode their anger as though life itself drew electricity from it: "Hell, man, I'm afraid of not being angry no more...
...One morning Jack Blum, who had held numerous jobs in his 46 years, looked at the unemployment lines and observed: "I'm at the bottom and nobody likes it at the bottom...
...It's something you don't think about, you just do it and it keeps you alive...
...What are you going to do, just sit there...
...But the most painful words of a woman desperate to vent her frustation with her husband were Rosemary Mullen's: "He should have taken me somewhere, thrown me down, slapped me if that was the only thing that would have quieted me, and made love to me...
...he hasn't earned his keep or his place...
...Tell him he hit the nail right on the head...
...Then, turning to O'Neill, he explained, "Dr...
...I had been speaking with individuals mourning their deaths, and lives...
...Tom's studying guys like me, out of work guys, you know what I mean...
...I know I'm going to die in this chair...
...The government calls people out of work more than six months "discouraged workers...
...They are aware of why we come, and still it is always they who help us through the ordeal of conversing...
...During one of his many angry moods, Jack Blum agreed: "The day that anger stops, I'm dead...
...My unemployed friends understand the implications of government social policies relating to their predicament better than sociologists...
...One of the more painful aspects of an unemployed man's existence is the daily obligation to answer embarrassing questions and suffer simplistic advice...
...You're a miserable sight...
...Talking with him later, my mother asked almost rhetorically, "He's very depressed, isn't he...
...Like a chorus, the other men shouted out: "Damn straight...
...What once may have been a life force drained out of the men with whom I had established close friendships...
...Tell him this is the way I'm coping with a story that's got a lousy ending...
...The unemployed men were telling me the same thing: We should be talking about you and me, working and not working, living and dying...
...they even spoke of it...
...But okay, somebody's got to be at the bottom...
...They read labor reports and newspaper accounts tracking the ebb and flow of the economy...
...They barely disguise an ideological bias —namely, that for our culture to, well, work, a significant percentage of people must be out of work...
...A family friend, a psychiatrist, visited him in the hospital several months before he died...
...No," the friend answered with uncharacteristic sternness...
...large corporations, having shifted into a "lean and mean" mode, are laying off thousands of workers...
...Conversely, when a man loses his job the one and only responsibility giving him his status in his home is lost too...
...And he's got something important to tell you...
...And if he's worried that I might die sitting here, tell him he ain't more worried about it than I am...
...Instead, he introduced his friend, Toonie O'Neill...
...The friend was upset by my father's weakening condition...
...Suddenly, people who months earlier had spoken with a characteristic toughness now seemed embarrassed by my visits...
...That does appear to be the case...
...Lost sheep," Jack Blum has called them...
...They began hiding, masking their feelings, running away from it all...
...They can neither fathom nor reconcile why their country has forsaken them, given the dues—in all senses of that word—they have paid...
...Emphasis mine...
...I wanted to be roughed up that night and feel that he was really a man...
...Tell him I wanna die in this chair...
...It was the government or the company or the economy that was at fault...
...I mean pull my clothes off and rape me, if he had to...
...Tell him that's the way I'm coping with being unemployed forever now...
...He has no right to be there...
...Regardless of the topic, he could turn it back on himself in devastating terms: "Even if there's 20 per cent unemployed, there's still 80 per cent employed...
...Forty seven-year-old George Wilkinson had told me: "There's only two worlds...
...Because it is "only natural" that we work and "make something" of ourselves, there can be no preparation for unemployment, particularly the trauma of long-term unemployment...
...Somewhere around the one-year anniversary of their unemployment, as it became clear to these men that they might never again locate steady work, their anger turned inward...
...The longer a person goes without a job, the greater the likelihood that he or she will give up hope of ever being reemployed...
...They rejected their families as well...
...People like Brian McShane, George Wilkinson and Amos Payton seethe as they listen to the experts arguing for the necessity of a certain base rate of unemployment, or rejoicing over a fractional downturn in the percentage of Americans unable to find a job...
...America's workers were innocent victims, no question about it...
...T.J.C...
...Life was filled with possibilities...
...dying friends have asked me...
...I'm sick of looking at you, sitting there," Dorie McShane yelled at Brian one afternoon in my presence...
...It is understandable that someone holding his view would expect to find dinner waiting upon arriving home at the end of a day and the children, already bathed, ready for a little play and their nightly bedtime routine...
...Although it sounds melodramatic, it also struck me that my subjects who had disappeared, usually after very long periods of unemployment—and there were many of them—had gone away to die...
...These are the people Andre Gorz called the "nonclass of nonworkers...
...They also read the transcripts of our conversations, hunting perhaps for the humanity that frequently gets lost in discussions of unemployment...
...They hunt for themselves, and even more for something they long ago lost and are convinced they will never regain...
...For over 15 years I have been speaking with families where the main provider has been out of work for at least six months...
...His books include Private Lives and Public Accounts, Children's Secrets and Hidden Survivors...
...Come on, you know," Brian insisted, clearly infuriated by the suggestion that he simply needed to get up out of his chair...
...I could not count how often I have found myself listening to the lamentations and expressions of incredulity of strong, articulate, frequently eloquent men who believe fiercely in the goodness of America...
...Not like you, Toones...
...In its place was born an intensity of shame I had never encountered before...
...Better believe it...
...The worst thing is to sit there and not move...
...Nevertheless, for centuries men have been taught that eight or 10 hours of steady work entitles them to this form of human compensation...
...That woman and those two kids upstairs, in the cold apartment where I can't take a warm bath when I want to, they're drowning...
...Eventually the anger receded...
...The origin of these emotions is no mystery...
...Technically, probably many of them could have been diagnosed as depressed, but that wasn't the point...
...Anger and fear, they're gonna keep you alert, keep you on the prowl...
...Then there was that refrain about the government "taking my taxes for 30 years, and now they claim they're running out of benefits...
...But the extended recession has expanded the phenomenon...
...Always they speak of the huge numbers of unemployed Americans everywhere—a network, one imagines, they find to be a rather sacred congregation...
...I heard any number of such protestations, especially in conversations at unemployment offices...
...A year after uttering those words, George Wilkinson, once a manager of a small tool company, killed himself with a shotgun...
...Both feel like a knife in the ribs...
...Go ahead Doc, tell him...
...At this stage Jack Blum, "joking" that shame and guilt were his middle names, said: "I'm the captain of the ship, right...
...Still, their shame, guilt and depression precluded much of a battle...
...They were like weary elephants looking for the burial ground they sensed was out there somewhere...
...I know...
Vol. 76 • September 1993 • No. 10
