We have a big problem in the United States. People have been socialized into thinking that all cases of unemployment are indictments on the unemployed’s character. The result is reactions to unemployment and poverty ranging from dismissiveness to disdain to out and out abusive treatments. What’s more in the unemployed themselves, there is a sense of unworthiness and inadequacy and pervasive depression. All of which is a natural consequence to both being treated that way and buying into the myth that people are unemployed because they personally aren’t good enough and not due to societal and economic factors far beyond their control.
And the thing is, it’s an obvious falsehood. Yet people all across the country believe it. Indeed we’re going to hear a lot more of it as the Presidential election rolls around as the Republican party is going to make this their platform. The reason unemployment is high they will argue, is that people have become too weak and stupid and dependent and they just need to be pull themselves up by their boot straps and get used to hard work and then everything will be fine.
What’s incredible about these kinds of indictments is that they don’t take into account basic Mathematics. The simple fact is the jobs don’t exist. There’s 14 million unemployed people in the country and another 14 million without full time jobs. That’s just the people that we count. A lot of these people without full time jobs might as well be unemployed really. For example I have a friend who has two part time jobs but can’t get more than 8 hours of work a week, nowhere near enough to survive and no unemployment. That’s what a lot of companies are doing though, hiring lots of people at miniscule hours at pittance pay. They can do this because there are so many people out there desperate for work that they’ll take anything and have zero bargaining power. There are 6 unemployed job seekers for every single job opening, and they are competing not just with each other but also with everyone who hates their job and wants to switch or has a job but wants more hours or greater pay. Not to mention the millions of new people entering the work force every year and the competition from potential employees abroad.
Do you see the basic fallacy?
Even if you took everybody and made them all the hardest working people imaginable, turned them all into geniuses, made them all perfectly healthy, trained them up to be experts in every possible job, gave them the knowledge and credentials of people with multiple PhDs, made them all perfectly personable and skilled people persons, made them all get along with everyone, made them all impeccably dressed and well mannered, ensured they were all incredibly creative and innovative and capable and heck even beautiful. Even if you did all of that to every single person in this country today…. guess how many unemployed we’d have tomorrow or a month or two from now?
14 million.
The jobs DON’T EXIST.
They won’t appear by magic. Improving humanity will only shuffle up who has the jobs. It won’t create new jobs. Certainly not in the short to moderate term anyway. Maybe in the long term some of those geniuses will create new businesses that hire people who otherwise would not have had jobs. Maybe. I have my skepticism about how many real new jobs that aren’t just replacements of old jobs these entrepreneurs create. Very often improvements in technology that create new jobs also cause people who were working old jobs with old technology to lose their jobs.
But even if it does work, it won’t happen overnight. We’re talking decades. And over the course of decades our employment situation is already on course to radically improve even if we do nothing at all, provided we don’t screw up and induce more recessions.
It’s totally irrational to assume we can just make people better and everything will be ok. And it’s equally irrational to assume that all or even a majority of people are unemployed because of personal failing in them. Anyone who has ever interacted with our employment process on the hiring, firing, or seeking side has seen how very much imperfect the system is. So much of what causes people to hire one person and not another has to do with ineffable things and emotions like whim, instinct, a sense of camaraderie or similarity, emotional connections, desire to help out friends and family, desire for revenge. It isn’t a hard science. It’s quite frankly a lot of luck. Even getting your resume looked at for a good job is often a matter of someone chancing upon a needle in the haystack.
We need to start understanding that unemployment exists because of social problems not because of character. It’s system failure not individual failure. The simple fact is when you have a huge economic collapse leading to a prolonged depression a ton of perfectly capable ambitious well meaning intelligent high quality potential employees won’t be able to get jobs. And the longer they are out of work the harder it will be for them to get work. And the more society will judge them and treat them like shit because of it which in turn reduces their self esteem and makes it even harder for them to find jobs. So the end up opting out of society altogether, giving up, contemplating suicide, or considering a life of crime. And is that any surprise? If society writes off people why should we not expect people to write off society? People’s lives are ruined by being unemployed. Their entire futures lost. They suffer emotional and psychological damage that can last a life time and a reduction in future earnings that puts them often permanently on track for less prospects for their children, worse health, and constant struggle no matter how hard they try to change their future. And we don’t seem to care at all. We just treat them like it’s all their fault, these genetically inferior refuse, and they’re just getting what’s coming to them. We act like we should just avoid associating with the icky unemployed or low salaried so we don’t get their cooties.
But it’s not really their fault. It never was. They didn’t ask to be unemployed and so many of their work their asses off trying to become not unemployed anymore. In reality, it’s all of our faults for not doing what we need to do to make an economic system that actually works and gives everyone the opportunities they need and deserve. Instead of solving that problem we’ve decides to be cruel and vicious to anyone suffering so as to blind ourselves to our own culpability. That’s how we roll.
