Reviewer:
Grady-Lee Howard
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January 29, 2008
Subject:
A Stimulating Package?
Katherine Newman and Barbara Ehrenreich are the best advocates poor people now have, but are wholly inadequate. I myself am what they call an older discouraged worker. I have a college degree and some graduate school but at my age (56) would be foolish to go into debt for education. Until recently, these two upper middleclass ladies have assumed education to be a universal cure for low income woes. My situation is that my education, basically in poverty fighting, excludes me from even a low paying position. Lets' face it: Walmart will not hire a union organizer, and such is the case everywhere I go. I now am employed 10 hrs. a week by friends, supposedly helping people learn to make and operate puppets and instructing in various textile arts. I am a participant observer who has submitted countless applications and done many interviews until I could no longer afford the expense or the trauma of rejection. I am sleeping on a couch at the folk school and have no car. All my possessions were lost in a storage depot sale. At the school I meet countless people who understand how a "helping profession" degree is useless without some sort of subsidy. MBAs are a dime a dozen too.
The American workforce topped at about 140 million officially employed. That did not include the gray economy of under the table work but did include contract jobs, temporary jobs and part time employment down to as little as 1 hour per week. Then you have to consider the reality of competition. The workforce is now beginning to shrink. I liken it to a game of musical chairs where some seats are taken away each round. When one sits, two are left standing, and there is an unbelievable stretch-out in the office work that remains on shore where the remaining employee does the former work of 2 or 3 people. Let's face it, if you're barely worth a damn at some kind of work you could not survive if hired, no matter how hard you tried.
Our office is filling with older layoffs who don't know what they'll do after unemployment benefits expire. They were replaced by new (indebted) college graduates who supposedly can afford to work cheaper. Remember how shippers and the airlines and so on have a two-tiered pay scale now?I submit that most employers do. I am tired of teaching people handweaving and holding their hand telling them they should not give up hope.
But now I'm thinking this Barack Obama kind of hope could be a bad thing, that people need not believe help will come. I don't believe help is coming. Corporations have too tight a grip on this economy. They will not stop until we become a bloody slaughterhouse. People have turned mean, selfish and panicked already. Look at how they drive! Look at how they neglect their families! Look at how they can't listen to news about injustices but only want a little crumb, a $600 handout from their own tax money. Where do you think things are headed?