“That Obama is not really as behind the people as he sounded like,” Feldman said. “As far as I can tell, he’s just another puppet in office.”
A month later the Obama administration negotiated to continue extended unemployment benefits. It was done not in response to protests but as part of a legislative compromise that extended the Bush tax cuts. But the deal wouldn’t mean any more money for Feldman. Earning the title 99er means you’ve graduated from the unemployment system. Feldman could only collect further benefits if he found a job, worked for the required period, lost the job, and qualified like any newly laid off worker. The tax-cut-for-benefits trade involved allocating money so that new people coming into the unemployment system could also get extensions beyond the normal twenty-six weeks if they qualified.
By the fall of 2010 there were fourteen million officially unemployed Americans—40 percent of them classified as the long-term unemployed. An additional ten million were working part-time but said they wanted full-time jobs. Fifteen million more had dropped out of the labor force since this recession began.
But bright, educated, unemployed people will surely drift into some kind of work eventually—won’t they? Maybe Gerri will pick up freelance event-planning gigs through contacts at organizations where she’s volunteered. Maybe Elaine will walk into a smart women’s clothing store where she’s shopped and ask for a job.
At the rate at which full-time staff jobs are being phased out, the older long-term unemployed of this recession probably have less than a fifty-fifty chance of finding permanent, full-time jobs.
But that’s statistics. All any individual needs is one job.
Our Pink Slip Club protagonists are college graduates. They prepared themselves for the “symbolic manipulation” that was supposed to replace industrial work in our new knowledge economy, and they kept up their skills.
None of the four friends are world-beaters who start in the mail room and end up in the CEO’s office. (How many of those do we need?) They were content to remain in their mid-level positions giving a little more than a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. Beyond that fair day’s pay, the reward they most cherished was appreciation for helping to make work go smoothly for the people around them. Aren’t these the workers companies need by the tens of millions?
I guess the reason I can’t quite end this story is that for all my intellectual grasp of the downward trends for American workers, I just can’t believe that these four generous/selfish, mellow/excitable, unique/ordinary, and highly employable individuals will simply remain the long-term unemployed. Even though they might.
Chapter Two
DOWN BY THE BANKS OF THE OHIO
Cash for Clunkers and XM Radio
In the second year of the Great Recession, the U.S. government granted a $4,200 rebate to anyone who bought a fuel-efficient new car and offered up an old one for sacrifice. My husband, Frank, and I brought in our twenty-year-old Lincoln Town Car and drove out with a brand-new Hyundai Elantra. It cost us $13,382, tax included.
Economically, it makes more sense to subsidize an embryonic industry than a mature industry, and public transit makes more environmental sense than private autos. Personally, I hoped for a weatherization/green jobs program to replace the leaky windows in the old industrial building where I live. But you take what you can get.
In our case Cash for Clunkers worked the way it was supposed to. It got a gas-guzzler off the road, and there’s no other way we would have bought a new car. The program brought me a personal bonus besides. My new car introduced me to a father and son in Indiana who had been adjusting to the downturn for a generation before it hit the Pink Slip Club in New York. Here’s how I met them.
————
Our new car came with a free trial subscription to XM Radio. Before it expired, several salesmen called offering low-rate deals to continue the service. My husband, Frank, said no to all of them. Then one day he said, “Okay, give me that.” He was won over by a young man who said he knew how to make the discount subscription end automatically so we wouldn’t find ourselves paying the full price when we forgot to cancel it in time.
“I got his number for you,” Frank said when he got off the phone. “I figured anyone selling XM Radio from a call center had to be doing something better before the recession. He says he’d be happy to talk to you.”
“I can’t interview every underemployed American,” I answered ungratefully. Still, I made a call.
“How long will we need?” Michael Kenny asked when I reached him at home on a weekend morning.
“I don’t know,” I said, dithering. “I don’t usually interview on the phone.”
“Why don’t we go ahead and start discussing?” Michael said, amiably taking charge. “If we need to, we can continue on another day.”
“Were you this good on the phone before you started doing it for a living?” I asked.
“Honestly, no, ma’am. Before my last two jobs I was very timid on the phone. I didn’t even like to call and order pizza.”
Before selling XM Radio, Michael, twenty-eight, had managed his fiancée’s uncle’s staffing agency. Most of its clients needed temporary loading crews for warehouses. Michael rounded up day laborers and sent them out at $7.50 an hour. But with the recession, business fell off for its clients (mostly low-end retailers), and the employment agency itself closed down.
The reason Michael might have to rush off the phone that morning was also recession related. He and his fiancée were looking at houses. The couple had been renting a house for the last five years, but the landlord stopped paying on the mortgage. “So we’re faced with a notice to vacate.”
“Oh no! First your job, then your home.”
Michael assured me that it wasn’t a tragedy. “We were already talking about having a child, and with house prices so low it’s a good time to buy.”
Michael’s fiancée, Caitlin, was employed at a franchise print shop formerly owned by another uncle. It too had gone bankrupt. Fortunately, a rival print shop scooped up the machinery, the customers, and the fiancée. So Caitlin had an unbroken employment record. The couple decided it would look good if Michael was also employed when they went to get a mortgage.
“That’s why I took the job at XM,” he told me. He’d originally thought to stay for about a year. But now: “I’ve been there for a month and a half. I don’t think I can take it for that long, honestly.”
“How long did you work at the employment agency?” I asked.
“Five months, I guess. I took care of everything from payroll, getting the temps to the jobs, drug testing [of job applicants], all that kind of good stuff, plus answering the phones, billing. The boss came in for an hour or two to help with the billing, but really to use it as headquarters for the restaurant he owned. That closed too.” Was I phoning a ghost town, I wondered, or were the uncles just jinxed?
I was surprised when Michael said he’d been unemployed for a full year between the temp agency and the call center.
“I’m only talking to you on the phone, but you sound so … employable.”
“Well, I do need to tell you, ma’am, I have ten-year-old dreadlocks that hang down just to my waist. That does turn some employers off, especially here in the Midwest.”
“Are you a Rastafarian?” I asked. I was also wondering if he was black. That might affect his job prospects.
“No, I’m not a Rastafarian. I respect women more than that. It’s a spiritual thing with me. I’m actually a quarter Native American.” (That didn’t answer my hidden question. But he sounded like a white midwesterner.)
“It might be different if I was living in New York,” Michael continued, “but the only jobs that were available to me here that year were fast foods, sandwich shops, stuff like that. And I just wasn’t gonna go in reverse.”
“Well, a call center, isn’t that reverse? I mean, you were managing the employment agency.”
“It is a bit of a reverse,” he conceded. “But I am actu
ally pulling in the same amount of money.” At the call center Michael was paid $7.50 an hour plus $2.00 per sale. He estimates that he averages five sales a day, which brought it to about $72.00 a day.
“But it is a reverse in that I’m … I’m sacrificing some …” For the first time in our conversation, Michael Kenny groped for a word. “At the temp agency I really got a bit of … satisfaction [he found the word] because I was able to help someone find work.
“Like there was a single dad who was staying in a shelter with his two daughters. You could tell he was not someone who normally gets that close to the bottom. But his wife had passed away, and with the economy this time he fell all the way. So I gave him all the work I could … Mostly unloading trucks and moving boxes around. But that guy, he didn’t care what it was. He just wanted to get his daughters out of the shelter.
“When I was able to help someone like that, it was a sense of satisfaction. I don’t really get that out of XM Radio. I’ll be honest with you, eight out of ten people we call, maybe nine out of ten people, it’s kind of like we’re hassling them. I’m supposed to push it and push it. They listen in for that. But I don’t like hassling people. So it’s kind of tough on me. I’ll try to stay till we get a house.”
“Why don’t you buy the house you’re renting?” I asked.
“It’s not in the most beautiful neighborhood,” he answered, “and we want to start a family. But it’s not the ghetto, either.” (Why was I too embarrassed to simply ask if he was black or white? It matters in America; it’s an honest question.) “The identical house next door sold for $35,000,” Michael reported. “They covered the hardwood floors, painted over the gorgeous woodwork, and resold it for $45,000. You could come to Evansville, buy this house, and rent it out.”
“I don’t even know where I’m calling. Evansville, is that near Chicago?”
“No, Evansville, Indiana. I’m literally right across the river from Kentucky.”
“Oops, sorry.”
“That’s all right. I was born in the Chicago area. We moved here when I was three.”
When I asked how his family got to Indiana, Michael launched into his father’s life story. “My dad never went to college. His father left, and he had four brothers and sisters to help take care of. He worked two jobs and finished high school at night.”
Mr. Kenny senior had taken a job with a national-brand food company “for the security.” Michael represented his dad’s thinking about security with emotions it was hard to interpret over the phone. The company had moved his father to Evansville, Michael said, and then downsized, leaving him stranded. So his dad got a job as a supervisor at the Indiana distribution center of a national retailer where he works to this day.
“Dad, he’s been busting his hump working for these corporations for the last thirty-five years,” Michael said. “He’s actually the second-longest employee at this center, and yet they just put him on a night shift to try to force him out of the job. They even threatened to take his pension away from him at one point if he didn’t quit. Someone actually said it to him: ‘We’ll fire you and take it away from you.’ ”
Michael went on with great feeling about the pressure his father worked under. “You know the way a corporation can scrutinize over you. When you supervise four hundred people, they can always find something that one of those people wasn’t doing right that you should have caught. But he still didn’t quit, and they still didn’t fire him.
“My dad, he’s resilient, he’s right-on, but he hates what he does. It’s paid his way—well, the job and credit cards. But it hasn’t got him satisfaction. He finds that in church these days. I’m not going to live that way.”
“Do you think your father would talk to me if I came to Evansville?” I surprised myself by saying.
Michael said he’d ask. A couple of weeks later he reported that his religious, Republican, and “right-on” dad was willing. (He really was a terrific salesman.) So we drove the new little car to Evansville, Indiana.
Michael and His Friends
At Michael’s suggestion we checked into the Casino Aztar Hotel. The casino itself is a numbingly lit and Muzak-filled showboat, moored on the Ohio River. But the adjoining hotel offered double rooms for seniors at $39 a night. The senior discount must have been a real selling point because there were quite a few gamblers with walkers and portable oxygen tanks at the slot machines.
But the Aztar had just been bought by Tropicana Entertainment. A receptionist congratulated us on getting in under the wire. The senior rate was already scheduled to go up considerably, she told us.
“That’s okay by me,” I assured her, especially if it meant that her pay wouldn’t go down too much. She said amen to that and explained that after the last cuts she’d moved her family across the river to Kentucky. But she wasn’t going to find any place cheaper to live than that, she said.
His fiancée, Caitlin, was still working at the print shop, but Michael had quit the XM call center to spend time fixing up the house they’d just bought. It cost $95,000, and Caitlin had put all of the $20,000 that her grandmother had left her into a down payment so that they could get a low, fixed-rate, twenty-year loan. “Caitlin is very good with money,” Michael said. She was determined never to refinance their house. Indeed the couple feared debt so strongly that “we don’t possess a single credit card.”
————
We were to meet at the new house as soon as Michael got back from driving a friend to a job interview. Though it was only an eight-minute ride from downtown, it was set in a cluster of old, rural-feeling houses circling a pond. Michael was relaxing on the porch when we arrived.
Michael Kenny turns out to be a blue-eyed, brown-haired midwesterner. The three-quarters of him that aren’t American Indian are Irish and German. As for the dreadlocks, perhaps because he’d warned us or because they were so neatly tied back, the young man who stepped off the porch seemed not only presentable but winsome as he showed us the work he’d already done on the lawn.
“By the way, I found someone who’ll hire me with my hair.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Me. I’m hiring myself.” Michael had designed and was planning to manufacture T-shirts for Deadheads to sell at Grateful Dead concerts. He’d already applied to incorporate the new T-shirt business.
Michael had been a hard-core Deadhead in his younger days, following the band from city to city on their tours. It was among fellow Deadheads that he noticed the fellowship among dreadlock wearers and started growing his. He showed me how the hair was allowed to tangle for months before being separated into the strong “roots” that remain forever untouched. Michael’s roots hadn’t been re-rolled for over nine years. “My energy is carried in my hair. Everything I’ve done in my last decade is with me. Here, pull,” he said, showing me how strong his scalp had become.
One of the things that had impressed Michael about my husband was that Frank had actually photographed Jerry Garcia. “I never saw Jerry myself,” Michael said with regret, “but Caitlin did.”
“You know who else did?” I asked and explained that when I lived in San Francisco in the 1960s, friends had repeatedly tried to drag me over to a house in the Haight where this cool band rehearsed in public and anyone could go in and listen. When I finally went, I ran out screaming, “This is too noisy! I can’t stand it!”
“That must have been before their acoustic period,” Michael said tactfully. Rather than dismiss me as the most uncool person on the planet, he brought his guitar out on the porch and played a couple of Jerry Garcia’s children’s songs. He has a very pleasant voice, and he chose some nice safe songs for me. I liked them.
Michael took me inside to see a photograph of the Grateful Dead in front of their house at 710 Ashbury Street. “Yes,” I remembered, “that looks like the place.”
The guitar playing, the T-shirt art, the laid-back young man on the porch all brought back San Francisco in the 1960s. But Michael Kenny wasn’t just a retro hi
ppie. He was also an up-to-date hippie. The T-shirts he designed with the Dead’s lightning bolt logo were strictly 1960s, of course. But the artwork that Michael was setting out, most by friends, included magnified photographs of microscopic glass cuttings and various up-to-date electronic crafts. It was a lot more skillful than the tie-dyes I remember from the 1960s.
The housewares Michael was unpacking were also contemporary hippie. His things were gathered and artistically embellished from today’s discards, not from the already vintage or collectible. Bohemians of all eras have always preferred the unpolished and the unmatched. It allows them to scrounge aesthetically satisfying furnishings while limiting financial ties to “the system.”
But even though one abjures wall-to-wall carpeting and suites of furniture, some hard currency is always needed. In the 1960s, even on a rural commune, there was always someone who put on high heels and stockings—it was usually a woman, as I remember—and went out to earn cash. In those days one could easily drop in and out of such employments, so we took turns. But Caitlin held one of the rare nine-to-five jobs in her circle. So while she worked a permanent, full-time job, the couple’s less steadily employed friends made the new house their gathering place.
Shortly after I arrived, Bean, a tall, lanky youth, dropped a friend, Pete, off and exchanged a few words with Michael about the set Michael’s group would play that evening at a local pub. He spoke through the kitchen screen door.
“You gotta go to work?” Michael asked.
“Yeah,” Bean said with a sigh, and split.
“Boy, he looks sad,” I said. “What kind of job?”
“He’ll be tossing pizzas for the rest of the night,” Michael answered. Then he said to Pete, “He picked up a double [shift] yesterday. He must really need the money.”
Pete, an old high school friend of Michael’s, had been back in town for two weeks. He was heavyset and also in his twenties, but he already had a former wife who had remarried and moved to Florida with her new husband and Pete’s daughter. With not much going on in Evansville, Pete relocated to be near his child. But after nine months he hadn’t found work in Florida, so he moved back. In his own words, “I’m kind of in between things.”
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