Labor Day Weekend 2020, brought to you by covid19

According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, 52% of American adults under 30 live with their parents, and the number of households headed by 18 to 29-year-olds declined by 1.9 million (12%). At the same time, the August 2020 jobs report shows that workforce participation rose to 61.7% from 61.4% while unemployment declined from 10.2% to 8.4%. It's worth noting, perhaps, that 29 million Americans are receiving some form of unemployment compensation although the $600 extra per week expired at the end of July. Happy Labor Day!

a check that would never be repaid

"We eat hotdogs and sauerkraut for lunch. After lunch, my father calls the telephone company and explains to them that he cannot pay his debt. He gets angry over a misunderstanding and berates the customer-service rep. He owes ninety bucks for last month plus three hundred from the winter, but he yells at the lady because before they said he could pay the ninety to keep the line and now she’s telling him three ninety or nothing. But he holds neither sum so the point is moot, and bankruptcy leaves one bitter or quarrelsome. He hangs up and bitches about those corporate mothers. When you lose your phone, you lose call backs from prospective employers too. I listen and despair and resist the urge to write him a check that would never be repaid."

~~ from "My Father's Great Recession" by Alex Kudera

Unemployment 2020

"Before the pandemic, Detroit restaurant server Deshan Hedrick used to worry about saving for a new home. Now she has a new problem: where to find food to last her through the next few days.

"Hedrick, who lives in a small house with a roommate and had never been laid off in 25 years of waitressing, hasn't received an unemployment payment since she lost her job on March 16. . .

"By one measure, Michigan is a relative success story. As of April 25, the state had enrolled 21.1% of eligible working-age adults into unemployment programs, the third-highest rate in the country and above the national rate of 13.3%, U.S. Labor Department figures show.

"That’s little comfort to Hedrick, 40, who says she wrestled for more than a month with a website for processing claims that repeatedly failed and couldn’t get through by phone. Her claim wasn't accepted until April 18. Under federal guidelines, she should have received funds by early April.

"Hedrick, who has no kids and grew up poor in Detroit, earned about $3,200 a month at Starter’s Bar and Grill. By mid-April, she exhausted her $1,700 in savings. Now she's surviving on noodles and canned soup donated by friends and faces a $4,000 backlog of bills --- from utilities and insurance to her monthly rent of $825.

"Michigan's Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity spokeswoman Erica Quealy acknowledged there have been delays but said that it has extended call center hours due to the surge in demand and delays, and has quadrupled the number of staffers helping customers."

~~ from "'The government is failing us': Laid-off Americans struggle in the 

     coronavirus crisis,"  

     Reuters, May 7, 2020

Hunger 2020

"City Harvest, a nonprofit that distributes food donated by restaurants and other retail outlets to nearly 250 food pantries and soup kitchens citywide, says it delivered 6.6 million pounds of food between March 9 and April 12, or almost 5 million pounds more than the year-earlier period, according to Racine Lee Droz, City Harvest’s director of food sourcing. . .

"Food Bank for New York City — the biggest anti-hunger organization in the city — says the number of users could double or even triple from the pre-coronavirus level of 2.5 million. . .

"As of last week, 791,000 New Yorkers had applied for unemployment benefits, according to the Department of Labor. A New School study found that the state has lost 1.2 million jobs so far, and estimates that one-third of the city could soon be out of work.

"On Wednesday, Mayor de Blasio announced a plan to spend $170 million on food for the hungry. . .

"Now, Rethink Food, a local nonprofit, has launched a pop-up soup kitchen outside the church and is doing 600 to 1,000 meals a day, five days a week. “We could easily do 5,000 meals a day,” Rethink founder Matt Jozwiak said — and lines would be even longer if it weren’t for fear of infection."

~~ from The New York Post, April 19, 2020

Throwaway Americans, 10th Anniversary Edition

In "Throwaway Americans," Stu Bykofsky has the audacity to wave a white race card and get the reader to sympathize with a guy who went to private schools, once owned an airplane, and even has a part-time job, and, alas, maybe because the guy is 54, just as in my 1994, non-airplane-owning, flat-broke father's experience as fictionalized for "My Father's Great Recession," I do, at least somewhat, even as I wonder where I'll be in ten years. In 2024, just as in 1994 and 2014, it seems likely a majority of the folks making the "hiring decision" will be other white men.

At least that was certainly true in my dad's situation 20 years ago when he finally found his way back into the world of employment. I've noted this before at L.U.S.K., that he wound up getting his 15 seconds of fame as "the poet, Jay Roberts" while working at a gas station convenience store off A1A in Ponte Vedra, Florida after his downstairs neighbor in the beach bungalow they split a low rent on was kind enough to bring back an application and help return him to work. My father did about 20 to 30 hours a week at minimum wage, $5.05 at the time, I think, and enjoyed the job because playing cashier reminded him of working in a liquor store thirty-five years previously. He had time to walk on the beach and write his poetry, and he was quite happy for those reasons.

"My Father's Great Recession" is included in the limited edition paperback published in Romania (and available in English, Romanian, and Spanish soon), and we are looking for an American publisher to produce an e-book version of these texts.

2014-15: inequality, unemployment, poverty

One reason Fight for Your Long Day is worth reading is that the novel clearly predicts the direction we are heading in--toward contract work (35% of all U.S. Workers), increased inequality, and global "flattening" for most of us even as the elite prospers. In 2014, from Robert Reich's "Why There's No Outcry" to Stu Byfosky's "Throwaway Americans," inequality, unemployment, and poverty articles remain the easiest ones to find between Miley, Bieber, and Sochi headlines. Apologies again for pasting in URLs, but I'll update this list as I see them, and I'm sure it will prove impossible to capture even "the 1%" of the total. So to speak.

Inequality:

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-state-low-wage-america

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-11-03/how-401-k-plans-have-fueled-inequality-in-america?campaign_id=yhoo

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-us-income-inequality-is-bad-20141024-column.html

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/24/tale-of-two-cities-new-york-inequality-john-tim-freeman?CMP=fb_gu

http://mashable.com/2014/09/25/this-really-depressing-graph-about-the-u-s-economy-is-turning-heads/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/upshot/how-are-american-families-doing-a-guided-tour-of-our-financial-well-being.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMediaHigh&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0

http://news.yahoo.com/americas-wealth-gap-unsustainable-may-worsen-harvard-study-110255435--business.html

http://phys.org/news/2014-08-great-recession-americans-unhappy-pessimistic.html

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/25/6063831/two-numbers-that-show-how-badly-america-s-middle-class-is-hurting

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/why-theres-no-outcry_b_4666330.html

http://barrygrahamauthor.com/post/74927339360/guest-blog-post-a-brief-primer-on-inequality-by-larry

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/business/the-middle-class-is-steadily-eroding-just-ask-the-business-world.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&module=MostEmailed&version=Full&region=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/how-inequality-hollows-out-the-soul/?_php=true&_type=blogs&hp&rref=opinion&_r=0

http://www.newstatesman.com/economics/2014/02/gender-inequality-costing-global-economy-trillions-dollars-year

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/14/opinion/krugman-inequality-dignity-and-freedom.html?_r=0

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/21841-paul-krugman-redefining-the-middle-class

Unemployment:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/31/america-unemployment-map_n_5744656.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592

http://news.yahoo.com/30-percent-retirees-return-labor-093000852.html

http://news.yahoo.com/long-term-unemployed-improving-us-economy-39-hope-155005064.html

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20140214_Throwaway_Americans.html

http://www.ibtimes.com/us-january-jobs-report-2014-unemployment-rate-falls-66-nonfarm-payrolls-rise-113k-1553925

http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/business/20140213_ap_97aa78f9a8514fc2a176869f28786b75.html

Poverty:

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/majority-children-us-public-schools-are-low-income

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-child-poverty-20141021-story.html

http://qz.com/282841/who-and-where-americas-poor-people-are-in-charts/

http://news.yahoo.com/us-losing-generation-poverty-094500940--politics.html

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/nation-jan-june14-povertysuburb_01-11/

http://www.freep.com/comments/article/20140818/NEWS07/308180088/Hunger-America-1-7-rely-food-banks

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-hunger-crisis-americas-universities#

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/breaking/20140822_Hunger_survey_shows_46_5_million_Americans_hungry.html

unionize finance?

The story of the Americas continues to unfold as a union in Brazil funds finance workers organizing in New York:

The Brazilian union CUT (Unified Workers’ Central) has provided seed money for organizing efforts in New York City, Miami and Orlando, home to Banco do Brasil branches and call centers. (Brazilian unions have also supported American automotive workers.) CUT president Vagner Freitas explained this transnational strategy at a union convention in September, saying, “We don’t have the bank workers in the U.S. organized, so we can’t organize workers around the world. A lot of them are in the U.S., and they have a great role to play.”

It's tempting to say that we've come endless cycle, I mean full circle, since the days of Kissinger and Pinochet, and yet as of right now, according to a veteran teller, pseudononymous Ryan Filson, quoted in the article, $10 per hour remains the twenty-year-old starting wage for a NYC bank teller. Read the full article at the unionized paper of record. Oh, sorry. I meant read more at Al Jazeera, but I couldn't find anything online which indicated that Al Jazeera's journalists were unionized.

And this article from The Huffington Post suggests a third of our country's half million bank tellers subsist by drawing upon some form of public assistance. (And, of course, I can't prove that the HuffPo writer receives any monetary compensation, but at least one Tenured Radical suggests this is highly unlikely.)

Anyway, on this warm Friday in early December, the slippery slope leads to new employment numbers released this morning, and the employment figures are positive once again, with another 203,000 jobs added in November, but I imagine that the worker-participation rate remains at or near its all-time lows.

You tell me.

full-time work

According to a metric tracked by Gallup since 2011, less than 44 percent of American adults have a full-time job. Although it will always be a goal to increase this percentage, to encourage employers to understand why the stability of full-time work benefits both worker and company, it's also beholden on all of us teaching career-prep college courses to make students aware of this and teach strategies for navigating the world of contingent or permanent part-time employment.

Meanwhile, CNN just "broke the news" that the "U.S. economy added 204,000 jobs in October, more than analysts expected. Unemployment rate rose to 7.3% from 7.2%." Such substantial job gains coupled with a rise in the unemployment rate indicates that there are many more millions of people who'd gladly work were there opportunity to do so.

And here's another piece that includes charts to confirm, once again, that it is a bad time for younger workers in America.

the poetics of pensions

Dow 14,000 or not, according to plenty of sources, we're in a persistent recession for black Americans, older workers, and more or less, the rest of the country.

With an impending sequester and the promise of a million or more job cuts, things could get even worse before they get better, or possibly, they won't ever get better for most human beings on the planet. So to recap, that'd be worse and then worse again. . . maybe a meandering, a lull between worses upon occasion, but we'll see.

Somehow it all reminded me of this Kevin Varrone poem* posted on the homepage of the Pennsylvania Book Center. I'll be sure to hit him up for some cash if I ever run into him in Philly.

*The Kevin Varrone poem has disappeared with the Pennsylvania Book Center, so I found a replacement poem by Varrone.

worker participation

"The result is that the percentage of working-age Americans with a job or looking for one has dropped to 63.5 percent, a 31-year low."

Maybe it's too easy to blame it all on the Koch Brothers, the "Food Stamp President," Republican blocking and tackling in Congress, technological advancement, global warming, American obesity or generalized sluggishness, alleged worker abuses by apple in China, amazon.com's monopoly on everything, the unusually hot summer, a global earthquake pandemic, or the Wal-Mart in Central, SC raising the price of gallon of milk to $3.87 soon after all "permanent" state employees received a 3 percent raise?

Yes, yahoo, why did unemployment fall?

April 9 (another one)

Here's another one of those long, dreary, unemployed-youth articles that some of us find positively intoxicating. I tell you many of us get drunk off the wines of depression, reading these things, until we are nearly comatose, barely able to lift our bodies, weighted down so by our bleeding hearts and midnight snacks, off the lazy boy and onto the rest of our lives.

When Gertrude Stein told Hemingway he was part of a lost generation, she probably wasn't thinking of a future where we'd have millions of college grads living at home and tweeting from their basement "grad caverns."

I wonder where the 21st-century version of Stein's salon is taking shape. And what they're reading, writing, and thinking there.

men in their prime

I just posted on the recovering economy, and so it makes sense that one of the very next articles I read online would suggest that this is hardly your father's recovery--particularly in the sense that he might not be working. Middle-aged male worker participation rates (what Brett Arends calls "the Guy Rate") remain among the lowest ever recorded:

http://www.smartmoney.com/invest/strategies/what-does-bernanke-know-1332799616772/?link=SM_hp_ls4e#article_tab_article

And the past couple weeks, Atticus Books has shared some rough-draft memoir about my father's experiences in relation to his father and son, and although the year is 1991, the song resonates somewhat with the current situation, or at least the malaise we're hopefully climbing out of.

Here's part two:

http://atticusbooksonline.com/summer-1991-broke-and-back-in-philly-part-2

and in case you missed it, part one:

http://atticusbooksonline.com/summer-1991-broke-and-back-in-philly-part-1

and an earlier section posted at When Falls the Coliseum:

http://whenfallsthecoliseum.com/2011/06/19/no-returns/

For now, we'll let the URL links hang out in public, but maybe banish them to hyperlink status later in the week.

out of work in america?

Time Magazine's Joshua Cooper Ramo is lying through his teeth if we can call the use of an adverb--in this case, "unthinkably"--a lie. Cooper Ramo writes, "Jobless figures released Sept. 4 showed a 9.7% unemployment rate, pushing the U.S.--unthinkably--ahead of Europe, with 9.5%." I'd bet my house (the bank's house that is) that Cooper Ramo knows darn well that high unemployment is very thinkable in the United States and that Europe has had some recent years of robust economic growth.

This could be seen as nitpicky, but it could also be seen as editing by corporate-media elites. Time wants to save whatever audience it has left, so Cooper Ramo's original sentence gets two dashes and an adverb, or it is just too depressing or too honest to sell magazines and advertising.

Could Cooper Ramo believe that unemployment above Europe's is so unthinkable? Is his pay check based only on how well he sculpts sentences and not at all about his knowledge of his subject? In the same issue, Time is kind enough to inform us that we have 131 millions workers in our economy, and that is the same number we had in 1999. In other words, just as my earlier post suggests, we have lived through a jobless decade.

In reality, both Cooper Ramo and Time provide good information in the recent "Out of Work in America" issue, and I appreciate their work. I'm sure they are well aware of the limits to what their subscribers can take when it comes to a focus on negative news that is hitting quite close to home. Click here to learn that 80 percent of us consider the economy to be poor and over half of us are worried about our own ability to make ends meet.

When it comes to a poor economy, Africans Americans are a group that would never find any of this information "unthinkable" or perhaps even less than expected.

Barbara Ehrenreich has an effective summary of the African American Depression of the 2000s, and I doubt the findings would shock any black person or anyone with eyes open living in close proximity to the half of black America that has never seen the good times roll, rock, or animate themselves in any way.

On Tuesday, I return to literature class, armed with James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," and it is convenient to teach this as a pre-Civil Rights "that's how things were but they're so much better now" story about redlining and segregation and discrimination and everything else that used to be but then magically disappeared with a long, looping LBJ in cursive script. I hope I can offer my students more than that.

At the same time, my teaching strategies are superficial compared to today's larger problems of how President Obama can help us retain or obtain healthcare and jobs. It is Obama's time, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that any compromise bill that passes will be one that can help us all.

And please, if you are in a position to hire anyone at all, please do so.