Hope(lessness) and Change

H/T to Corrente for finding an oldie but goodie by Ian Welsh called the Personal Politics of Hopelessness. I'm sure many of our readers can relate:

As I write this I’m eating a sub I bought from across the street. While it was being prepared I chatted with the young woman making it, and she told me about moving from the Canadian Maritimes to Toronto, to, in essence, get a job that pays a little more than minimum wage. Because out in the Maritimes she had trouble getting even that.

I thought to myself that her experience is one that politicians need to have. Many politicians, of course, have never ever had a bad job. They went straight to a good university and from there to a good job or internship. They probably worked hard for it, and think they deserve what they have, never really seeing all the people whose feet were never on that road, who never had the same shot they did.

Then there are a fair number of pols, though less and less every year, who will tell you about the lousy jobs they had as teenagers, or maybe in their early twenties. But in most cases something is different between them and many working class and even middle class folks.

They knew they weren’t staying there.

When I was poor and working in lousy jobs I used to look in the mirror and see myself at 50, or 60. I expected to still be working at grindingly hard jobs, being treated badly by bosses (because there is no rule more iron than that the worse you are paid the worse your employer will treat you), and still being paid little more than minimum wage. That was the future I saw for myself.

And when I was on welfare, after having failed to find a job for 6 months, and even being turned down by McDonalds (in the middle of the early nineties recession) I wondered if I’d even ever have a shitty job again. I ate cheap starchy food, turned pasty and put on weight. My clothes ran down. When my glasses broke beyond the point where tape would keep them together I literally had to beg the optometrist to make me his cheapest pair and I’d pay him later. (I eventually did.) My life was a daily grind of humiliation.

And that’s what I expected my life to be.

When politicians participate in one of those “live on Welfare for a week/month” programs I’m happy, but I’m also dubious. The difference is that they know they’re getting out in a week or a month. They know it’s going to end. Much as I applaud someone like Barbara Ehrenreich, who lived for months working at lousy jobs, again, she knew it was going to end. She knew that, if push come to shove and she became seriously sick, she could opt out. She knew that if she really couldn’t eat for days, that was her choice.

Living without that safety net, knowing that if something goes wrong, that’s just too bad, changes you. Living without any real hope of the future, knowing that the shitty job you’ve got now is probably about as good a job you’re ever going to have, changes you.

And it changes your sense of what hard work is, of what it means to be deserving. I remember working on a downtown construction site as temp labor, and I’d watch all the soft office workers with their uncalloused hands come out for lunch, and I’d wonder why they got paid two or three times what I did for work that was so much easier (and which, of course, I could do, even if I didn’t have a BA.) At the end of the day they might be stressed, but I’d go home physically exhausted from hard labor and so would my co-workers.

Of course, I got out of that. I’d say “I went back to university”, but even though that’s true, it’s not what got me out, since I never finished my BA. Instead what got me out is that I finally got a couple chances to prove what I could do—I got a temp job in an office, and was one of their most productive workers (they measured it.) Later I got invited to blog, and hey, I can write, even if I don’t have a BA. I got lucky. Like most people who get lucky in work, that luck involved a lot of hard work, but it also involved luck.

But a lot of folks never get lucky despite the fact that they work hard. Perhaps they aren’t really all that bright (half the population, after all, is below average intelligence.) Perhaps they’ve got some personality issues or weak social skills. Perhaps there’s something not quite right in their brain chemisty. Or perhaps they just never catch a break because they aren’t lucky and their parents weren’t well enough positioned to help them get those breaks.

But still, most of them work hard and earn their money, whether it’s barely more than minimum wage or they did get a bit of luck and got one of the few remaining good blue collar jobs.

But when they look in the mirror, they know that the guy or gal looking in the mirror ten or twenty years from now is probably going to be doing the same thing. And they know that they’re one bad break away from losing even the little they have—one illness, one plant closure, one argument with their boss.

They don’t have a lot of hope for the future, except that it won’t get worse. The life they live now is the best it’s probably gonna get.

Living like that changes you. It makes you see people differently. You understand that there are a lot of bad jobs out there, and that someone’s going to be stuck with them. You know that most of those jobs are either hard or humiliating, and often both. You know that for too many people, a shitty job where they’re abused by their boss is as good as it gets.

If this depression and the "jobless recovery" has taught the educated underclass anything it is that connections and luck usually matter more than intelligence, hard work, and doing everything right to get into law school or even a top law school only to find yourself back in the same position you would have been in if you had dropped out of high school. Only now you have student loans so huge that it will take you the rest of your life to pay back.

This is especially painful to many of us who didn't come from a rich family. Maybe your mother was like the woman in Ian's post who moved to Toronto to find something better than a mininmum waged job. Or your parents struggled to pay the bills and the mortgage while putting aside money each month for your college fund. My mother bought used textbooks from the library so she could tutor me at home in addition to schoolwork. She always emphasized getting an education so that my life would be better than hers. Some of you might have had strict parents who forced you to take additional classes and extracurricular activities so you'd have an edge when applying to college.

Your parents or guardians did all of this because they held out hope that all of that hard work and education would someday pay off and you wouldn't have to struggle for the rest of your life or work in a demeaning and low-wage job. Hope for a better life for themselves but especially their children is what keeps most people going through the worst of times. Well, the light at the end of the tunnel has officially gone out and with it the hopes and dreams of millions of Americans who did everything right (emphasis mine):

Meeting 99ers is to tap into a deep well of anger at lives that have been knocked off course, shattering the enduring vision of the American dream that many had felt they had achieved. Just take Donna Faiella, a 53-year-old New Yorker who lives alone in Queens. She spent 28 years working in film post-production and video-editing. She was successful and had a career. Now she is desperate for a job, any job. But she cannot find one. "I will do anything. I will sweep floors. You think I look forward to collecting unemployment? It is fucking degrading," she said, almost quivering with anger.

Faiella is in dire trouble. Joblessness has eaten away at her sense of identity. "I feel like we are worthless. We are lost in the world. I don't know what to call myself. I don't have a title any more. What do we do? What do we do?" she implored. Faiella has one week of benefits to go. Then her 99 weeks will be up. She will have a title again. But not one she expected. She will be a 99er. "I am petrified. Do I become homeless?" she said, adding that she has begun making inquiries at local shelters.

Perhaps the most tragic is to see so many young Americans who have lost all hope and faith in a better future for themselves and for their children. It is tragic to see a generation who should be starting their lives having to move back home with nothing to give their parents - who may very well be struggling with unemployment or early retirement themselves - other than a worthless piece of paper that they and their parents had invested their entire lives to obtain.

I hope for our country's sake that someday we get a President who really had to struggle so they know what it is like to live on the edge with no money and no hope for the future. Someone who grew up on welfare and struggled to find a job during our generation's Great Depression will hopefully have at least a modicum of empathy to invest in job creation and finally end the total looting and destruction of this country by Wall Street and the student loan companies. I'm not holding my breath. Regardless, if or when we get out of mess, there will be inumerous casualties including many of our readers and scambloggers who are part of the Damned Generation.

Infographic by College Scholarships.org

Arranged Marriages Take Education Loans Into Consideration

This Times of India article made me laugh because so many of our readers have told us about their concerns with finding a mate or burdening their spouse with hundreds of thousands in student loan debt. Well, apparently we're not the only ones who worry about loans ruining our love life. Women in North India who have taken out education loans for an advanced degree are having issues finding a suitor who wants the responsibility of assisting in the payback of those loans.

The marriage market in North India has a new condition for brides-to-be – no education loan.

Shashikant (name changed), an advocate in the Allahabad High Court, was a trifle surprised when he was advised by his close friends not to play up the education loan taken for his daughter’s degree in dentistry while looking for a groom for her. But that’s how things are in the marriage market these days. Not only is a bride expected to be fair, convent-educated, English speaking and homely, she also has to be loan free. With parents increasingly turning to education loans to fund their children’s education, prospective in-laws are keen to know whether the bahu-to-be comes with the burden of paying off an education loan since an education loan has to be paid off by the student. So marriage alliances are dependent on the status of loan repayment – pay it off before tying the knot is the new demand coming from grooms’ families.

Sangeeta Bhattacharya, a graduate from Banaras Hindu University took an education loan to pursue her MBA from Pune. After the completion of her course, when her parents began looking for a match for her, questions about her education loan would invariably always crop up. “Almost all the guys would ask me about the status of the education loan. I was not offended since I believe that there should be transparency in matters of marriage,” she says.

Admitting to this trend is Kiran Chawla, who runs a franchise of a marriage bureau. “Education loans are figuring prominently in fixing matrimonial alliances these days. The most common query that comes from the boy’s family is whether an education loan has been taken by the girl or not and the clearing of the loan is the primary condition for a match to be arranged. The prospective in-laws are not ready to take the risk of paying the loan if it is still unpaid," she says. “While a well-educated girl is still sought after, that demand comes with a no-debt rider,” according to Chawla.

Let this be a lesson to students everywhere before you sign off on that student loan. Unless you want to die alone and penniless with your degree as your only accomplishment in life, think twice about how much money you will be able to pay back and how much you think your future spouse will tolerate. No one wants to marry - or have their son or daughter marry - into a situation where they are responsible for paying thousands of dollars in non-dischargeable debt.

Horror News Open Thread

Another day, another sign that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Let's start with the news that 300k teachers could be laid off this summer. Unlike overpaid law professors who fuck (literally) their students and contribute little to the well being of our society, teachers who work in primary, middle, and high schools are underpaid, overworked, yet are essential to an educated safe, and productive community. Schools in my area have already proposed 4-day school weeks and extended vacation. I expect the crime rate to skyrocket. When teenagers have nowhere to go because all of the schools and recreational facilities have been shut down, the only thing left to do is alcohol, drugs, sex, and loitering.

I've been putting off the BP Oil gusher spill because it's just too depressing beyond what we've all read and seen on the news and in photos. I recommend Naked Capitalism and Corrente for updated news and analysis of the cover-up story. Not only have wildlife and jobs been destroyed, but now there are reports that fishermen have become ill from BP's toxic chemicals while trying to clean up the spill.

More and more stories about sick fishermen are beginning to surface after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The fishermen are working out in the Gulf -- many of them all day, every day -- to clean up the spill. They said they blame their ailments on the chemicals that BP is using.

One fisherman said he felt like he was going to die over the weekend.

"I've been coughing up stuff," Gary Burris said. "Your lungs fill up."Burris, a longtime fisherman who has worked across the Gulf Coast, said he woke up Sunday night feeling drugged and disoriented."

It was like sniffing gasoline or something, and my ears are still popping," Burris said. "I'm coughing up stuff. I feel real weak, tingling feelings.

"Marine toxicologist Riki Ott said the chemicals used by BP can wreak havoc on a person's body and even lead to death."

The volatile, organic carbons, they act like a narcotic on the brain," Ott said. "At high concentrations, what we learned in Exxon Valdez from carcasses of harbor seals and sea otters, it actually fried the brain, (and there were) brain lesions."

Despite the environmental disaster in the Gulf, Shell continues to go forth with plans to drill on the Alaskan coast as early as July 1st.

Do you have additional doomsday news to report? This is an open thread. Legal and non-legal news welcomed.

Big City Living Is Expensive

Over the weekend I left Podunk for the first time in nearly a year to visit a friend, a PhD student, in the big city. I've lived in big cities before, New York and DC to name a few, but it is always a shock to my wallet when I leave for a while and come back to discover that while prices in Podunk remain relatively cheap, prices in the big city continue to skyrocket. I did a double take when I walked by a gas station and saw that regular gas was $3.29. Want a nice dinner that isn't fast food? It'll cost you as much as I spend per week on groceries in Podunk. Organic over processed and canned food? Don't even think about it. And who has money to afford gym membership in the city when you can't even afford a place that isn't infested with cockroaches or pay for books and school supplies?

At the end of two days, I had spent over $50 in the blink of an eye just to have lunch and dinner with friends. And this was me penny pinching, choosing not to have any alcohol and once having to eat in the park rather than have a sit down meal in the restaurant where I'd be obliged to give the waiter a tip. I chose to spend around $15 for the entire weekend taking the bus and subway rather than spending $15 on one cab ride. Angel has already written about her experience taking the bus and riding her bicycle as her way of commuting into Manhattan.

I was looking through Angel's posts from last year since I did not have a chance to read every single one. I came across this post about Angel's friend who lived off of PB&J sandwiches for years while making $100k/year in order to pay off his student loans:

I have a good friend that buckled down from the time he graduated (2004) until last year, and paid off his private loans. He's not done yet, of course. But he is close to it. In order for him to do this, he was frugal. He rarely/if ever went out to eat. He brought a PB&J sandwich to work daily. He did not engage in frivolous spending. I think his social life was somewhat limited by how much he was willing to spend, which was nothing. He didn't have a girlfriend during this stressful time. I know he went on dates, but I'm sure he was somewhat constrained on what he could do with any girl. Having fun costs money, right? He lived in a studio apartment with hand-me-down furniture. Ran instead of joining a gym. He collected cans from co-workers to recycle for cash. Wait... the kicker. This was all while he was earning $100K. That's how you pay back your student loans, folks. I'm very proud of him. I'm not sure that many people could make the same sacrifices. Afterall, he basically handed one biweekly paycheck a month over to the Lender.

I had the chance to meet up with another friend during my visit who was smart enough to only attend college. Nonetheless, she still lives at home with her parents while she pays off her student loans and works as someone's assistant for a little more than minimum wage. And these are considered the lucky people in this recession who have a job. These stories should be a warning to all the law school lemmings and high school or college students (and their parents) who believe everyone with an elite degree or graduate school education lives in Soho and shops at Whole Foods. I went to top schools only with the belief that it was my ticket out of Podunk and now I'm back to where I started and have turned into the Coupon Queen to save money on groceries. I still feel fortunate that I still have a place in Podunk to return where the cost of living is cheap enough that I can still eat healthy and nutritious foods without breaking the bank.

When I see the constant criticism of the poor and obese in our society on television, it really makes me wonder whether any of these critics have experienced anything close to poverty or being an indentured student with six figure debt. I highly doubt it. I've never been obese but I have put on weight since being unemployed. I've forced myself to go jogging at least several times each week to maintain my weight and I receive enough financial support from my family that I can afford to buy fruits and vegetables or the occasional salmon or tuna. But I also find myself eating more microwave dinners and fast food while I'm out to avoid spending too much at a sit down restaurant.

Going back to the big city and not being a full-time student or having a job really made me think about these issues on my way back to Podunk. What it is like to be poor in the city for the unemployed graduate, or someone like Angel's friend making a good salary but trying to pay off his law school debt, or the single parent making minimum wage. How is it possible to maintain a healthy and happy lifestyle let alone think about superficial things like their physical attractiveness when they have bills to pay, kids to feed, or are dealing with depression and unemployment. Instead of criticism and finger pointing, maybe the people in power should try to help these people find good paying jobs to buy healthy food and give them affordable education and health care that would allow them to live happy, active lives.

Is a Temp the New Perm?

My dear friend Ivy sent me that pic and I let out a little gasp.  Is this my future?

While Obama is covering my health insurance, I suppose I can live on the horribly methodic, brain dumbing work--but is this present slowly turning into my future?  I read the article in Businessweek and I felt no better.  Upon evaluation, it is clear that I am now a Disposable Worker.

A "Disposable Worker": "no health insurance, no retirement benefits, no sick days, no vacation, no severance, and no access to unemployment insurance."

When it's put that way, doc review sounds pretty horrible, doesn't it.  Yet, piles of attorneys are being fleeced from law firms every day and dumped into document review projects; where you are no longer a professional.  You are an hourly wage worker. If you don't work, you don't eat. If you get sick, you suffer financially as well as physically.

"You know American workers are in bad shape when a low-paying, no-benefits job is considered a sweet deal."

I have received two offers of employment since being let go.  Both were laughable.  So, I continue to click away at document review.  Temp attorneys are made fun of constantly, but facts are facts. I may not have vacation pay or stability.  But , with a semi-decent rate, I will make more as a temp attorney than I will at either of the companies/law firms that offered me a position.  The only advantage a low paying job offers is stability, and even that is questionable. ""When I hear people talk about temp vs. permanent jobs, I laugh," says Barry Asin, chief analyst at the Los Altos (Calif.) labor-analysis firm Staffing Industry Analysts. "The idea that any job is permanent has been well proven not to be true." As Kelly Services (KELYA) CEO Carl Camden puts it: "We're all temps now.""

And when is this likely to change?  Or will this be life from this point forward?
"The forecast for the next five to 10 years: more of the same, with paltry pay gains, worsening working conditions, and little job security. Right on up to the C-suite, more jobs will be freelance and temporary, and even seemingly permanent positions will be at greater risk."

This gives me pause. I find myself thankful to be in a large urban center that offers temporary placements.   I definitely consider myself lucky.  I've landed on my feet, for now.