Nina Easton writes on economic topics in Fortune Magazine. Seldom have I read as
wrongheaded an understanding of the unemployed in our country than her recent
article, "Time to Get Creative About Helping the Unemployed Back Into The
Job Market" (Fortune, Feb. 3, 2014). If she had cited some
ideas about helping unemployed people, I wouldn't have an issue with what she
wrote. But she offers nothing creative or helpful. Instead, she cites
statistics that are supposed to convince us that people who get food stamps and
disability checks actually are healthy people who are lazy, who could find
employment but choose not to. Since anything can be "proved" with
statistics, I'm not going to argue with her claims. Instead I want to talk
about what the poor and unemployed really are facing.
People on disability are not faking it. They have been broken by years
of working physically damaging jobs, by factory accidents, and by chronic
illness. Some of them can still walk without a cane, but most of them are
not in any shape to work at any job. They're in constant pain, they're on
medications that fuzz their brains, and they often can't see well enough to
drive. The young ones have very obvious mental incapacity; if they are able to
work, they do work in sheltered workshops. But they can't be expected to count your
change at a Sheetz, and Walmart has eliminated greeters. These people as a
group also lack education, which means they are unlikely to qualify for many
jobs. Then the reality is that employers today very rarely make any
accommodations for people with disabilities, despite the laws in place that are
meant to help such people. Why should a chain restaurant hire a middle-aged
server who has trouble walking when it can hire a healthy teenager or young
adult? Why should a discount store hire a mentally challenged person who can't
speak intelligibly and can't comprehend the employer's list of duties when
there is a college graduate begging for the same job? In an economy in which
the best and the brightest of our young generation are struggling even to find minimum
wage work because there aren't good jobs for so many people, it does not matter
whether the least educated and least healthy among us are trying to get jobs or
not. They lose out because their competition is younger and more agile.
Regarding food stamps, I don't like when well-fed
individuals begrudge hungry people a meal, which is what cutting down or
cutting off food stamps does. How does it hurt me if someone else eats? It
doesn't. People who get food stamps use government money to buy food, which in
turn supports many other businesses and means there are more grocery store jobs
and trucking jobs--and farmers' crops don't go to waste. No one loses if people
eat. If the argument is that an unemployed or underemployed person probably
could pay for food, the reality is that if a person meets the government's
rules for qualifying for food stamps, money is scarce. The money that has to be
spent on food then can't go for rent, or for a car repair that could make it
possible to get to a job. Food stamps also help keep children from starving,
which is a noble cause. Food stamps are good. We should keep this program going
until no one in America
is hungry.
What about disability checks? Easton
indignantly cites Lexington-Herald
writer John Cheves' claim that disability checks yield "as much as $710 a
month per person." That might sound like a fortune to an eight-year-old,
but is a mere $8,520 a year. I defy anyone to loll in the lap of
luxury on so little income. It divides out to $4.09 per hour if there is a
40-hour-a-week job available. Who can live on $4 an hour?
So how do the unemployed in our country survive? They live
with relatives and friends, or they rent tiny apartments or government price-supported
housing. Mostly, they depend on a personal
support system. People who move in search of work from a chronically depressed
town whose factories have fled lose the very support system that sustains them,
which is why they mostly do not move. Even supposing there are many jobs for
which they qualify, we have plenty of statistics and history books to tell us
just how miserable people are when they follow good jobs and end up living far
from family and home. Remember the excesses of the Gold Rush? Rampant crime.
Brothels. Suicide. Back when Detroit
was a powerhouse, Bobby Bare had a popular hit with "Detroit City," a song about the
loneliness of moving there to work one of those good factory jobs. The most
telling phrase was, "I wanna go home."
In an increasingly connected world thanks to the Internet,
it should be possible eventually for unemployed people living in depressed
coal-mining towns in West Virginia
to do work from home. Even low-skilled customer service representative work. What
is the advantage to this? Why shouldn't they all move to city slums? The social
fabric is not destroyed when people don't have to abandon their personal
support systems to work. The result is less crime. More money is saved when
people live in families, and if money is saved, more education dollars and discretionary
dollars are available. It becomes possible to start a business, because there
is seed money for it and other people in the area are employed also and thus
have money to spend. That's my idea: The Internet is going to save us all.
Maybe I'm right and maybe I'm wrong, but meanwhile, considering all the stupid
ways our government wastes money, I'm okay with helping unemployed,
underemployed, and disabled people keep up a basic standard of living. This is
a rich country and we should spread the wealth to our people as they need it.
