'We Have Lost It All': The Shock Felt by Millions of Unemployed Americans (NYT)

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/us/coronavirus-unemployed.html

‘We Have Lost It All’: The Shock Felt by Millions of Unemployed Americans
By Sabrina Tavernise, Audra D. S. Burch, Sarah Mervosh and Campbell Robertson
Published March 27, 2020

WASHINGTON — So much has changed so quickly for Joseph Palma that he barely recognizes his life.

On Tuesday last week, he was going to work, helping passengers in the customs area of the Miami airport. The next day, he was laid off without severance or benefits. Five days later, he moved back in with his 59-year-old mother, loading his bed and his clothes into the back of his friend’s pickup truck.

Now he is staring at his bank account — totaling about $3,100 — and waiting on hold for hours at a time with the unemployment office, while cursing at its crashing website.

“I’m feeling scared,” said Mr. Palma, who is 41 and nervous about the $15,000 in medical debt he has from two recent hospital stays. “I don’t know what’s the ending. But I know I’m not in good shape.”

For the millions of Americans who found themselves without a job in recent weeks, the sharp and painful change brought a profound sense of disorientation. They were going about their lives, bartending, cleaning, managing events, waiting tables, loading luggage and teaching yoga. And then suddenly they were in free fall, grabbing at any financial help they could find, which in many states this week remained locked away behind crashing websites and overloaded phone lines.

“Everything has changed in a matter of minutes — seconds,” said Tamara Holtey, 29, an accountant for an industrial services company in the Houston area, who was on a cruise to Cozumel, Mexico, as the coronavirus outbreak intensified in the United States and was laid off on her second day back at work.

Now she spends her days applying for jobs online from her home in Alvin, Texas, while she and her wife weigh whether to delay paying their mortgage for a month or two — only to have to pay more in interest.

“It’s just a constant thought in my head: Am I going to lose my house? Am I going to lose everything?” she said. They had been talking about starting to have children, but “that’s on pause now.”

In 17 interviews with people in eight states across the country, Americans who lost their jobs said they were in shock and struggling to grasp the magnitude of the economy’s shutdown, an attempt to slow the spread of the virus. Unlike the last economic earthquake, the financial crisis of 2008, this time there was no getting back out there to look for work, not when people were being told to stay inside. What is more, the layoffs affected not just them, but their spouses, their parents, their siblings and their roommates — even their bosses.

[BeckyDem]

1. I read of a New Jersey family where the entire family is infected with the virus.

The father has died.

[underpants]

2. I feel so much empathy for them. And there's a lot of them.

We went for a drive yesterday and the "essential business" thing really hit me. Everything is shut down. Sitting in our house you just don't "get" it. We went to a big fancy mall that usually has no good parking spots anywhere near the entrances ALL DAY LONG. The running joke is for those of us who, say, go to a business lunch during the day "Who ARE all these people? What do they DO?"
The parking lot was vacant. A few cars - there are restaurants there - maybe the maintenance crews but that was it. A ghost town.

We know all the numbers on how many people live paycheck to paycheck or less. Can't afford a sudden $400 expense. I've been there. We've been there. When my daughter was really young we had this one period where we were Bbbbbroke! The weather wasn't right to go to a park or the river so we went to a Bass Pro Shop. My daughter was amazed at the fish tank. It killed some time and we had a good time.

My wife and I are lucky. We are still working - teleworking - and that looks to continue. I can't see either of us being laid off (especially not her) or furloughed.

Those of us making jokes about spending time at home, Look it's something we have in common and it's truly bizarre, don't get that this is going to be the ruin of many people and many businesses that employ them. Restaurants and stores will re-open but that's a ways down the road.

[Loge23]

3. It's only just beginning.

The loss of lives should rightly be the focus of this disaster, but we also need to be mindful of the economic toll which will be will be massive.
Millions of small businesses - so-called Mom & Pops - will be lost along with, for many of them, their entire assets. It's no secret in America that proprietors of these small businesses run just about everything through their businesses. Even larger concerns will be significantly down-sized if they survive at all.
Yes, corporations have themselves to blame for piling on debt, buying back their shares, and obscenely rewarding their executives at the expense of their non-union workforce, but here we are nonetheless.
Then there's the employees. It's also no secret that many of the jobs in the pre-virus economy were low-paying jobs. The OP example clearly describes one such person in this situation. These folks have to eat, to stay in their residences, to raise their families.
It's difficult to see how civil unrest will not follow the health emergency, or even accompany it.

[dalton99a]

4. +1. And consumer spending accounts for 70 percent of U.S. economic activity

[customerserviceguy]

5. Look for a spike

in filed bankruptcies in the coming months. That may be Joseph Palma's only economic salvation.