Transcript of "The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences"

[UpInArms]

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=7488

excerpt:

Chanda: And so, how did this happen? This is the kind of mystery.

Uchitelle: It’s still a mystery to me, as much as I’ve explained it. But the paradigm shift included going from a society in which we thought of ourselves as a community if you will, everyone in it for everyone else, to this individualism which has always been a strain in American society, which got out of hand. I think that it became very convenient to blame workers for their own layoffs. We got to the point where we said, “Look, we have to lay you off because you’re not worth what we’re paying you.” A tremendous psychologically damaging blow to people. And then we said the solution is training and education and you’ll qualify for the good jobs out there. There weren’t enough good jobs out there so you’re blamed again for not enough training, not moving around, not being flexible enough. Very convenient for the Republicans and the Democrats – they didn’t have to come up with policies that might challenge the layoffs, and challenge what was going on. Very convenient of course for the CEOs. They were absolved of responsibility.

But we did not measure the social damage. We used to measure in this country all sorts of social damage. And we didn’t measure, for example, the psychological damage from being told that you don’t have value. I was amazed doing this book, you know a journalist goes out and interviews somebody for a daily story, or for a story that’s done after a month’s research, and you don’t get deeply into the lives of these people until you do a book, and then you really become involved tracking families. And I only used in the book some of the people that I got to know over the years. I never thought I would be so drawn into the psychiatric aspects of layoff. I’m not talking unemployment, unemployment is a separate issue.

Chanda: Right.

Uchitelle: Just this traumatic statement that you don’t have a place in society, in the workplace. In a society where people’s identity is very much wrapped up in the workplace among other forms of identity – family, community, so forth. The workplace is very important. So here you’re doing this damage, and I went to psychiatry, they said “Yes, we run across it all the time in therapy, and we are undermining public health.” In fact I’m going to make this point to a psychiatric convention in less than a month, and we’re not putting a warning label on it. There’s something wrong. Well, we have to measure that. If we’re not going to measure that, then we’re not going to put some sort of brakes on layoffs. Again, I do not want to say that we can stop the layoffs, but I do think that if we measured the damage we would begin to say, “Well, is there a way to lay off five people instead of ten. Are there ways to make people feel better if we lay them off? Are there social ways to deal with this problem?”

<snip>

Uchitelle: And Wal-Mart made a big, big advertising campaign out of how they purchased only American goods until CBS or one of the networks came along and just went shopping in the store and found that most of it was made abroad. But Wal-Mart doesn’t even think about a thing like that anymore. So on the margin, chipping away, jobs were lost. I’m not going to say they were lost for a bad reason, but there was that resistance, that sense of “certain things should stay home.” Dissipated.

...worth reading in its entirety...

[EVDebs]

1. College kids should read this in conjunction with Strapped by Tamara Draut

Strapped
http://www.demos.org/pub663.cfm

also Young and Uninsured
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/052406HB.shtml

[area51]

2. Great interview.

This is an important issue. It certainly feeds into the problems we have in this country of lack of affordable healthcare, lack of jobs, & overpopulation.