The death of the american worker

[blues90]

I can't speak for anyone here other than myself and a few friends and relatives .

I have to say it does not look very good and this is in calif and illinois that I refer to . My older sister had an enjoyable job that she had for many years and did well , now through less and less commissions and the selling of the company to another she is barely able to pay the bills . Her husband had a landscaping self employed business but now he can't meet the low price of the competition , he got scammed by an insurance training position that said they paid all but this turned out not to be the case , He found a shit job in a gum factory in rockford and was fired because some 150 pound tray of gum slide and he had to shut the machine down so he was fired for this , can't imagine what he was expected to do really .

A long time friend of mine works as a painter and each year he has less and less work and more low paid competition , he is self employed as well and now is going through the long process of bankrupt filing . He rents a room to stay under a roof .

I being in southern calif haven't been able to find one real job that pays enough to afford the gas to get there and back and leave enough to even be a help with paying bills , maybe I could keep the electric on and have internet service and pay half the high rent .

This is not only depressing it's disheartening , you reach a point where you feel trapped with no way out no matter what your experience is , you are over qualified or need to retrain and begin at the bottom with a little more than minimum wage and a great crack to your overall moral . I can't see how it is possible to put your self worth right in the trash and still maintain the momentum to have the will to get up in the morning .

My wife and I have considered moving out of the country to hope it is better somewhere else or find a small trailer to live in and hopefully pay little land space rent at some dump on the fringe of horror town and get a gun to play it somewhat safe .

This is not america , this is a bombed out shell of a country with no promise delusional or real left in it's very fiber .

I wonder just how long it will be before thousands of people find themselves broke and homes foreclosed and empty apartments that no one can afford . It will look like Flint Michigan most everywhere . I really wonder how much longer it will take before the Masses find the same as many already have .

[Blue_Tires]

1. well said

i've been having employment problems of my own

[TomInTib]

2. You have plenty of company, blues90. Unfortunately, your collective

voices have no ready forum.

I travel a lot and talk to many, many people. The depth of suffering out there is staggering.

Although I cannot imagine how it could get much worse, I am sure it will.

Good luck, man.

[TwentyFive]

3. Go to census.gov - poverty up every year Bush has been in office

The Middle class is shrinking. If you look at the numbers, poverty was cut in half from '93-'01...but has increased every year since. Visit census.gov or your library and look up the numbers yourself.

I find less work too, and then there is more competition, so you get less. As manufacturing jobs are lost, those people have to go somewhere. Good luck to you!

[Pugee]

4. Well said

My job ends Friday and there is almost nothing within 50 miles (well, 1 job) that is comparable in pay and benefits. Scary:scared:

[xmas74]

5. Six years ago I became a single mother.

I thought I could handle it alone because I had a decent paying job for my area. I had good benefits to support a child-cheap health, dental and vision insurance; good vacation and sick time; paid holidays. I owned nothing, not even a car payment. I had money in the bank and was hoping to add a bit more for a down payment on a small 2 bedroom fixerupper. I thought things looked good for me and my newborn daughter.

In the past six years the economy has tanked and I've struggled to make ends meet. I lost my job (place closed down) and have lost a few jobs inbetween (sick child, not enough hours at work, etc.) I quickly went through all of my savings. I now work at a job where I make less than half of what I did six years ago and I'm stuck as a thirtysomething living back at home with my parents.

During this time I've suffered from severe bouts of depression where I wanted to end it all, thinking that my daughter would be better off if I were dead. At least I had family to take care of her and they would receive my social security and maybe some state assistance for her. I desperately needed medication and therapy but no longer had any insurance for either so I went without, just trying to keep my head up one day at a time. I know the main reason for the depression was because of the economy. I just felt like less of a person because I couldn't keep my own child from living in poverty.

I know I'm not the only one but I still have days that I have these thoughts. And you are absolutely right-soon this country will be a shell. The middle class have taken more hits than anyone. How much longer can this go on?

[aikoaiko]

6. Good luck finding a decent paying job

...but unemployment is still relatively low at 4.7ish%. Its true that that includes a lot of low paying service jobs, but technical skills are in still in big demand. Still, I'd rather be a worker now than in the early 80s when 10% of us were looking for work.

I don't know what your skill set is, but technial colleges are cheap and fast ways to get into fields that often have good benefits and long-term demand.

[acmejack]

9. That 4.7% number is bullshit!

They play so many games with their numbers, they have no validity whatsoever. Unemployment is much higher than that, there is a huge contingent in that "discouraged no longer looking for work" category or at least around here there are. I am on disability but I entertain notions of returning to the workforce. I have floated hundreds (literally) pf resumes and received one response, for an awful road warrior commission position with a shaky start up that I wouldn't have touched with a ten foot pole.

It is not good out here at all. The only people doing really well it seems, are the lawyers and process servers.

[aikoaiko]

10. True unemployment figures are relative - there are many how have given up

I'm sorry its so tough out there for you. I wish you well.

the hopelessly unemployed (i.e., those that have stopped looking) are very difficult to track.

[rwenos]

7. Something Big is Happening

I'm a professional myself, and took a job working for a fellow professional (lawyer), who expected me to take no breaks from my desk, dial the phone a certain number of times an hour, work 11 hours a day, who interrupted every sentence I uttered to shout contradictions, and who refused to give me unpaid time off to cover some old court appearances which had been set months ago. (Lawyers have an ethical obligation not to abandon their clients just before trial.)

I told the guy, "I have to take those three days off, it's a professional obligation."

He screamed, "I don't care. Show up for work or you're fired."

I worked on that job eight days, and resigned.

Employers nowadays think they own you. It's a Bush-era thing, I guess. Kinda like slavery, eh?

[blues90]

8. i can't even imagine

Someone like my brother in-law being able to get up the energy to work in a gum factory , not that I am above people who work in factories , i worked in plenty of them when I was younger , some real horrible places where by 10 am you swore it was the end of the day . It took alot of strength for him to take that job . For me at this time i think I would step out in front of a bus . i can't imagine why they would feel the need to pile 150 pounds of gum on a tray 6 feet off the floor either .

I found one job , a possible in a small cabinet shop , tomarrow i get to find out what they pay , it's where i would be a sub contractor , i have no idea how this works if I work there in their small shop . i would prefer if possible to do the work in this garage that I have as part of my apartment , this way my wife can be included and feel like she is once again viable in some way , she has not worked for 15 years due to longterm anxiety . It is brutal for her to sit indoors while I work , she gets very depressed and this weights on me as well .

It's just turned into one huge nightmare in the last two years .

[PsN2Wind]

11. When jobs are exported

and labor is imported to fill many of the jobs that couldn't be exported, someone is going to take a helluva hit. That hit has been to many that were formally, or are now struggling to stay, in the middle class. Welcome to the new two-tiered U.S.A brought to you by Republicans and Democrats via NAFTA, WTO, et al.