Down the Up Escalator

by Barbara Garson

  You couldn’t miss the Ponzi-ish smell. If I don’t have $10 this year and my wages aren’t going up, how will I have $15 next year to pay you back with interest? Take out more loans? By the late 1990s it was obvious to anyone but a central banker that this couldn’t go on much longer.

  If it sounds as if I’m flaunting my own economic prescience, let me state for the record that while I shook my head over student loans, leveraged buyouts, dot-com stocks, and credit card debt, I did not predict that the ultimate Ponzi scheme of the era would involve selling, securitizing, and betting against home loans made to Americans who couldn’t afford houses.

  All I knew was that the United States is a consumer economy. But instead of sharing the productivity growth of the last forty years with our consumers, we divided it so unequally that most of the new wealth went to 1 percent, leaving the other 99 percent, including Duane, too poor to keep buying what they produce. Eventually, it caught up with us.

  Yet once I started talking to victims of the Great Recession, I noticed something odd. “Poor” Americans are surprisingly rich. The breadlines of 1929 have been staved off by unemployment insurance. The two-income family, though it may have been a response to declining wages, is another form of unemployment insurance. Most people who are out of work not only eat but stop for take-out coffee. Not a single one of the long-term unemployed you’re about to meet carried a thermos.

  I’m aware, of course, that over 15 percent of the U.S. population lives below the official poverty line and that a sizable number face what we now call food insecurity. But I began this study by contacting people who had lost a job, a home, or savings in the Great Recession. That means they had one or more of those “middle-class” accoutrements to begin with.

  A couple of people I talked with began to suspect, in the very course of our conversations, that they may “recover” from the recession by landing in a different socioeconomic class. Some have distressing ways of coping with their insecurity. But you’ll also meet people with a real talent for snatching moments of pleasure and creating reassuring small routines, even when they can’t be sure of larger patterns like where they’ll work the next month or, in a couple of cases, where they’ll sleep the next night.

  As I talked with people who’ve lost jobs, homes, and savings, I couldn’t help wondering what shape they and the country will be in after we fully emerge from the downturn. I think there are enough clues in their individual histories for us to make some good guesses by the time we’re finished.

  In the meantime, I’ve tried to leave these recession vignettes open-ended enough for you to glimpse a lot that’s contradictory or irrelevant to my economic notions. That may be the best reason to travel along with me and see how specific, unique Americans cope with the Great Recession.

  * These figures come from Professor Richard D. Wolff, who made this point in his monthly lecture series, Update on the State of Global Capitalism, delivered at the Brecht Forum in New York City. The lectures can be viewed online at brechtforum.org.

  † These statistics were collected for me by Doug Henwood, editor of the Left Business Observer. Henwood adds, with his characteristic fairness, that if you count fringe benefits, which were pushed up primarily by the rising cost of medical insurance, then the average employer’s full hourly labor bill went up by almost half (49 percent) between 1971 and 2007. While costly to employers, that money didn’t go to workers in a form they could spend, nor did it generally increase their standards of living. So to be totally fair if inelegant, we might say that between 1971 and 2007 productivity gains were twenty-five times hourly wage gains and two times wage-plus-benefits gains. Either figure is a radical break from the historic U.S. tradition of far more evenly shared productivity gains.

  I: OUR JOBS

  Chapter One

  THE PINK SLIP CLUB

  April 2009

  Did you ever wonder how Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer of Seinfeld manage to pay Manhattan rents with those flaky jobs of theirs?

  I met a group of four single New Yorkers who had worked at unglamorous office jobs and devoted their incomes—one earned $48,000 a year, one earned $52,000, and I’m guessing that the others earned around the same (they didn’t say)—to maintaining themselves, supporting their church, and experiencing the city.

  Even before they lost their jobs, the four friends were constantly in and out of Geraldine’s, or Gerri’s, condominium near Lincoln Center. When Gerri mentioned to the congregation that she was now unemployed, her friend Elaine, who’d already been out of work for two months, said, “We ought to start a Pink Slip Club.”

  The idea was to keep each other’s spirits up and to enjoy inexpensive outings around the city. “We might as well make something positive out of having free time during the day—while it lasts,” Elaine had said optimistically.

  In the first couple of weeks they’d gone to a museum and to an afternoon concert, and Elaine had come over to Gerri’s to play Scrabble.

  “Let’s do it again,” Gerri said.

  “It was fun,” Elaine agreed. “But it felt strange in the middle of the day.”

  Our Elaine is tall, blond, and more overtly glamorous than her Seinfeld namesake. Like Seinfeld’s Elaine, she can be a bit prickly, but that’s only when she senses disapproval or misunderstanding of her intentions. And unlike Seinfeld’s Elaine, she’s spontaneously generous. The job she lost involved processing accounts payable for a broadcasting conglomerate.

  Gerri is short, dark, and quiet. When she speaks, it’s often to encourage others to express what they mean more fully or to point out the basic agreement that underlies seeming differences. I could tell how good she makes others feel by the way the doorman smiled when I asked for her and how he sang into the intercom, “Gerri, you have company.” For over twenty years Gerri had worked as an insurance adjuster at an office a short walk from her apartment.

  Gerri and Elaine are suitable names for the two women, but it would raise constant misleading mental images to call the men George and Kramer. So I’m going to call them Kevin and Feldman from the Seinfeld episode where Elaine starts hanging out with three alternate buddies who turn out to be just too nice for her. It won’t throw you far off if you think of the Pink Slip men as agreeable Seinfeld avatars.

  Kevin is slim, well-groomed, and precise. He frequently restates what the others say with just a small editorial tweak. Perhaps that’s because I’m there and he wants to make sure that the historical record is correct. But it may also be because Kevin was an editor at a trade journal. Despite the tendency to edit his friends, he’s attentive to them in matters like holding doors, locating things they’ve carelessly set down, collecting information they can use, offering refreshments around, and similar thoughtfulness.

  Feldman, the second Pink Slip Club male, is a solidly built guy who practices kung fu, rides a motorcycle, plays in a drumming circle, and has a tendency to take the last two cookies on the plate. (But he’ll put one back if he notices.) Feldman did graphics—text layout—at a textbook company.

  Before we met, Gerri had told me on the phone about the day she lost her job. “I was paralyzed. Or not paralyzed but jelly, because somehow I could move. I got my stuff together like a zombie. Six other people in our department got laid off that day, so I know it wasn’t me. But it’s like a divorce. You see your co-workers as much as your family. More, because the whole time in the office you’re pretty much awake; a big part of the time at home you’re asleep.”

  A colleague from another department called to ask Gerri out for dinner that evening. “She does that every time one of her friends gets laid off.” I have since met the woman, and she reports that Gerri appeared to move through the rest of the day with her usual quiet purposefulness. But that’s not how it felt to the victim.

  “For the next three days I had migraine headaches. Then I got a cold. It had to be from the stress. I’m slowly pulling out of it. I’m getting my résumé together.”

  Our phone conversat
ion took place less than two weeks after the blow. Despite apologies that she was still sleepwalking, Gerri e-mailed her Pink Slip Club comrades and got back to me with a meeting date for early the next week. By the time I met her in person, a plan of action was taking shape.

  Gerri is active in a national civic organization whose name you’d almost certainly recognize. The New York chapter is large enough to have a local president paid $50,000. That’s only a couple of thousand less than Gerri’s salary as an insurance adjuster, and Gerri had thought about pursuing it in the past. But despite encouragement from other members of the board of directors, she’d always hesitated to quit a permanent job for one that would only last one or two years. Besides, the local presidency isn’t available for the asking; you have to run. But now, she says, “I’m unemployed, I might as well go for it. Maybe the Goddess is telling me this happened to me for a reason.” (The four Pink Slip Club members happen to be Wiccans and their congregation a coven. Hence, the “Goddess.”)

  We had a few minutes to talk about the idea before the others arrived.

  Elaine came to Gerri’s place straight from visiting a friend in Queens who’d lost her job in the same round of cuts at the broadcasting company.

  “We worked in different buildings, so first we told each other our stories, then we had lunch in this wonderful Greek restaurant. It was crowded, but from the talk I heard, nobody was having a business lunch. I wondered, what do all these people do? It’s like they’re on a holiday in Florida. My friend was going to have a pedicure afterward. ‘Bring a book, just read and sit there and have a pedicure.’ She said we’ll do that together next time I go out there. Just relax and have a pedicure.”

  “You just have to treat yourself every now and then when you’re on unemployment,” Gerri said approvingly.

  “And she’s going to Yellowstone next week. She’s always wanted to go to Yellowstone.”

  I wrecked Elaine’s mood by asking her to describe what happened on the day she was fired.

  “The word is not ‘fired’!”

  “I’m sorry, I just meant …”

  “Someone is fired when they do something bad. I was laid off because they found a computer program to do the invoicing.”

  I apologized, stammering that to me a layoff meant something temporary, like a seasonal layoff at a factory. If they weren’t going to call you back, then “layoff” was a euphemism.

  Feldman explained the term’s functional significance for him. “ ‘Laid off’ means you can still collect your severance and unemployment. You didn’t get fired for cause.”

  Though still annoyed, Elaine brought herself back to that day. “We got an e-mail that morning from the head of the whole company saying there were going to be some changes and layoffs. As soon as I finished reading that e-mail, we got one from the head of X [one of their big stations] saying, ‘Oh, it’s hard to say good-bye to people.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, shut up!’ Then my phone rang, and the division head’s assistant said, ‘Les wants to see you in the office in five minutes.’ And I knew what it was.

  “When I got to his office, he was just getting there, and I said, ‘Oh, am I the first?’ And he said, ‘You know it’s not performance, Elaine.’ He was just being so condescending.

  “I said, ‘I know it’s not performance. I don’t need to hear it.’ ”

  Les asked Elaine to stay on for several weeks because the new computer system wasn’t up yet. “ ‘Your final day will be February 27 … We know you’ll be professional to the very …’

  “I said, ‘I’ll just go and talk to HR.’ I didn’t let him finish.”

  In HR, Elaine saw the woman assigned to present each person’s severance package and to make sure that everyone eventually signed a release freeing the company from any further obligation. “She said if I wanted to, I could take the rest of the day off.

  “I said, ‘I can’t do that! This is the day we’re closing the month and the year for payrolls. [It was the beginning of December.] I have work to do!’ Later I told her, ‘I’ll take tomorrow and Friday off.’ Friday would count as one of my entitled free days, so it wouldn’t come out of my severance package.

  “Of course I was going to remain professional till the end. There are people I worked with who need answers from me to get their jobs done. That’s what I was there for. It’s not their fault.” Elaine was proud that throughout nine years of mergers, buyouts, and other corporate discombobulations, she had kept those paychecks coming to the network’s celebrities, behind-the-camera employees, and vendors.

  Elaine continued the story to the final moments of her final day when someone from human resources came down with her severance agreement.

  “She said, ‘Do you want to sign it right here?’ I said no.” (Elaine knew that she had forty-five days to get the agreement back to the company and had already hired a lawyer to look at it.)

  “I asked, ‘Do I have to go see anybody else before I leave?’ She said, ‘Nobody’s going to walk you out.’ So I went up to the shredder, I took my ID, I put it in the shredder, and then I walked out the door. It was a fairly nice day out. That night I went to the ballet and had a nice time.”

  Isolated details from the moment of being fired (or laid off) have a way of becoming embedded in our minds. (Some wounded soldiers remember the bullet approaching in agonizing slow motion.) Fortunately, most of us soon encapsulate or neutralize the painful details by arranging them into a story that protects our dignity.

  Elaine’s story shows her to be loyal to her colleagues and to her professional duties while treating the corporate types with the caustic but dignified disdain they deserved. As an added fillip, she enjoyed herself at the ballet that night. Not only that, but “the first day I wasn’t working it was a really big snowstorm and I was just delighted that I didn’t have to go anywhere.” I guess we know whose side the gods are on.

  Kevin’s integrity had come into play years before his actual layoff from a finance-related professional organization, and that’s where he started his account when I asked what happened.

  “With the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, our members had a lot to learn and relearn. At that point the editor in chief [Kevin worked on the organization’s journal], who started around the same time that I did, realized that we could not only provide information on the new rules to our members; we could become the voice of our industry speaking to the regulators and standard setters in Washington, D.C. He was very much a visionary.”

  According to Kevin, the publication did, indeed, gain stature. But eventually the editor moved on. “It took me a while to realize that the new editor was not a visionary. The only question for her was how to maintain the status quo. So I found another position within the organization. But when the economic downturn came, several people were let go. I had kind of lost respect for the organization on account of the magazine becoming so status quo. I have no regrets really.”

  In Kevin’s story, professional integrity dictated that he transfer from a secure position to one where he had insufficient seniority. This is as close as he got to describing the painful moment to me. But he liked to talk about the adventuresome decade before.

  Ten years earlier Kevin had sold his house in Chicago, moved to New York without a job, and bought an apartment on Christopher Street. “I remade myself,” he said.

  In New York he volunteered on weekends for a charity venture that raises considerable money for people with AIDS and for the homeless. Now he’d added a weekday shift. “I made a conscious decision to volunteer more because it would give me more of a structure and sense of purpose.

  “I’m economical.” (Kevin’s friends confirmed that with fond laughs.) “I’m collecting unemployment. I probably have enough savings to survive until I start collecting Social Security. So I don’t have the urgency that Feldman has. But in some ways I wish I did because … the older I get the harder it’s going to be to find another job. I almost wouldn’t mind feeling a little more anxious. My biggest fear is th
at this will turn into, you know, the beginning of my retirement. I don’t want that.” Kevin is fifty-four.

  I hadn’t yet asked these four unemployed New Yorkers how they were supporting themselves. But it didn’t seem to be an immediate concern to anyone except Feldman.

  When he got out of college, Feldman had a girlfriend who acted as a subcontractor, hiring freelancers to do graphics for textbooks and magazines. As a recent and unemployed grad, Feldman hung around her apartment and noticed that she could never find enough reliable, skilled hands. He decided that he would master the craft. He even paid her for a few lessons on the most advanced programs.

  Feldman soon had all the work he needed. In fact, his first job was a marathon of twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. “I went from earning nothing to making thirty grand in three months. It’s the most I ever earned in that industry.” All Feldman wanted was enough work to support himself, his rent-stabilized apartment in Inwood in northern Manhattan, and his motorcycle and his hobbies.

  Over the years jobs got a bit scarcer, and Feldman sometimes had to take $25 an hour instead of $30. The more distressing development was that contractors took to paying freelancers forty-five, sixty, or even ninety days after the work was delivered. If they went out of business or if a client defaulted (and those things seemed to be happening more and more often), they “stiffed the guy at the bottom of the totem pole,” Feldman said.

  “Yes, there’s a lot of freelancers getting stiffed,” Kevin confirmed.

  “Sorry, our client didn’t pay us, so we can’t pay you—boo-hoo-hoo,” Feldman japed. “One time it made me so angry that I went up to the office, and I didn’t physically threaten the guy in charge, but I did intimidate. And of all the people who got paid, I wound up getting paid first.”

  After thirteen years as a freelancer, “I couldn’t take the insecurity anymore,” Feldman confessed.