The Tolls of Uncertainty

How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America

Sarah Damaske

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691219318
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Sociology

An indispensable investigation into the American unemployment system and the ways gender and class affect the lives of those looking for work Through the intimate stories of those seeking work, The Tolls of Uncertainty offers a startling look at the nation's unemployment system—who it helps, who it hurts, and what, if anything, we can do to make it fair. Drawing on interviews with one hundred men and women who have lost jobs across Pennsylvania, Sarah Damaske examines the ways unemployment shapes families, finances, health, and the job hunt. Damaske demonstrates that commonly held views of unemployment are either incomplete or just plain wrong. Shaped by a person's gender and class, unemployment generates new inequalities that cast uncertainties on the search for work and on life chances beyond the world of work, threatening opportunity in America.Following in depth the lives of four individuals over the course of their unemployment experiences, Damaske offers insights into how the unemployed perceive their relationship to work. She reveals the high levels of blame that women who have lost jobs place on themselves, leading them to put their families' needs above their own, sacrifice their health, and take on more tasks inside the home. This "guilt gap" illustrates how unemployment all too often exacerbates existing differences between men and women. Class privilege, too, gives some an advantage, while leaving others at the mercy of an underfunded unemployment system. Middle-class men are generally able to create the time and space to search for good work, but many others are bogged down by the challenges of poverty-level unemployment benefits and family pressures and fall further behind.Timely and engaging, The Tolls of Uncertainty posits that a new path must be taken if the nation's unemployed are to find real relief.

PART I

Losing a Job

1

Job Loss in the Twenty-First Century

WHEN I STARTED work on this project in 2012, the Great Recession was only recently in our rearview mirror, and I had no idea that the decade that lay ahead would be one of unprecedented economic growth. The stock market recorded Wall Street’s longest-ever winning streak on Wednesday, August 22, 2018.¹ By December 2019, the unemployment rate was down to 3.5 percent, a level not seen in decades.² But it was also a decade in which, even as corporate profits boomed, millions of Americans lost their jobs, struggled with long-term unemployment, worked part-time because they couldn’t find full-time work, and gave up searching for work.³ Now, as I sit down to revise the final draft of this book, at the start of a new decade, we have entered into the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

What, then, does losing a job during good economic times have to teach us about unemployment at any time? As it turns out, quite a lot, because even during good economic times, our support systems were inadequate and the tolls of job loss and unemployment were both numerous and unequally shared. We need, now more than ever, to understand how our unemployment system shaped these experiences if we are to respond to the challenges that lie ahead.

Despite the large-scale closures during the Great Recession at the end of the first decade and the coronavirus pandemic at the start of the third decade, job loss during much of the twenty-first century looked different than it had in America in past generations. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, job losses were glaring and made the national news. They were sudden large-scale events that seemed like natural disasters—auto factories closed down, telecommunications giants merged, jobs went overseas. Today, layoffs have been built into most companies’ everyday practices.⁴ Instead of mass layoffs, we see smaller layoffs that respond to bad quarterly or annual reports rather than sustained downturns in the economy. Although recessions garner the most media coverage of job loss and unemployment, companies don’t wait for bad economic times to cut jobs or restructure their workforce. Instead, it has become commonplace to lay off portions of the workforce when the company needs to produce a short-term profit report.⁵ While recessions can cause a flood of layoffs, they are not needed for job loss to happen. In 2014 to 2016, when these interviews took place, job cuts were simply part of doing business in Pennsylvania.

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By 2014, Tracy had become a single mom of two kids and had worked at the same local restaurant waitressing for most of her life. She enjoyed the work more than the job she’d had at a local deli back in high school or the one she’d had after that as a cashier at a local market; she was sociable and liked chatting with customers. She laughed easily when we met, and I could see how she would have charmed both the locals in her small town and the truck drivers grabbing a bite as they passed through. Although Tracy had worked at the restaurant a long time and earned seniority there, management had cut her hours, which made it tough to support her family. In town, there had been many layoffs, and lately the truckers had also had lean years. It was a tough time to work at a job so dependent on the generosity of others. As a tipped wage worker, Tracy was paid a starting hourly wage below the federal minimum, and while management was legally obligated to match the difference if the tips didn’t, no one was around to enforce that law. Tracy had left her kids’ father because he was abusive, her dad had been ill and died shortly before we met, and her mom was barely getting by, so Tracy didn’t have anyone to rely on other than herself. But Tracy had expected to work when she was growing up and “always knew I had to take care of myself and my kids.”

When a manufacturing company came to town promising stable hours and an increase in pay, Tracy decided to make the change. She didn’t love her new job cutting speaker wires on the factory line. It was mundane, and the sociable Tracy found it boring to be doing “the same thing all day, every day.” She did appreciate the regular nine-to-five hours and Monday-to-Friday schedule. She also liked the money. She made $8.25 at the factory; she was thirty-seven years old, and it was the highest wage she’d ever earned—a full dollar higher than Pennsylvania’s state minimum wage.

She worked for seven months before the company went through a layoff. Work had been busy when she started, but then “it slowed down, and I knew I was one of the new people. So, I kind of felt it coming but I was still shocked. And nobody wants to be told [they are fired]. It’s one thing when you make that choice [to leave].” Tracy and ten others lost their jobs that day; she said she “cried like a baby.” Her family experienced financial hardship almost immediately. While Tracy’s kids were fed, she often went hungry because “we don’t have food in the house like we used to.” There wasn’t enough money left for new school clothes, either; when I met her kids, their pants hung above their ankles, and their shirts stretched in the shoulders.

Tracy had done everything right; she seized a manageable opportunity to make life better for herself and her kids. For a short period, she seemed to have achieved the American dream, but less than a year later, she was much worse off than she’d been before she left the restaurant to work at the factory. She couldn’t go back to the restaurant; they had already found another waitress. As we spoke for hours that day, Tracy cried yet again; what was she going to do?

As Tracy discovered, employees of some industries, like manufacturing, were at higher risk of unemployment than others. Neil also discovered that the hotel industry had more risk of unemployment than he had anticipated. Although he wanted to follow his father into management, he credits a family vacation to Canada during his late teens for his decision to go into hotel management. Sitting in the bar of an upscale hotel, he thought to himself, “Boy, this is the life.” Neil earned his BA and then his MA degree in hotel management. He moved away from Pennsylvania for a while, living in states along the East Coast and in the South, where he met his wife. They eventually decided to return to Pennsylvania, where he worked for several years as the director of banquet services for a resort. Then the opportunity to become a general manager of a hotel in a small city opened up. A gregarious guy with a wide smile, Neil jumped at the opportunity—it would be a promotion with better hours (banquets meant weddings, which could run until 2 A.M. or later). While Neil and his wife couldn’t have children, they were looking into fostering or adoption, and switching to a job with better hours might make them better candidates. His wife also worked full-time as a graphic designer. Married for over fifteen years, Neil spoke very fondly of his wife, often going off topic to tell stories of her volunteering work or her outdoorsy nature.

But Neil’s new job proved difficult; the hotel had been in the red for several years, and he had been hired to help turn things around. During the year he worked there, Neil worked long hours and increased revenues, getting the hotel in better financial shape than his predecessor had. But about a year after he was hired, his boss invited him to lunch, bought an expensive bottle of wine, and told him the company was letting him go. Neil recalls, “It was frustrating because when you’re let go, you kind of have this expectation that you’ve done something wrong.” But Neil felt he wasn’t to blame for the hotel’s continued financial troubles; in fact, he thought they were headed in the right direction and that his bosses had hampered his ability to do more. Had some of the cost-saving measures he suggested been implemented, he thought, it could have moved the hotel out of the red.

When I asked if he felt the financial pinch of his job loss, he replied, “It’s been two months.” He further clarified that he certainly had not been out of work long enough to experience any financial repercussions. Neil had a spouse with a high income, no children, and he described a “nice unemployment” benefit from the state.

Instead, Neil was most concerned about his next career move. After two decades in the hotel industry, Neil was burned out by the long hours and bruised by the casual way he was tossed aside. Neil and his wife sat down and assessed his next steps; she suggested he take additional time off and look at the job loss as an opportunity to think about a new career. His job loss also coincided with the start of fly-fishing season, and Neil decided to take some time to enjoy his favorite hobby. While Neil’s loss stung, it was a chance to try something new, and it was nothing like the devastation experienced by Tracy.

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Social class matters a lot for how people experience their job loss. While the media often claim that everyone thinks they are middle class these days,⁶ scholars argue that Americans have a much more nuanced understanding of how they compare to others.⁷ In recent years, more Americans have come to identify themselves as working class instead of middle class; this is particularly true of Black Americans.⁸

Part of why Tracy and Neil experienced their job losses differently was that their different education levels gave them different levels of protection against the effects of job loss. At Penn State, where I am a professor, my students sometimes say that relatives have needled them about how college is a waste of money. I understand this accusation: colleges are expensive—too expensive, in my opinion. But a college degree remains one of the best buffers against the effects of job loss and unemployment. And the biggest gains from college go to those whose parents didn’t attend college—in other words, you get the most from college if you are the first in your family to graduate.⁹

People with a college degree have many advantages over those without a degree. Overall, they are much less likely to lose a job when a recession hits—in the Great Recession, the college-educated were not immune from job losses, but their chances of losing their jobs were much lower than those who had only a high school degree.¹⁰ People with college degrees also generally get better jobs, partly because of those degrees and partly because they meet people in college who can introduce them to people who can hire them. Researchers have found that people with college degrees are healthier and happier, too.¹¹

Having a college degree even changes who you are likely to marry.¹² My mother’s parents met at a cotillion for nurses and sailors during World War II. My grandmother earned her nursing degree through a war program designed to train more women as nurses. My grandfather did not have a high school diploma. After the war ended, they married, he went to work as a mechanic, and she stayed home and raised their two girls. It wasn’t unusual back then for married couples to have different levels of education. Today, it is increasingly likely that people will marry those with similar education levels.¹³ Take me and my husband, for example. We met in college, started dating at the end of our first year, finished college, got married, and now both have advanced degrees. Today, people are increasingly likely to marry people who are like them, increasing inequality in America, because it allows people to keep important resources for themselves (like access to education and to better jobs) and to pass those resources down to their children.¹⁴

The change between then and now in who we marry is important because people with college educations are likely to have spouses with good jobs that they are less likely to lose. Conversely, people with a high school education not only tend to marry people with fewer resources, but they are more likely to divorce or not marry at all.¹⁵ Thus, there are a lot of resources—gaining a college degree, using that degree to get a good job, using that job to purchase a house in a good school district, using that good school district education to help your children go to a good college—that end up creating a pretty wide gap between people like Tracy and people like Neil.¹⁶

Tracy made a lot less money than Neil, and she also had fewer resources on which to draw after she lost her job—she wasn’t married, and her extended family didn’t have the resources to help her out. She was also raising two children on this smaller income. In contrast, Neil was married to someone who earned a stable middle-class income, and while they were hoping to adopt, they didn’t have kids yet. As we will see in future chapters, when the consequences of the job loss started to play out in Neil’s and Tracy’s lives, there were buffers in place to protect Neil from some of the worst of it, but Tracy and her kids were relatively unprotected. I want to be clear: I don’t mean we should root against Neil. I am glad he didn’t face more hardship than he did, and he struggled as well. But it is important for us to think about why Tracy had it quite as hard as she did, and as we’ll see, things got worse for Tracy before they got better.

Part of the reason behind Tracy’s and Neil’s differing unemployment experience is alluded to in Neil’s earlier quote about his unemployment benefit, which he described as “nice.” Tracy described her unemployment benefit quite differently; she said, “Honestly, it’s not enough.” To understand their different views of their unemployment benefits, we need to understand how unemployment insurance works in the United States. We have a somewhat complicated system because the federal government has guidelines, funds administrative costs, and oversees the programs, yet each state pays for and runs its own program. But most states have the same basic model. In the state of Pennsylvania, where everyone I met lived, eligibility for unemployment was based on some common rules (rules that are generally followed throughout the United States): domestic workers, farm workers, and the self-employed were excluded from coverage; workers had to have involuntarily lost the job through “no fault” of their own (in other words, they could not have quit or been fired for something like insulting their boss); workers had to have worked at least eighteen of the last fifty-two weeks (one-third of the year), and to have earned a minimum of $116 in each week worked. Arindrajit Dube, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, estimates that these restrictions mean that nationally only 25 percent of the unemployed are eligible for unemployment insurance.¹⁷

Once individuals are determined eligible for unemployment, they apply for benefits from the state and are required to attend a meeting at the Pennsylvania CareerLink Center, the clearinghouse for job seekers. At this meeting, the unemployed do not actually learn about their benefits or how to maintain their eligibility. For that information, the state provides a twenty-page handbook with the rules of unemployment that the unemployed are supposed to read and review. During the course of my interviews, I learned many people had not read the handbook, or, if they had read it, they did not understand the rules.

I understood why participants didn’t read the handbook; it is filled with technical language and graphs that somehow manage to make the rules even more confusing. Many people were overwhelmed when they lost their jobs ...