The Anguish of the Jobless

By Frank Trippett

The new unemployment rate: 8.9%. Everyone who hears that percentage will know it is fraught with troublesome forebodings. Yet the modern habit of mistaking statistics for reality makes it easy to overlook the fact that the rate stands for an indigestibly large number of individuals-- 9.5 million. Each point in the unemployment rate also represents, as the President explained last month, roughly $19 billion in potential but lost federal revenues, plus some $6 billion in financial assistance that the Government disburse jobless. Such statistical and elaborations usefully suggest the vast scope of unemployment and its staggering cost in both forfeited wealth and rescue efforts. Yet it is essential to remember that statistics tell nothing whatever about the reality of joblessness.

That reality is always personal and almost always lashed with a confusion of difficult emotions. Indeed, the psychological cost of joblessness is more hurtful to many victims than the strain of making financial ends meet. A few individuals, true enough, are so oddly disposed that they can take unemployment with upbeat nonchalance, making a lark of it or seizing the opportunity to switch careers. Still, Americans more typically take a cruel psychic bruising when they lose a job (never mind the cause). And if joblessness goes on for long, men and women of all ages, occupations and economic classes tend to suffer a sharp loss of selfesteem, a diminished sense of identity, a certain murkiness of purpose, a sense of estrangement from their friends--a sort of feeling of exile from wherever they feel they really belong.

The loss of a job remains, by definition, an economic event. Naturally, it is the economic aspect of the world of the jobless that has become most familiar to the public: the struggle to pay the rent and keep food on the table, the suspenseful search for new work. The intangible atmosphere of the jobless world is less familiar only because it is ordinarily more private, often downright obscure. The most obvious personal wounds of joblessness are often easy to spot, as in the language of Ronald Poindexter, 34, a Washington bricklayer out of work for six months: "I feel sick." But the profound wrench of unemployment is not often disclosed as plainly as in the reflection of Connie Cerrito, 52, of New York City, who last July lost the cosmetics factory position she had held for 35 years. Says Cerrito: "My job was my whole life. That's all I did. It's unbearable now. Staying home is terrible. I can't go on like this."

Common among the jobless is a sense of being condemned to uselessness in a world that worships the useful. Out-of-work people who do not develop such feelings on their own are apt to be given them when they visit the unemployment office: there the applicant is more often treated like an alien culprit in need of interrogation than an unlucky citizen in need of assistance. Says a young writer who was among the anonymous hundreds that Harry Maurer taped for the oral history Not Working: "I always get the feeling that the people at the umemployment office think I'm a bum or something." Says another of Maurer's subjects, a welder. of the umemployment rites: "You get a feeling of rejection. Especially the feeling that they're better than you."

The the worst jolt of joblessness may be that first notice of it--the firing, the layoff, the company closure. That event, whatever its form, typically arouses feelings like grief, as though a loved one had died, according to experts like Industrial Psychologist Joseph Fabricatore of Los Angeles. The victim, says Fabricator, passes through stages of disbelief ("This can't be happening"), shock numbness, rage. The elemental severity of such a reaction tells a great deal about the invisible desolation that is possible--and commonplace--in the world of the jobless. The bruising can show up in feelings of worthlessness. Rage, sadly, often crops up in the form of destructive behavior--wife beating, child abuse, neglect of friends, drunkenness--that increases predictably among the jobless. (In a study of the social effects of unemployment over a 34-year period, S ociologist M. Harvey Brenner of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that a 1% increase in the national unemployment rate was associated with a 4.1% increase in the suicide rate and increases of 3.4% in admissions to state mental hospitals, 4% in state prison admissions and 5.7% in the homicide rate.)

Surprisingly, or so it seems at first glance, most of the emotional beating that the jobless take is self-administered condemnation. Says a former publishing company worker in her 30s, who was one of Maurer's subjects: "I was persuaded that I must be not only as bad as the company must have thought I was to fire me, but much worse than that. Probably the world's worst. Probably I didn't deserve to live. It doesn't simply take away your self-confidence. It destroys you." Elliot Liebow, chief of the Federal Government's Center for Work and Mental Health, says that the very nub of the lost-job syndrome is the victim's feeling of being cut off from personal and social power The sense of powerlessness is compounded by all but universal self-blame, says Liebow, adding: "One very destructive thing is the enormous difficulty people have in seeing themselves as victims of the system. They always blame themselves, and it doesn't matter if you're talking about a plant shutdown or a government layoff."

It is not surprising, only ironic, that the unemployed should take such an uncharitable view of their own ordeal. Actually, they have merely carried into joblessness, and applied to themselves, the attitudes inculcated in them by workaday society. The American view of joblessness has never been overly sympathetic. Pioneer America flaunted its punitive sentiment in a vulgar aphorism: "Root, hog, or die!" While that position has been softened a bit (witness unemployment benefits that have ranged from $9 billion the $19 billion annually in the past few years) in the face of the fact that most of today's idleness is involuntary, the nation has not relinquished its basic view of work as sacred and worklessness as sin. Proof that the old creed persists lies in the self-chastising of the unemployed.

Such social convictions cannot be changed by preaching. Yet it is fitting considering the frequent bleakness of the world of the jobless to mourn the nation's way of casually accepting increased unemployment as an unavoidable trade-off cost in the effort to achieve monetary stability and defeat inflation. News paper Columnist Russell Baker had the notion of that trade-off in mind a few years back when he wrote: "It is obvious that unemployment is an honorable form of service to the nation." The pity is that he spoke more truth than humor. --By Frank Trippett

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