As I See It: In the Aftermath

by Victor Rozek

From January through April of 2005 there were 5,053 layoffs totaling 536,359 employees (source: Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Jonas was 47 when he lost his job. He was a low-level manager earning $64,000 a year when his company decided to abandon its in-house IT operations and move them offshore. Nothing personal, just global competition; the sort of competition that pits the needy against the desperate and renounces any labor force that dare become too affluent.

Overnight, Jonas became unnecessary. He was married and the father of two. He and his wife, Hanna, owned a modest house recently refinanced to pay for a kitchen remodeling and provide a down payment for one of the family's two cars. One day he was balancing a middle-class lifestyle on his back, and the next it began to crush him.

Jonas had mortgage payments, car payments, credit card payments, growing kids, a stay-at-home wife, minimal savings, no medical insurance, and no salary. His daughter took piano lessons, his son studied karate. Twice a month he and his wife saw a counselor to help them sift through twenty-two years of marital debris. Driving home after his last day on the job, Jonas felt more exhausted than he could remember having felt in years. Walking through the front door and seeing the bills piled on the small writing desk in the hall alcove, he felt something else he hadn't felt in a long time: He felt scared.

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The decision to have a single-earner family with a stay-at-home Mom meant that Jonas had only been able to save a few months of living expenses. Over the years, what money Jonas was able to set aside was intended for the children's college education and was inviolate. His son was less than two years away from college, his daughter had just started high school. Like millions of other middle class families, Jonas' household lived well, but essentially they lived month to month and relied heavily on credit.

Jonas took a week to let the dust settle and catch up on some projects around the house, then he updated his resume and began shopping himself around. In the next three months he mailed off 32 resumes, talked to dozens of human resources departments, and had six interviews. Three times he was invited back for a second round of evaluations. But by then, he was running out of money and when he answered the questions put to him he no longer appeared youthful and confident, he seemed desperate and frightened.

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As Jonas discovered, one of the hardest things to do is to change your lifestyle. His major obligations remained constant and his family continued spending what they were accustomed to spending. To save what they could, Jonas and Hanna quit seeing their counselor at precisely the time when the pressure in their marriage was building. But in spite of cutting back on non-essentials wherever possible, their savings ran out all too soon and Jonas' unemployment benefits didn't begin to cover their expenses.

As the money ran out, the fighting accelerated. Jonas was discouraged and became short tempered, sulking around the house, driving Hanna crazy and drinking too much beer. Credit card bills were mounting, creditors were calling, and the couple began to blame each other. Hanna blamed Jonas for not looking harder for work, and Jonas blamed Hanna--as he ungallantly and mistakenly put it--for "not working at all." Finally in frustration, Hanna, who had a degree in English, found a part time job as a sales associate in a women's clothing store where she made less than $10 an hour. She came home tired, with little to show for her efforts, and complained bitingly about Jonas' lack of progress in finding employment. Most nights they went to bed sullen and angry, lying in resentful silence with their backs to each other.

The more guilt and self-loathing Jonas felt, the more immobilized he became. Discouragement gave way to depression. Without a job, Jonas lost a large part of his identity as a manager and a provider. When he met people and they asked him "What do you do?" he had no answer. He felt useless and alone, floating on a vast uncaring ocean without direction or destination.

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The possibility of losing his home coupled with the shame of being unable to support his family drove Jonas to do two things that would eventually cost him his marriage and radically change the direction of his son's life. Two months behind on his mortgage and unable to face the accusatory looks of his wife and children, Jonas announced he'd found a job. Each morning he got up, dressed, and went off ostensibly to work. Actually, he spent his days in parks and museums, movie theaters, coffee shops and bookstores. But every two weeks he brought home a cashed "paycheck" which in reality was money he was withdrawing from his children's college fund.

For a time, life returned to normal. Everyone relaxed a bit and Hanna left her sales job. She and Jonas even returned to counseling, trying to rebuild their strained relationship. It was there at the counselor's office, seven months later, that a tearful and broken Jonas admitted what he had been doing. His timing was exceptionally bad. His son had graduated high school and was preparing to go to college and would now have to be told that the money was gone.

Jonas, of course, promised to replace the money, as he tried to explain to his numb family. "How?" was all Hanna wanted to know. She was livid, the kids thought he was weird, and no one knew what else to say. Six weeks later, Hanna filed for divorce. Two weeks after that, Jonas' son announced he was going to join the Army to earn his own college money. He enlisted in late August 2001, just weeks before the attack on the World Trade Center.

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The divorce was uncontested and Hanna ended up with the house and custody of the minor child. Jonas' son was eventually sent to Iraq where, about a year later, he fired on a car which had failed to slow while approaching a checkpoint, killing three members of a family and wounding two others, the youngest of which was four. The driver was apparently confused by the signals the soldiers were making. When he talks to his son now, Jonas says he's not the same. He seems distant and preoccupied, and he no longer cares about going to college.

As for Jonas, he was diagnosed as suffering from depression and with the proper treatment he eventually found a job at about half his former salary. He lives alone in a small apartment on a busy street.

"Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labor."

It was no less renown a laborer than Leonardo Da Vinci who made that observation. If that's true, however, so is the converse--that without labor, all good things may be lost. And often are.

The layoff numbers are factual. The story is a compilation of events I've heard or read about during the past five years; tragedies great and small that are not reflected in the unemployment statistics. In a system that champions winner-take-all and seems hell-bent on shredding the social safety net, the loss of a job can have seismic reverberations that rattle across generations.

Forgotten in the sea of statistics so casually imparted, is that each number has a life story attached to it. And the sum of the numbers does not begin to equal the sum of the stories. Life for the unemployed can unravel quickly. Having a continuous flow of money is the primary constant of modern survival. And when that flow is interrupted, families suffer. Paddy Chayefsky synthesized it 30 years ago in that brilliant scene from Network where CEO Arthur Jensen explains the facts of life to the mad Howard Beale: "It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today."

It may be the order of things, but it is not natural.

When good people are discarded, sometimes they begin to doubt their own goodness and then act accordingly. It is a sad but unavoidable consequence of putting people last.