“It’s not you. This is what the country is going through”

by digby

Here’s a tale probably told many millions of times, all over the country, throughout this slump:

ON June 25, 2010, Frederick Deare punched out for the last time from his job driving a forklift at the Old London factory in the Bronx. That summer, everyone at the plant was being laid off: the oven operators, the assembly-line packers, the forklift drivers, the sanitation workers. Total jobs lost: 228. Old London, the snack manufacturer that invented the Cheez Doodle, was moving its operations to North Carolina. At 53, Mr. Deare, known as Freddy or Teddy Bear to his co-workers, would have to find a new job.

Read on to see what it’s like to be 53 years old and looking for work in this environment, what it does to a person. This was a man who had worked hard his whole life to attain a comfortable middle class life. The quote in the title is the soothing words his wife would say to him when he was rejected by yet another employer. It’s a harrowing story of a good person, upstanding citizen caught in the maw of this awful economy.

He’s actually one of the lucky ones. After going through hell for most of a year, he’s found another job. But check it out — this is the new reality:

He got an interview, and the supervisor he met with sounded optimistic about his chances of being hired. But there was no formal offer. Day after day went by. For three weeks the wait stretched on. This time, however, he got the job. And it was a union job, with benefits. He started on April 11 — 290 days after Old London laid him off.

“You’re speaking to a happy man,” he said after his first day. “I am in my glory. I mean, today was wonderful.”

There was only one downside: The work paid $10 an hour, 40 percent less than he had made at Old London. After taxes, his paycheck was even less than the unemployment benefits he had been collecting. But he tried not to dwell on this. “I don’t let it bother me that I’m getting less, because of the simple fact I have something, and a lot of people have nothing,” he said. “You have to crawl before you can walk.” Four and a half months later, he is still on the job.

Everybody sees this, whether they’re employed or not. And it’s made working people very accommodating. Being scared you might never find a decent job again will do that to a person.

It’s great for employers, though.

And good for the NY Times for doing this sort of story. If social distance is one of the primary reasons we have have this huge disconnect between our leaders and the citizens, then stories like this might be helpful. If they never see anyone who has been dealt a blow from this economy at least they might read this and recognize that this isn’t an abstraction for millions of people.