Dear Editor, my heart goes out to “Angry,†the woman whose husband lost his job and who feels the community has turned its back on him (MindBiz by Esther Mann, October 29). Unfortunately, my experience as an unemployed man in our community has been much the same. In my opinion, our community, collectively and individually, remains deaf to the concerns of those of us who have lost our jobs over the past two years.
I think some statistics are in order to put this in perspective. We all know that the unemployment rate is reported at 9.6%. However, what economists use to measure the severity of the problem is the “median duration of unemployment.†Put in simple English, more people are remaining unemployed for a longer time period than at any time since the Great Depression. About 30% to 40% of those currently unemployed have been out of work for a year or more. Imagine the financial and emotional pressures on a breadwinner, and the entire family, as his unemployment stretches on and on.
By the time you publish this, I will have entered my 24th month of unemployment. When I lost my job, I knew it was going to be a tough slog and, having been unemployed before, I thought I knew how people could be. Despite being a high-level Wall Street professional, I was even prepared to contact community institutions for help, because I knew this downturn was going to be like no other I had lived through.
Having said all this, nothing really prepared me for the insensitivity I have encountered. Two years—730 days!—and only two people have ever called to see how I am doing. I thought I was close to several rabbanim in the community, but neither they nor their rebbetzins have sought out me or my wife to see how we are doing. Phone calls and e-mails asking for help or advice are unanswered. Those of us who are unemployed confront depression, anger, fear, and bewilderment on a daily basis; but can you imagine how all that is compounded by simple loneliness?
Perhaps one story out of many will illustrate what I’ve been going through: Sometime during this ordeal, a “friend†e-mailed me to tell me he was davening for me. I thanked him for his prayers, but told him that what I really needed was someone to take me out for a cup of coffee. I never heard from him again.
I’ve heard many explanations for the way people act and I’ve tried to be “dan l’kaf z’chus.†However, I think the most obvious explanation is this: helping someone find a job or offering comfort requires a personal commitment. I think many people would prefer to write a check to, say, Tomchei Shabbos than get personally involved.
Let me give another story out of many to illustrate: One job-placement professional at EPI suggested—and he was serious—that I form a high-tech company with a 70-year-old man whose entire life had been spent in the kashrus industry and a 55-year-old fundraiser who didn’t even know how to use a PDA. Why these two? Because they were the next two applicants in his folder after me.
It is not the fact of unemployment that our community must address today, but the changed nature of that unemployment. Many of us will have to re-create ourselves, and that is no easy task.
I wish I had some good advice for “Angry’s†husband. He needs to look out of our community for help and ideas and, while he looks, trust that Hashem knows the way.
Name Withheld
Matching Employers And Employees
Dear Editor, there is a well-known story about a pastor named Niemöller during WWII who wrote: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I wasn’t a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.â€
After Y2K, in the business world there were many unemployed community members left stranded without jobs and, following the outsourcing of jobs abroad, left very unemployable. These were middle-aged professionals with college degrees that they had earned pre-outsourcing and that should have ensured them middle-class status and professional work who suddenly found themselves either over- or under-qualified for jobs on the market. I and my husband were in that group.
After a lengthy and thorough attempt to find employment help from Jewish sources—I need not name all the Jewish non-profits, they advertise their assistance all over—we found their help to be useless, self-serving (i.e., ensuring their own existence and continued financing), and targeted at narrow specific audiences they are committed to help. Finally, after hearing from a lady at one of these organizations that maybe our family should move to Scranton, Pennsylvania, as there is a nice Jewish community out there and more jobs, we decided that we needed to retrain in other fields and not count on community help.
So it was that my husband and I put our financial lives on hold and used our retirement money to enter other fields. For my husband, baruch Hashem it worked. But for me (and my income is just as critical to our financial survival as his) it did not. And here I am several years later, still unemployed, and tired after earning a degree that is better fitted for a younger person.
The dean at the Jewish school I went to for this degree told me I should have “done my homework better.†If you do consider retraining, be very careful where you put your education dollars, because colleges want your money and don’t necessarily care about a right fit between you and the program. Talk to graduates of any program you’re interested in to find out what their experiences are after they graduate.
To “Angry,†the woman who wrote to Esther Mann in last week’s issue, I say that unless it touches home, no one will care. Even from the response in last week’s column, I could tell that while you want to help you really don’t get it. Continued socializing and being invited for Shabbos is really one of the last things on our minds. Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, writing about his concentration camp existence, wrote: “A well-known research psychologist had pointed out that life in a concentration camp could be called a ‘provisional existence’ . . . A man who could not see the end of his ‘provisional existence’ was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life. He ceased living for the future, in contrast to a man in normal life . . . The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position. His existence has become provisional, and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal . . .â€
I would be willing to try, with other women who are in similar positions or whose husbands are unemployed, to match middle-aged unemployed professionals to professional jobs. On the part of the hiring organizations, please realize that if we’ve held professional jobs in the past, we probably have the work habits and ability to learn something unfamiliar.
To the professional seeking employment, be flexible and open to anything that will bring a decent parnasah. If the Five Towns Jewish Times would be willing to place ads asking employers and businessmen with professional openings to send them in, maybe a group of well-intentioned women can try to make the matches directly without the endless and useless paperwork of organized bureaucracy. After all, who knows better what it’s like to be jobless than a family with unemployed breadwinners?
Name Withheld
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Not Enough Help For The Unemployed
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