On Unemployment and the False Dichotomy of Good and Bad People

In which I lose friends and alienate people and also exercise my recently-learned gender neutral pronouns.

This is obviously a time to reflect on how things like globalization, corporatization and technology have changed The American Dream, what with economy drama, unemployment, and Occupy Everywhere happening.  One thing I hear pretty often these days is a blanket condemnation of the Occupy protesters..."If those hippies/losers/what-have-you would get out of the streets and get a real job, blah blah etc."

Now, I am not an economist, or politician, or sociologist, or financier, or even pundit.  But the job-hunting experience of a close friend of mine has caused me to look at the issues of employment and livelihood very differently than I would have years ago.

This friend and I, like most American kids, were raised being constantly reminded of the value of hard work and education.  If you finish school and don't do anything to make yourself look like a "bad person" as your particular subculture defines it, if you try hard enough and search hard enough, you'll get a job and be able to sustain yourself as an adult.  To be fair, maybe the adults and media in our lives weren't trying to so clearly connect the dots between school and job, but you can't sit there and deny that there is a cultural trope which takes for granted that being "good" and "working hard" under certain never-spoken-aloud conditions somehow magically guarantees a livelihood, or at the very least improves your chances of achieving one.  On the flip side, if somebody doesn't have a livelihood, that person must have done something bad.  That person must not have finished school, or must have gotten into drugs, or performed poorly at a job, or just not tried hard enough.  It's tempting to impose this good/bad binary on society because it (1) generally casts those imposing the binary in the "good" column and (2) erases the existence of any wider social problems by foisting all the blame solely on the "bad" people.  I do it too.  We all do it.  It is the nature of humans to want to control by declaring neat categories over what are actually very complicated and messy situations.

My friend's path to hir current job really clarified for me how much the search for employment boils down to luck-of-the-draw.  Because I have promised not to reveal hir identity, I can't give you the details, but suffice to say that if zie had not said the right thing at the right time (which was MONTHS prior to the opening and the interview), the current job wouldn't have happened.  Zie had the necessary what-you-know, but hadn't come into the right who-you-know until then, and now zie is in a fulfilling, promising career in the field zie is trained in.  And the minute we start believing that zie somehow deserved this job by virtue of hir work during hir bachelor's degree or hir previous jobs is the minute we lose sight of reality.  Yes, zie worked hard to earn hir bachelor's.  So did the 100 (not exaggerating) other applicants for that job.  Yes, zie searched like crazy for a job and took one zie was way overqualified for just to get by.  So did most of the 100 other applicants for that job.  In fact, I know five other applicants personally off the top of my head whose credentials are actually *better* than hirs and who worked multiple jobs in multiple fields to make do.  This is not me downplaying my friend's abilities; zie is really good at what zie does.  But in discussing this good fortune, zie has made a conscious effort to remain grateful and humble, and not to slip into the "I EARNED this job by working hard and being good!" narrative.

I am inclined to agree.  There was a time when I had worked hard, earned a bachelor's degree, job-hunted until I was blue in the face and still got goose-egg.  If a certain politician had declared, "If you don't have a job and you're not rich, it's your fault!" at that time, he would have been speaking to me.  Had I not been married to an employed man or, lacking that, had a family with the willingness and means to support me, I would have been in serious trouble.  Even though I had fulfilled all the culturally-accepted prerequisites for obtaining a job, even though I had applied to many, many places and interviewed cleanly and articulately, that statement would have suggested to me that the fact that I was unemployed was entirely my fault; I obviously did something wrong.

I can hear the defense from here: "He wasn't talking about people who are actually TRYING, he's talking about people who just don't want to work and are looking for a handout!"

There is a phrase for that: straw man.  Now, obviously I do not know every single unemployed American personally.  But just off the top of my head, let me take my previously mentioned cultural narratives regarding lack of employment in adulthood and see if I can't come up with some explanatory circumstances:
1. "This person didn't finish school."  Some people perform poorly at school for a variety of reasons - their strengths don't fall into the two ways you're able to be successful in school (that is a soap box for another post), or they may be dealing with external stressors like poverty, abuse, dysfunctional family relationships, bullying, learning disabilities, lack of district resources (heeey, my stack of future soap boxes is starting to get really big), inadequately educated or uninvolved parents, migrant family, disruption of family, inadequate health care...the list goes on and on and on.  I don't care how "driven" you are, if you're not getting enough food in your stomach, or if you're petrified that some jerk is going to bash your face in for looking at his girlfriend, or if you're weighing the pros and cons of hiding versus confessing that a family member hit you, or it takes you longer than your classmates to read through the assignment and you're afraid of being chastised for being stupid if you ask for help, or if your school district can't afford current-enough textbooks for you to get the right information to pass your EOCT, or if your mom can't help you with your homework because she can barely read herself, or if you're always playing catch-up because your family has to move constantly because of legal or employment issues, or if you're dealing with a bad virus without the benefit of medication because your family can't afford it...your brain simply will not function right, no matter how bad you want it to.

And all of those situations?  ARE NOT THE KIDS' FAULT.  And do not magically become their fault when they become job-seeking adults.

2. "This person got mixed up in drugs/illegal behavior."  Drug use can be a frightening thing.  But what sort of things cause people to seek out drugs?  Let us consult the internets...

What causes drug abuse and addiction?

Like the majority of other mental-health problems, drug abuse and addiction have no single cause. However, there are a number of biological, psychological, and social factors, called risk factors, that can increase a person's likelihood of developing a chemical-abuse or chemical-dependency disorder. The frequency to which substance-abuse disorders occur within some families seems to be higher than could be explained by an addictive environment of the family. Therefore, most substance-abuse professionals recognize a genetic aspect to the risk of drug addiction.
Psychological associations with substance abuse or addiction include mood disorders like depression, anxiety, or bipolar disorder, as well as personality disorders like antisocial personality disorder. Social risk factors for drug abuse and addiction include male gender, being between 18 and 44 years of age, Native-American heritage, unmarried marital status, and lower socioeconomic status. According to statistics by state, people residing in the West tend to be at higher risk for chemical abuse or dependency. While men are more at risk for developing a chemical dependency like alcoholism, women seem to be more vulnerable to becoming addicted to alcohol at much lower amounts of alcohol consumption.

Biological, psychological and social factors, and possibly a genetic basis as well, eh?  There are probably some drug users out there who, despite the proliferation of anti-drug media in our culture and the demonization of drug users, think about the possibility of using this or that and go, "Well, it looks fun, so to heck with any consequences!"  But considering that against the possibility of "mood disorders, depression, anxiety..." and other such problems driving people to seek relief, especially considering that for some people, an illicit drug might be a more feasible, faster and cheaper route to relief than a legal one gained by prescription (for almost 50 million Americans in 2010, doctor visits and prescriptions were not an option at all), which explanation do you reckon occurs more often?  And in a society that still doesn't have enough jobs to go around, drug trafficking and criminal behavior start to look less and less outlandish when you and your loved ones are in danger of homelessness or starvation.

3. (Assuming previous employment) "This person must have performed poorly at hir job."  Some people perform poorly at jobs because their skills/education simply aren't suited to it.  And if  you're inclined to wonder why a person would apply for such a job to begin with, I'll point you again to the lack of employment opportunities in our country and the fact that people have to eat.  While I'm trying to anticipate counterpoints to my points and address them, I'm having a really hard time believing that someone would perform poorly at a job just because they didn't want to do it.  Either something else is going on, like the aforementioned not-good-at-it-but-must-eat scenario, or any number of the scenarios that accelerate poor school performance, or they don't actually need the job and therefore don't have to do well at it...and since that would only happen in households wealthy enough to do without one family member's income, that scenario is less relevant to our discussion right now.

4. "This person just didn't try hard enough."  This criticism might make me see the reddest of all.  It's an egotistical statement if ever there was one.  I don't know every specific detail of another person's brain chemistry, cognitive processes, metabolism, emotional fortitude and/or trauma...how dare I presume to know at what point that person is truly exhausting hir efforts?

Lest I be accused of constructing a straw man myself, I welcome rebuttals and discussion in the comments.  And I'm not aiming for a fight over or a solution to the unemployment and economic crises.  What I am aiming for is acknowledgment of the fact that when we try to impose simple labels, when we decide that people who are unemployed must somehow deserve it, we erase and demonize millions.  There are plenty of people out there who got their educations and lived within their means and behaved like "good" people and *still* got in a bad spot because they were laid off or because there simply were no jobs to be had, causing the means within which they were living to dry up.

We want it to be as simple as "good" and "bad."  It is never that simple.  And we will not fix these problems until we acknowledge that.