The New Financial Normal

Why you should care that I couldn’t find a permanent job

I used to be a job creator. That’s right: I was a member of the Consumer Middle Class. Then things changed. The company I thought was having a few minor bumps suddenly made some unexpected severe cuts and, with no warning, my job disappeared. I was unemployed for ten months. It was scarey and despressing. And on top of everything else, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the other people I was letting down.

With no idea when my next paycheck would be coming in, whatever money I had was reserved for strict necessities. That long summer weekend for which I’d already made reservations? I had to cancel the B&B, and I immediately stopped dreaming about taking my almost-annual vacation in the fall. I wasn’t eating out. I wasn’t donating to the charities I usually support. Over a span of months that would usually see me having 3 haircuts, I had only 1, a few days before a job interview that, in the end, came to nothing. I didn’t shop for anything that wasn’t food, not for myself and not, more regretfully, for gift giving; December was exceptionally depressing. For nearly a year, all the ways in which my money usually trickles into the economy were shut down at the source.

Multiply me by 4 million, the number that was publicized when Congress, the best compensated part-time workforce in the USA, took off for their own Christmas vacations on the breezy note of having voted down the extension of emergency unemployment assistance for people like me. So much money that wasn’t spent, resulting in store and restaurant closings, in cutbacks by wholesalers and manufacturers whose consumers were closed or trimming down, in service reductions by charitable organizations whose budgets were depleted. Every dollar I wasn’t spending (or donating) was making a dent in someone else’s pocket. The loss of my job, and those of others like me, have resulted in even more unemployment. Because we are the genuine job creators, the people whose earnings cycle back into the economy.
I’m employed now, but I’ll never be the job creator I used be. You see, the only work I could find was temporary. Like many categories of work that used to be salaried employment, mine has almost entirely been re-envisioned as contract work. I was able to get compensation close to my old base salary calculated as an hourly rate but, even if a contract lasts an entire year, I’ll always earn less than I did. I pay 100% of my healthcare now. And there’s no such thing as vacation time; even if the office closes for a Federal Holiday, I don’t get paid for that day. Those vacations I used to take every year or so? It was always a stretch to budget those, and now that the loss of a week’s income would be added to air fare, room and board, it may be more of a luxury than I can swallow.

My withdrawal from the economy isn’t temporary. Assuming, as seems likely, I’ll have to remain a contractor for the rest of my working life, I will never have either the spending power or the confidence I had as a salaried worker with a company to call “mine.” I will always be living lean, trying to hold back enough to cover what will now be regular periods of unemployment, while also putting money aside for the time when I can no longer compete in the job-hunt beauty contest.
I’m not asking for pity. Compared to many, I’m lucky. Very lucky. I know that. But this is not about me. Multiply me by millions. You don’t need to imagine the impact. It’s reported on the news every day.