On the pain of being unemployed...

I was reading a featured article on CNN on interviews of the unemployed over the past three years (2008-11) across walks of life and across the nation.  It's painful to read of the lives and times of these less fortunate folks, some of those who still suffer from the aftermath of the unemployment, as they are yet to find another job.  That big void, of being rejected by fellow coworkers and an employer to whom some folks have devoted their lives, of the depression, of the unspoken shame, of the loss of hope to some (though some still hold a brighter outlook than others).

It's sad too, that losing a job in a poor economy comes at no fault to these people, yet they bear the brunt of the impact of the recession.

I have little doubt that Republicans like Mitt Romney, the GOP hopeful who is vying to be the presidential nominee of his party in the general election in the fall, have little (or none at all) sympathy or care about these folks who struggle to find jobs in a market where jobs have evaporated in some parts of the country.  I'm sure GOP would give their standard lines to folks like these, telling them to be self-reliant, to not expect handouts from government, to try harder to find jobs.  If they still fail to land on any jobs, it must their own fault and making, and no one else to blame.  I heard those lines so many times.  Romney is simply regurgitate those tired script from folks like Newt Gingrinch and Wall Street Journal.

I hate it, that these well-greased politicians would not miss a beat, in providing handouts to their corporate buddies like candy, at the expense of taxpayers' money (hello, government handout).  I don't hear anyone telling these Big Corps to be more self-reliant, and quit sending lobbyists to Washington to send them more pork-barrel perks.

It's not that the Democrats are not doing their own version of scratching the backs of their lobbyist buddies.  The GOP simply comes across as more hypocritical, for rejecting big government, handouts, promoting self-reliance, yada yada, yet at the same time, doing exactly the opposite when they're not in front of a camera or out of earshots of main media.  In the end, only the little guys (and they are taxpayers too) who play by the books, follow all rules to the T, are going to pay the price for an economy gone awry, and a Wall Street run amok.

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Some years back - it must have been more than a decade now - my brother was working in middle management (management accounting) in an European Bank.  Everything seemed to be on the up and up, and the economy worldwide was chugging along; and then the news broke.  The bank wanted to cut costs, and the whole department that my brother worked was eliminated.  News got out, that the backoffice functions were relocating to India.

I can't remember exactly when this was, but it's at the beginning of the globalized trend, when corporations, large and small, suddenly found religion and realized that they could get the same bodycount from India for a substantially reduced salary level and pretty much no benefits.  There's no hassle from unions in India either.  The Indians were scrambling to work in an office of overseas companies inside an air-conditioned cubicle.  Never mind that they needed to work the graveyard shifts in order to accommodate the timezone differences with most of the developed countries (where the corporate offices and customers really reside).

My brother has always been reticent.  He's not one that talks about feelings.  Some years later, my sister-in-law declares that my brother has Asperger Syndrome.  I find it almost comical.  I have this feeling that my brother has been in depression for a long time; but, being a nurse as she is, I don't think my sister-in-law ever truly understands him.  In any case, her declaration never does anything good; afterall, what good does it do if you have a "diagnosis" with no follow-up or treatment?  Ah, but she's a whole new story, for another day.

I do remember how bitter my parents were when they got the news that my brother was laid off.  Afterall, they have the same notion as most of those in the article have had, that if you work hard and are good at your job, you will be appreciated, and you work your way up the management ladder.  It took my parents a very long time, perhaps even longer than my brother, to accept the fact that he's going to eventually just treat this as an early retirement (from the very prime age of his mid 40s).  Even though my brother has resigned to that fact, and he's found other things to keep his mind busy; I'm doubtful if my mom, in particular, ever gets over the rejection that her only son got, in the form of firing and prolonged unemployment.

My parents feel bitter too, that my brother seems to be still being picky about what jobs to apply for.  From their perspective, if he's desperate enough, he should try harder, and cast a wider net in his job search.  He never did.  Eventually, after some years, all his previous contacts - and he's never good at networking with people anyways - fade out, and he's pretty much shut out in his own ivory tower, working on a pet project that has been going on for the past ten years, with little to show for.

Everytime I read others' life stories like those less fortunate ones who remain unemployed, I think about my brother.  Oftentimes I'm unsure what and how to offer help to him.  I'm not sure if he wants to go back to the corporate world, or if he can adjust back to corporate workplace at all.  Perhaps it might as well that he takes early retirement, since he seems to look a tad bit more cheery than in the past.

I don't want to treat him like a loser.  He's a very smart and intelligent man, and his insights on things can be startling (though at times he tends to have tunnel vision).  All I can think of, is the tremendous loss of talent; so much unfulfilled promises; so much broken dreams.  And, multiple that by millions of times (for those who are still unemployed and underemployed), and one can only appreciate the amount of wasted talents to society as a whole.  There's so much loss of productivity.

BUT, corporations don't see things that way.  They make calculated moves, measured by dollars and cents.  They don't measure intangible, abstract human costs (and why would they care anyways?), not to the individuals, nor to society as a whole.  That's what I feel Romney is good at, in cutting costs, boosting profits, and fattening the bottomline and pocket books of the investors and the wealth (ie. those who don't need to work anymore) when he's at Bain Capital.  For all that, Romeny wants us to believe that it's fair that these investors should be taxed at 15% while those who actually toll to work for a living should pay 35% taxes.  Go figure.

I'm not a proponent of socialism, and I don't believe in governments creating jobs, just for the sake of creating jobs to keep people busy.  (Just look at what happens to Greece, and its very bloated public sector that threatens to cripple the whole nation with its huge unjustifiable salary and pension obligations.)  There must be, however, some threshold by which the costs (salary+benefit) of Joe Blo are measured.  The quality of work that oftentimes is in direct linear relationship to the costs that the staff are paid must also taken into account.  But I don't see the corporate sectors (not only in US, but around the world) behave like good corporate citizens; more often than not, they exemplify very bad corporate citizenship.

Although it's been smooth sailing for me during the past few downturns, including the tech bubble burst in 2000, and the property market and financial market meltdown in 2008, I must admit I've lost substantial confidence in the corporate private sectors, in particular, Big Corps, in stepping up and doing the right thing.  Naturally, the keyword here - should any lawyer type parse my words - is the word the "right" thing.  That's because what's right to the corporate oftentimes are not the right thing for individuals anymore.  (It's no longer the big corps like GE and IBM and GM and Ford after World War II.)

To that, I'd say, Congress and Obama should re-regulate big corps, especially banks and financial institutions that have been left to their own device for far too long by the likes of Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin.  I'm truly, truly sick of this.  If we don't do this, there's going to be another repeat of the 2008 financial meltdown in a few years.  Just look at the $2 billion blunder of JPM.  These folks are incapable of policing themselves.  If GOP would tell us otherwise, they're lying through their teeth.