Forgotten Millions Still Matter

Divided families, dwindling finances, foreclosed homes, totally jobless – that’s what life has meant for millions of Americans from 2007 to today. Yet for the employed, especially politicians in Washington, not much has changed.

Turn on the TV news today and you see little about the jobless and underemployed – 13.7 million and 8.3 million Americans, respectively. It might be argued our leaders care more about the Mideast and the federal budget deficit.

The April edition of Reader’s Digest offers the ugly truth about the greatest economic collapse in United States since the Great Depression of the 1930s:

“More than half of all U.S. workers either lost their jobs or were forced to take cuts in hours or pay during the recession,’’ RD says. “The unluckiest suffered prolonged unemployment, bankruptcies, or foreclosures, which are now at 65-year highs.”

The icing on the cake, by way of New York Times Op-ed columnist Paul Krugman, is simply this:

“More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed.

Difficult To Escape

“It might not be so bad if the jobless could expect to find new employment fairly soon, but unemployment has become a trap, one that’s very difficult to escape,’’ Krugman says.

“There are almost five times as many unemployed workers as there are job openings; the average unemployed worker has been jobless for 37 weeks, a post-World War II record.

Krugman, professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, asserts our nation is well under way to creating “a permanent underclass of the jobless.”

How can that be?

Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, says part of the answer may be that the jobless tend to stay that way, and those who still have jobs are feeling more secure than they did a few years ago.

Layoffs and buyouts spiked during the crisis of 2008-09 but have fallen since then, perhaps reducing the sense of urgency, Krugman says.

The U.S. economy now suffers from low hiring, not high firing, so things don’t look so bad — as long as you’re willing to write off the unemployed and underemployed, according to Krugman.

Closer To Home

Take, for example, a former employer of mine, Gannett Co. Inc., the largest publicly owned newspaper publisher in America.

Under CEO Craig Dubow, GCI has eliminated 20,000 jobs since 2005 -- nearly four of every 10 employees, according to the Gannett Blog, an independent daily journal about the company.

It’s not a stretch to believe a good number of those former Gannett journalists remain unemployed or underemployed. And keep in mind this is just one of many industries slammed by the recession.

The Great Recession was a cold slap in the face for many of us who enjoyed the 1990s boom, when technology advances and soaring stock prices offered unlimited potential – even a hint of early retirement, or at least a secure one.

The Bitter Pill

Today’s reality is quite another matter. Even so, millions of unemployed and underemployed should not simply be written off because it’s politically convenient to have them fade from the spotlight.

For those among us who survived the recession relatively unscathed, good for you and your family!

But while you continue to enjoy the fruits of your labors, please take a moment to remember the less fortunate, your former co-workers.

Urge your elected officials to do the right thing by enacting a “real” jobs bill that puts people back to work permanently, not in some temporary make-work (pork) project.

Stealing some lyrics from the Police song, “Invisible Sun,” nobody should be relegated “to play the part of a statistic on a government chart” and why should they?

Let's all keep that in mind as we move forward and out of this mess, together.

Ken Cocuzzo