Permanent Army of 1 Million : Discouraged Jobless Face World on Threads of Hope
Since he lost his assembly line job 2 1/2 years ago, Gerard Dumais has filled out 100 job applications. For his trouble, he got one interview--and no job. Now, Dumais said: “I know before I go looking I won’t get the job, because I know what I’ve been through.”
Dumais is a “discouraged worker,” part of what many economists fear is a permanent army of at least a million people who have given up looking for work. They are not counted among the officially unemployed, and they retain only the loosest connections to the job market. They hang by threads of hope until hope disappears, and then they drop out of sight.
The resulting misery is profound for the individuals themselves and spreads through whole communities. In some areas around the country, labor groups, social agencies and city and state governments have become so concerned that they are devoting scarce resources to programs designed to combat the desperation that many discouraged workers say they feel.
“I don’t think I could kill myself,” said Verna Toomey, a former convenience store manager here who has not been able to find a steady job since 1982. “But it’s entered my mind.”
In June, according to the U.S. Labor Department, 109.7 million Americans held jobs and 8.4 million were looking for work but could not find it. In addition to those traditional unemployed, there were 1.1 million officially discouraged workers--so called because they had not bothered to look for work for the last four weeks.
About 70% of the discouraged workers were women and 26% were black. Beyond those disproportionately represented groups, certain kinds of individuals are particularly likely to slip from unemployed to discouraged:
--Workers of middle age or older who have lost long-held jobs and, because of their age, represent poor investments to employers who might retrain them. James Markle Sr., a York businessman who is an advocate for the unemployed, said many industries are trying to “unload the older workers and get younger people to work for less.”
--Young people who have never worked and have so few skills that they may never hold steady jobs. Jack Ward, director of an AFL-CIO jobs program in Kenosha, Wis., where thousands of American Motors Corp. workers have lost their jobs, called illiteracy “a hidden problem” among many of the discouraged. “When you start talking about filling out applications,” he said, “they shy away.”
--Injured workers who are frozen out of the job market because some employers regard them as bad risks. Toomey, for example, said she was fired unfairly from her job after she hurt her back lifting a milk crate and sued for her medical expenses.
Lack Self-Confidence
Each kind of discouraged worker needs different kind of help. But more than merely learning skills that would make them employable, discouraged workers of all stripes must overcome the conviction, which grows each time they are turned down for a job, that they cannot be productive human beings.
“You go into a place expecting not to get hired,” Toomey said. “You start thinking that you’re not human anymore.”
Carolyn Young, Catholic Charities’ coordinator of services to York’s unemployed, said repeated failures to find work become “an ego or pride issue. We try to teach them that it’s okay to hurt.”
The numbers of discouraged workers predictably follow unemployment trends. “People come out of the woodwork when the jobs are there,” said Michael Podgursky, assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts.
As unemployment remains at about 7%, some advocates for the unemployed worry that the nation already views that figure--and its accompanying 1.1 million discouraged workers--as acceptable.
Here in Pennsylvania Dutch country, the fear is palpable. This town of 44,000, which replaced Philadelphia as the nation’s capital for nine months in the 1770s, now serves as a painful reminder of what has happened to many American industries--and the people who work in them.
Loss of Jobs Found
The Manufacturers’ Assn. of York found, in a survey, that employment with the area’s 24 largest manufacturers--including the “Big Four” of Caterpillar, Harley-Davidson, Borg-Warner and Allis-Chalmers--dropped from 26,800 to 21,200 in the first half of the 1980s. Now, said Walter Reamer, executive director of the association, there is a “leveling off” of employment among heavy industry. “But that isn’t very reassuring for those people who happen to be on the outside looking in,” he said.
Some economists quibble with the government’s definition of a job search. “There’s no objective way of defining it,” said Sar Levitan, director of the Center for Social Policy Studies at George Washington University. “What is it? Having a beer with a friend and mentioning it?”
What is clear is that many people who say they want jobs actually stop looking at times--for days or weeks or even years--because they believe that no matter how hard they search, they will not be able to find work.
This belief exacts an incalculable human toll, say experts around the nation. Alcoholism, drug abuse and family problems can directly result from discouragement in the job market. The discouraged withdraw, sleep more and watch more television. Many of them blame discrimination because of their weight, age or past union activism. Eventually, however, they begin to question their own competence. Rae Hamilton, spokesman for the National Assn. of Social Workers, calls it “a crisis of confidence.”
Seen as ‘Self-Sustaining’
“That tends to be self-sustaining and shows up in job interviews,” he said. “The longer it goes, the more stress it creates.”
Toomey, 39, who was interviewed in her apartment in nearby Dover, said: “There are days when I don’t feel like walking out the door. It’s safe in here. When I walk out that door, someone’s likely to say no to me.”
Dumais, whose wife has a job, worked for 13 years at Borg-Warner Air Conditioning Inc., which laid him off amid a huge cut in the work force. Rejection, Dumais said, “takes years out of you.”
His anger apparent, Dumais, 54, who has a high school equivalency certificate, said his one job interview was with the local post office, which turned him down for a clerk job because it was “right-handed work” and Dumais is left-handed.
Sooner or later a discouraged worker’s problems can become the whole family’s problems, straining relationships.
Charles and Jeanne Spiker learned that the hard way. Charles, 51, was laid off from his machine operator’s job at Williams Tool in July, 1984, a few months before the tool manufacturing plant closed. After repeated failure to find another job, he said, he reached the point of watching too much “boob tube” and “screaming to the high heavens” before finally saying, “The devil with it.”
“I had to do the pushing,” said Jeanne, 40, who continued to work as a machine operator at York International Corp. (formerly Borg-Warner). “I made my threats” to leave him. “I became very domineering. I came down hard on him many times.”
Pressures Recede
Finally, last spring, Charles got a part-time janitorial job paying $3.50 an hour, half his former wage, and some of the family pressures receded.
During an interview, Jeanne reached out to touch her husband, tears gathering in her eyes. “Charles is a good man,” she said. “He tries. This man has really been trying.”
But just as the Spikers, both with high school educations, began coming to terms with their diminished income, Jeanne was laid off from York. “It’s only our faith that’s going to keep us together now,” she said.
Discouragement affects not just families but friendships as well. Many discouraged workers report that when they lose their jobs, they lose their friends. It is as if friends are afraid of “catching” discouragement.
“You find out how few friends you really have,” said Judy Sechrist, a 40-year-old with a two-year medical secretary degree. “That’s hard to take.”
Sechrist said she was laid off from her job as an accounts receivable clerk in June, 1985, after 19 years at a dental supply firm because “they didn’t think I was doing my job properly.” She hasn’t looked for a job since April. The many refusals “take away your self-esteem,” she said.
Social workers are increasingly concerned about the patterns of anger, depression, frustration and apathy. In her office at Catholic Charities here, Carolyn Young said special attention is needed because many discouraged workers “fall through the cracks in the system.”
‘Project a Weakness’
A 3-year-old program at Young’s agency offers discouraged workers a variety of services, including resume writing, skills testing and job and family counseling. Like similar officials around the country, Young said most of the people who come to her agency are in the 40-to-55 age group and that many are rejected because they “project a weakness,” such as concern over age or weight, during job interviews.
Many here believe the problems faced by discouraged workers are fast becoming the whole community’s problems. Robert Harvison, the liaison between labor and the United Way here, said many discouraged people “are becoming street people and are using our agencies at record rates.”
Trenton, N.J., Mayor Arthur Holland told a House Government Operations subcommittee in March that undercounting the unemployed has become “a serious problem” because it “inhibits our ability in cities to understand the extent of unemployment and to respond accordingly to it.”
Carolyn Golding, director of the U.S. Labor Department’s unemployment insurance service, said the agency is responding with a $5.2-million demonstration project in New Jersey designed to identify likely long-term unemployed people and help retrain them. She also said the government is studying the question of undercounting but does not want to act before it “knows what to fix.”
Rejects Special Programs
Roger Semerad, the department’s assistant secretary for employment and training, rejected the idea of special federal programs for discouraged workers. He said the states already have enough money to address the problem.
The first thing discouraged workers should do, he said, is learn to read if they do not already. “You can’t be retrained if you can’t read,” he said. “Any job that can be done by an illiterate can be done better by a machine.”
Discouraged workers must also be willing to take low-paying jobs rather than not work at all, he said.
Many states and municipal governments are seeking out discouraged workers for special help. Suzanne Schroeder, information officer for the California Employment Development Department, said new job training programs are getting under way to give the state’s 115,000 discouraged workers “a second chance and get them back into the labor force.”
Unions Act to Help
And in the private sector, unions are joining social agencies in trying to help their own. The AFL-CIO has a $1.8-million grant from the Labor Department to help dislocated and discouraged workers around the country with resumes, job searches, testing and even reading and writing.
But Michael McMillan, director of the union’s human resource development institute, said the program serves only “a small percentage of those in need.”
