By Sheldon Greaves

The national upheaval caused by the murder of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin has dominated the headlines for the last few days, and rightly so. You can almost feel a qualitative difference in the anger, the frustration, the yearning for justice. But at the same time, we are also facing a crisis of another sort as the nation teeters on the brink of an economic abyss. One is actually hearing the phrase “economic collapse” spoken by experts who tend to choose their words carefully.

Where We Are Now

Sadly, we’ve been here before, several times. The last great recession that began in 2007 allegedly ended around 2011, but it has to be one of the weakest “recoveries” in living memory. A lot of good jobs went away for good, and were replaced by the “gig economy”, which is a polite way to describing jobs that stink. We have even seen the return of the American hobo in the form of workers who drive from gig to gig, living out of their cars or RVs. The Trump administration made things worse, and then COVID descended, and here we are. As of this writing, somewhere between 36 and 40 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits. More than 40% of low-income Americans have lost their jobs. Current aid and stimulus packages are running out for the little people. Over 107,000 have died from COVID. The hasty repoening in some states, combined with the recent mass protests, are certain to give us another spike in cases and deaths. Another side-effect of the pandemic is that a record number of Americans are in danger of going hungry.

Through it all, government remains unresponsive to the needs of ordinary people. This was true before Trump, but is now more visible and more acute. The Republican-controlled Senate steadfastly refuses to pass any additional aid for the vast bulk of Americans who need it. However, government neglect of anyone who isn’t obscenely wealthy was demonstrated in a 2014 study showing that ordinary people have essentially zero influence on policy making in Washington, DC.

This is the setting for what we are all about to experience.

What to Expect

Between COVID, a worse-than-usual recession or (more likely) depression, further ravages of climate change such as fiercer hurricanes and a nasty fire season, it’s going to get rough. A lot of people have already lost their jobs. More will follow. Barring any heroic measures by the government to alleviate the problem, we are looking at another epidemic of one of the most insidious, destructive societal scourge: long-term unemployment.

Having experienced this myself, I cannot overstate how damaging this can be. I’ve written about the long-term effects of joblessness elsewhere, but here are some of the more salient effects based on my own experience. After about six months, it starts messing with your head. You start to doubt yourself and your ability to take care of your loved ones. Every hour becomes a constant exercise in second-guessing yourself, your judgement, your worth. Being poor messes, seriously, with your ability to make decisions. Even simple cognitive tasks can become fiendishly difficult. Planning long-term becomes an exercise in futility. For someone living on the precipice, even a minor setback can spill your plans. You will also find yourself with a permanent spreadsheet in your head; you will know to within a buck or two exactly how much you have in your bank account, and even the most mundane or hypothetical purchase will be weighed against that figure.

Certain voices in our society will inveigh against the impoverished, the poor, the unemployed and insist that it’s all your fault, that you are unemployed because you lack character, that “the jobs are out there” even when they are not. They will tell you to “start a business” even though you have no capital or cushion and that most new businesses fail. You’ll hear a lot about bootstraps. One learns to savor (well, sort of) the irony that one’s powerlessness has the ability to upend entire economies. Who would’ve guessed? The truth is, that poverty should be treated like a disease, but that’s another discussion.

By contrast, you will also learn who your friends are, who is really bent on doing good in the world. You will learn that it does not take much to save someone for a day or a week. I also observed that the poor can be amazingly generous, as are some rich people who remember what it was like to be poor. There are also well-meaning agencies who want to help you, but others infected with a conservative ideology that the best way to solve any social problem is to apply the right punishment. Job agencies are a toss-up. Some do seem to work. Others couldn’t place a stray cat with a crazy old lady.

Response and Lessons Learned

Here are some suggestions for the coming hard times, and lessons I learned from many years of un- or underemployment, in no particular order:

You must take care of yourself. Sometimes the best way to do that is by taking care of others. In the last recession we saw the formation of common security clubs where people would meet to exchange job leads, information, provide mutual support, network, and so on. These seem to have faded a bit, and they would be harder to do in the age of COVID, but it’s an idea that needs to make a comeback.

Avoid succumbing to the social imperative that you must spend every waking moment looking for that next job. Take some time for yourself. One of the worst traps I discovered was how I would stop doing activities–even things I truly loved doing–because there was no clear potential payout. This brings me to another important point: the bootstrap myth is bullshit. It’s not only a myth, it’s a con. Nobody “makes it” on their own, and some interesting research recently has shown that a large part of our financial success in life is due to pure, dumb luck. Another recent finding is that there is zero correlation between talent and financial success.

It is not your fault if you were laid off (if you were fired for cause, that’s different). There will be caustic voices trying to paint you and people like you as lazy, unambitious, irresponsible, the Cause of All Our Woes, etc. Don’t listen to them.

Poor people are not “lacking in responsibility”, they are drowning in it. When you’re poor, everything is your responsibility because you can’t afford to have someone else fix the car, handle that legal matter, watch the kids, deal with that health issue that seems to be getting worse, and so on. It’s all on you.

Be prepared to occasionally do business off the books.

Receiving help from others is hard, but if someone offers, accept it. Don’t let your ego or some misbegotten notion of “rugged individualism” cause you to pass on it.

The stock market won’t tell you much about the state of the economy, having mostly decoupled itself from the economy long ago.

Because being poor or unemployed for a long time messes with your decision-making ability, scammers will target you. Be wary. Never make a decision on a short timeline.

Most advice offered by a richer person to a poorer person tends to be useless in proportion to the economic distance between the two.

Job hunting is one of the most soul-crushing activities out there. Networking is the only thing that really works, but the sweet spot is not networking with your friends, but with friends of friends. It’s going to take some time; currently it takes the average job seeker five months to find a new job. Your mileage may vary. Be prepared for a long haul.

Yes, craft a resume, but realize that the audience will probably be a machine. The magic words the algorithms search for are constantly changing, so try to keep up. I maintain that resumes are in fact an as-yet unclassified form of folk magic. They are phylacteries against poverty that we are encouraged to strew about like Tibetan prayer flags. Better to hone an online profile on LinkedIn. Offer a resume only after a live encounter, like a business card.

Human Resource departments exist as much to keep people out of a company as to bring them in. Avoid going through them at all costs. Instead, try to make direct contact with a manager who is hiring.

Finally…

Raise holy hell. It is not supposed to be this way. Government is supposed to take care of its vulnerable. The stronger societies do this. You’ve got some time, write letters, make phone calls, editorialize, but most of all organize. Given the current vacuum of leadership and good governance, this is an opportunity to get together with others and find some new ways to create stronger, more resilient communities and local economies. Worker coops, farmers markets, food exchanges, community gardens, creating local currencies… there are many ways for people to circumvent the inefficient, brittle, exploitative systems that drive so much of this dysfunction.

We can get through this, but only together.