EDITOR’S VIEWPOINT/Freedom isn’t free
I was an economics major until I took my first economics course. I got dizzy looking at the relentless parade of charts and graphs, all of which appeared to be an inorganic digest of life. Even today, the economists who draw conclusions from an output or index only occasionally offer an emotional caveat such as “nervousness about the war” or “uncertainty about the outcome of the election.” However, because of its clear relationship to people, the unemployment rate is one economic term I can understand.
However human the toll, we still discuss unemployment as if it wasn’t really happening to anyone. For example, the rate is usually described impersonally by using percentages. No one would describe other personal matters in percentages (“Honey, I’m 60 percent sure that I’m in love with you, but the other 40 percent is not sure what that means.”).
Discussions about unemployment can become slightly more personal when we convert the current percentage (5.6) into the number of unemployed people (8.2 million). That number becomes still more personal, if not more frightening, when you add the 5.96 million people who the Labor Department describes as those who are “marginally attached.” That phrase sounds personal, but maybe in a way you wouldn’t want to think about the unemployed.
Who are these unofficial unemployed workers who conceivably could jump back into the job market and mess up the appearance of a recovery? They include people who have not looked for a job in the past four weeks or have given up looking.
Nevertheless, the employment picture is brighter than it has been for several years. The feds reported another payroll increase in June — the 10th month in a row. Reminding us that the unemployment figures represent individuals, the U.S. Conference of Mayors says that employment is a qualitative as well as a quantitative issue. The association’s Employment Outlook Special Report, issued in June, predicts that the $43,950 paid to workers who lost their jobs between 2001 and 2003 will be replaced with an average $38,839 wage for jobs gained between 2004 and 2006. That assumption was casually confirmed by another recent news item, which noted that immigrants fill one-third of the new jobs that have been recently created.
Being unemployed — something that I’ve only experienced for two months in the last 30 years — is as serious a problem as an individual faces. Having a job provides more than a sense of purpose. Working is the main way that ordinary people pay for their freedom. We often talk about family values, but a job is the very center of this core value because work allows us to provide our families much of what freedom has to offer. Freedom is all about opportunities, and where there’s little chance of having a job, the underpinnings of civilized society becomes endangered.
So the next time you read something about the unemployed, don’t think about the percentages or even the numbers of people that it represents. Think about yourself and your family and what it would be like not to have a job. Only then will you have a real idea of what it means to be unemployed.