Being unemployed isn’t all shits and giggles. It can actually be quite distressing. Firstly, there’s the having no money. Then there’s the fact that you expend almost as much effort and energy trying to find work as you did when you were in work. Then there’s the having no money. Then there’s the constant stream of “thanks, but no thanks” or simple stony silence from employers (especially in a recession). Then there’s the having no money. Then there’s the stigma around claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance and the inescapable sense that someone, somewhere, thinks you’re basically stealing their money. And then there’s the having no money… Or at least having so little that what you do get goes on things like making sure you can get to the Jobcentre to claim your next payment or getting to interviews. After that, if you’re lucky, you might just have enough left to think about possibly eating some food.
That probably sounds a bit melodramatic to you. Well, this is a personal blog, and ssth isn’t going to try and educate you on the myriad cases of people ending up in desperate situations through nothing more complicated than losing their job and struggling to find a new one. If you’re not sold on it now, you won’t be by the end of some obscure Scouser’s blog post. In fact, now that you know he’s a Scouser, you’re probably feeling even less sympathetic. No matter how many stories of repossession, homelessness, drug addiction or mental illness you come across that begin with “I couldn’t hold down a job” or “I was laid off”, you’ll probably not have changed your view that these people are no more than social Darwinian losers. So this post may not be for you.
ssth‘s story, quite fortunately, doesn’t involve repossession, homelessness, drug addiction or mental illness. But it does involve the self-esteem crushing, soul-destroying sense of rejection that comes from being turned down for job after job; the sense that people are judging you for claiming off the state; the hopeless feeling that you’ll never find a job because all you have is a Politics degree and that you’ll still be living in your parents’ house by the age of 40, assuming they can hang around till then.
It was exactly a year ago this month that ssth‘s previous employer – his only employer since graduating – made almost 40 people redundant by ceasing trading. It must have been a tough day for that poor man, having sacrificed his marriage and, to some degree, his health to build up a company over almost 40 years – a company that had seen off several economic downturns and come out stronger. Telling that many people they no longer had a job can’t have been pleasant, either. Up until that point, ssth had naively filed the global economic catastrophe away in his mind with things like 9/11 or the Iraq War – traumatic and appalling but unlikely to affect him.
How wrong he was. For ssth was to spend the next year with his life effectively on hold, unable to convince anyone that he had the relevant skills or experience, and therefore unable to finally escape the shackles of living under his parents’ roof well into his 20s. When you have a job, it’s easy to tire of the routine, of the sameness of each day. But when you don’t have a job, you tire of the opposite – of all the different times you wake up, of the total lack of certainty in anything that comes from having no money. Mostly you tire of the rejection. They tell you never to take it personally and that it’s a feature of job searching. You’ll always get more rejections than acceptances. That’s how it works. Fine. Especially fine if you’re one of those irritating thick-skinned types who handles anything with aplomb. But if you naturally take things to heart, there’s only so many times you can be told that you’re effectively not good enough for something before it starts to chip away at you. As for leisure time, forget it. Time spent relaxing, away from the trials and tribulations of trying to get back into work would be almost as welcome as a standard holiday you might take when employed. But you don’t have time for that. You’re unemployed. Plenty would tell you that time spent away from your jobhunt is theft.
Luckily for ssth, he returned to work this week, almost exactly a year later. But even that comes with its own set of problems. When you’re paid a month in hand and yet your JSA stops, and you have to commute 60 miles a day, how exactly are you meant to live? Until the end of September, ssth will be working in the knowledge that he’d have been better off remaining unemployed. Obviously that’s not true in the long term, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that somehow the system has actually reduced the incentive to take a job. Which is stupid.
Still, it could be worse. There are millions still unemployed and many more who, unknowingly, are headed for that same fate. We can stigmatise the unemployed all we like. But what would you do if it happened to you?
MJK
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