Tag: unemployment

Unemployment And Suicide

On By southwerkIn business ethics, ethics, Government Failure4 Comments

What some think of the Unemployed.
When my son comes home from school, he tells me how his friends explain unemployment as a matter of laziness and sponging off the government. My son to his credit does not let this go unchallenged. I talk at home about the people who have lost their manufacturing jobs that they have been at for 15 – 20 years trying to find a new career where I teach. They don’t look lazy to me.

I have been unemployed fortunately not recently. It was a terrible experience.

And it seems like it’s a terrible experience for others as well. Read the following –

I was informed about this report by Homophilosophicus.

A report published earlier this year by the National Suicide Research Foundation; ”Suicide and Employment Status during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger Economy,” published in the European Journal of Public Heath, showed overwhelming statistical evidence supporting a direct link between unemployment and suicide. Ella Arensman Ph.D., the foundation’s research director, commented to the Irish Times (June 7th, 2010) that this analysis showed that while unemployed men were at risk of suicide, unemployed women were at significantly greater risk. One explanation for this, heretofore anomalous ratio, is the fact that since the early 1990s women have been increasing represented in the Irish workforce. This study concluded that unemployment was related to a threefold suicide risk increase in men, and double this in women. In 1987 there were 245 registered suicides in the Irish Republic (not including undetermined deaths), a figure which rose to 478 by 1998; representing an one hundred and ten percent increase in the Irish suicide rate in little over a decade. Professor Kevin Malone from University College Dublin’s school of medicine and medical science at Saint Vincent’s University Hospital commented that the 527 recorded deaths by suicide in Ireland in 2009 probably did not reflect the real numbers. In March of this year Jane Walshe, in an article for Irish Central, stated that “Ireland’s property collapse has led to 29 definite suicides.” All of the scientific research is pointing to a firm relationship between Economics and concrete examples of human suffering.

The Irish example is relevant here because similar studies in the United States demonstrate similar numbers and I wanted to talk about the pain of unemployment on a broader scale than the United States.

We often think of ourselves as a special case different in every way from the rest of the world. Certainly there are areas where that’s true. But it’s not always true. We don’t have to be myopic in our view of the world. Their examples especially the Greek and Irish austerity programs may become reality here soon.

I think that the laziness explanation of unemployment is a psychological defense. It implies moral virtue on the part of those still working and an “it can’t happen to me” comfort on the other.

I worked in a homeless shelter for a while. I’ve seen a well dressed middle class family come in and get processed. They didn’t look too confident. But I’ll bet you that in six months when he got employed again, he and his family went right back to the ranks of the righteous. It was just an accident. It won’t happen again. I am hard worker and I’m safe.

There is no safety and the pain of unemployment is real.

As a nation, it might well be more important to get people employed than to make sure the banks are profitable.

James Pilant

Hardship Withdrawals Reach Ten Year High

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Economic measurement, ethics, Government Failure

These kinds of withdrawals indicate sever financial distress. They are an absolute last resort in most households.

Quoting from the article – To be eligible for a 401(k) hardship withdrawal, individuals must demonstrate an immediate and heavy financial need, according to IRS regulations. Certain medical expenses; costs relating to the purchase of a primary home; tuition and education expenses; payments to prevent eviction or foreclosure on a primary home; burial or funeral expenses; and repair of damage to a primary home meet the IRS definition and are permitted by most 401(k) plans.

Forty five percent of those seeking a hardship withdrawal this year got one last year.

It’s another sign that his economy is not getting better. It’s getting worse.

During the last great depression, the government created jobs and increased spending, developing enormous projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam.

America will not recover until there are jobs for every American who wants one.

James Pilant

Look At This!

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Economic measurement, ethics, Government Failure

I found this on the web last night. It’s a video of American unemployment by county. The film runs month by month and in about a minute you see how unemployment developed in the U.S. over the last two years. It starts in January 2007 and runs until May of 2010. High employment counties have light colors. High unemployment counties are darker. You can watch the whole nation darken in a two year period, it’s very striking.

No Vacation – Keep your job?

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, ethics, Government Failure

ABC news reports that many Americans are declining to use their vacation time. Only 57 percent of Americans are taking their full vacation time. And what makes this story even more bizarre, Americans average only 13 days of vacation.

Want to see the numbers?
Italians 42 days
France 37
Canada 26
Japan 25
Korea 25

United States 13 days

How did we get here? Aren’t we supposed to be the richest country on earth? How did Americans wind up with an average of 13 days of vacation and far, far worse, almost half unwilling to use their full time apparently for fear of losing their jobs?

It takes a decoupling of morals from business. When a businessman, when an employer, looks at his workers and says to himself, “That one is using his vacation time. I can do without him,” we have arrived at a bad place.

And yet, where is the outrage (besides mine)? Foreigners in far less wealthy countries give their workers in many cases three times the vacation time of American workers and what’s more they take the time.

“Let’s get rid of the people who work here for fifty weeks a year and take a vacation.” How do you even think like that? What kind of thought process produces that kind of cruel immorality?

It is written: Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.

The King James Bible prescribes better treatment for an ox than that given American workers. The ox gets some share of its labor that could be denied. American workers have no benefits that cannot be denied if even the legal ones put you in danger of being fired.

And I don’t want to hear, “They have to do it to compete.” That’s a nasty age old excuse for any kind of immoral (and often incompetent) act. You could compete better with workers who have no where to go, who don’t get minimum wage or get pregnant or have bad days or get ill or don’t look like other people, etc. Where do you want to stop? You can’t. Talk about slippery slope. If any vile, virtually criminal, act can be justified by the need to compete, there is no bottom standard to stop at, no place of safety, no island of ethics.

You might ask me as a business ethics teacher, what it’s like to teach that subject in a country where taking your vacation days can cost you your job. No fun. It’s preaching against alcoholism in a saloon, safe sex in a Thai brothel, hypocrisy in mega church. In short, it’s hard and it’s not getting any easier. You always think that it’s just got to turn a corner that some limit has been reached and it hasn’t.

James Pilant

Screwing The Public With “Financial Restraint”

On By southwerkIn business ethics, Capitalism, Economic measurement, Government Failure1 Comment

Keith Chrostowski at the Kansas City Star provides a good summary of the arguments for fiscal restraint during this economic disaster while calling for extension of unemployment benefits. I find the arguments for such restraint to be ridiculous. Chrostowski only summarizes these arguments and I have no problem with his views but the arguments for fiscal restraint during this crisis border on the bizarre.

Where were all those people when the Bush tax cuts were put in place? Where were all these people when during a period of massive public approval and unity, George Bush asked for no tax to finance the war? Where were all these people when Congress approved an enormous expansion in Medicaid? Is it only when the crisis concerns the basic middle class American that we discover we are in a crisis?

Where were all these economists when the estate tax (fortunately only for a while) was repealed? Where were all these formerly employed politicians (Alan Simpson, are you reading this?) now shouting “fiscal restraint?”

It is hard to describe my anger at these “born again” budgeteers. My students suffer. The people I know suffer. This economy is damaging lives and destroying the hopes and dreams of tens of millions of Americans. And now, only now, do these cowardly wretches find the fortitude to challenge spending. It seems you can make wars, cut taxes and do every kind of strange appropriation until the American people are hurting and then and only then, must we become “tough minded” and fiscally concerned.

We exercise fiscal restraint according to Keynes when the economy is healthy. This one isn’t. We labor under intense levels of unemployment, a little under 10%. If we count those who have simply given up looking for work, the number climbs toward 16% which is roughly the same as in the great depression. I tell you with conviction that this recession is becoming and may already be a depression and our leaders are unable and unwilling to meet that challenge.

We are rapidly moving toward desperate times. Each day I drive to work and see businesses closing. Each day I see nothing to give me hope for my students and confidence in the economy. Each day I wait and hope and pray that the leadership of this country will do the simple and basic things necessary to employ the great and good American people. This people who have astonished the world with their achievements and can do so once again if only given the opportunity.

But I know this is not going to happen. This people do not appear to be worth a second glance. When fiscal pain must in the eyes of these unsought comedians, these fact distant fools, be felt, it is only when the great mass of Americans are enduring the pain and suffering of evil economic times brought on by the rapacious stupidity of the financial elite.

James Pilant