by Ian Rygiel | Mar 28, 2014 | Ian's Blog
As The Great Recession turns into The Slow Recovery, I have noticed an increasing number of articles written about the psychological effects of long-term unemployment (if you’re still reading after that opener, I applaud your fortitude). While I always find the statistics sobering, as someone who has had their life deeply affected by the recession, I often find myself disagreeing with how those stats are applied to the inner thoughts of the working class. This article in particular (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26669971 ), written by Debbie Siegelbaum, deals with the alarming fact that companies have begun discriminating against the long-termed unemployed. I’ve lived through this myself, and I can attest that there is no hurry to grant interviews to folks who have been out of work for months at a time. As Siegelbaum points out, in 1950, the average length of unemployment was just 11.8 weeks; in 2014 it is 37.1 weeks. My experience with this phenomenon occurred as my first real job as an educator in a public high school ended. When the recession hit, I was let go along with a sizable portion of my coworkers. Despite my teaching certification, which I received through an MA program, I found the prospects of getting an interview growing dim. After sending out countless job applications, and receiving only one interview in over a year, I began to settle for part-time positions; not limited to the field of education mind you. For a while I worked as a day laborer, scraping tile and hauling all manner of things from refuse to cement and eventually found a part-time gig loading trucks on an overnight...
by Ian Rygiel | Mar 23, 2014 | Ian's Blog, The Poorgeoisie
For as long as I can remember, the American Dream was tangible: Get an education, work hard, and prosper. It was simple. It was straightforward. It was fair. It was American. And in my experience, it’s all we 20, and now 30, -somethings wanted. Yet, here I am, and very likely, here you are. We’re killing ourselves in dead-end jobs. We work in warehouses, in the back of trucks, and behind grills. We wait tables, we pour coffee, and we live paycheck to paycheck with bachelor and masters degrees that we earned by placing ourselves in crippling debt. We are a generation of highly capable and motivated individuals. We are highly educated. We appreciate high culture, art, and music, yet our paychecks barely leave our encouraged champagne tastes within our beer budgets. It should come to no one’s surprise then, that we are a highly transient and restless generation. We are a generation yearning for the challenges we were trained to face. We want to work, and we want a fair wage for that work, yet both have been denied to us. We are the lost and forgotten. We are the discarded. We are the poorgeoisie....
