Joe,
For four months now, I have perused the help wanted ads. I've gone to interviews, sent off countless resumes and emails about jobs. Some of the job ads raised my blood pressure. They want someone who can drive a truck, pick up 75 pounds, make a dozen stops per day, handle all the paperwork, the phone calling and appointment setting, do repairs on the truck as needed, and drive 12 hours a day. For $11.00 an hour. Right.
I left my last job because of a conflict with my dispatcher over a safety issue. He wanted me to continue driving after I'd told him I couldn't maintain the minimum road speed with an empty trailer in 40 m.p.h. gusts. It was unsafe, but he didn't care. He's learned from Bush that it doesn't matter what the underclass thinks. It doesn't matter if they die, as long as they try.
I've got better ideas. I have a family at home I'd like to spend some time with before I die. So when I got back home I cleaned out my truck. I quit. This was a job that I loved too. I had been with this company for four years. I was a trainer for them. I taught other drivers how to do their job. But my dispatcher got a wild hair about the same time that my mother was in the hospital with only hours left to live. Instead of sending me back home to California from Georgia, they sent me to Illinois. I was fuming. Eventually, I did manage to get a dispatcher to see the light, and she swapped me out with another driver for a west-bound load. But she fired me from her fleet six weeks later, because as she said, I had "service failures." Never mind that these service failures were nothing more than delayed deliveries due to adverse weather conditions. You give me a light load and send me out in 70 mph winds? I'm going to shut down til it's safe to drive. I'm not going to kill myself trying to get your stupid load of cotton candy across the country.
So the help wanted ads are depressing. When I got an interview for a sales position at the local car dealership, I went out and spent some money on clothes for the occasion. I wanted to look decent. I wanted to look the part. And the interview went well. The personnel manager was laughing at the stories I told him about truck driving. It went well, and I had all the right answers to his questions. The one thing I didn't have was YOUTH. And male parts. I am an old lady. Yup. Uneducated, underfunded, and unemployed. Evidently unemployable too. I don't have a college education. I spent my youth raising kids, until my husband died.
I applied for unemployment, and was turned down. I just couldn't believe what was happening to me. I appealed the decision. The employment office said it would take four to six weeks for them to set a date for the hearing. I was in shock. How can I survive on thin air for that long? The date was moved back once for about 10 days to the end of June. I haven't worked since March. So the day finally arrived. I drove the 40 miles to the hearing site. I think I got the judge to understand. I hope. But it will be another four to six weeks before I hear their decision. Yah, they drag it out forever and ever. By the time I see any money, I will be so far behind on my house payment, I'm already worried I could lose the house.
I am in the process of adding the passenger endorsement to my license so I can drive school buses. It's a long and expensive process for someone with no job. But hopefully this will help get me back on my feet. If I do this, then I can take a class at college. One by one, or two by two. Whatever I gotta do to get educated. While I drove the truck college was a pipe dream. With 11 hour driving days, 15 hour work days, there wasn't much time for anything besides a Carl's Jr. burger, if I was lucky, and the south 40 of the truck stop. I longed for the ability to get some education. To have a future. To live like a normal person. I don't know what normal is anymore, now. I'm still just trying to survive in a world that hates old ladies.
Patricia
California
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Dear Patricia,
For a long time now honest and dedicated working Americans have been treated like meat on the hoof, and it slowly and steadily gets worse. As to gaining more formal education, it is always a good thing, especially for personal intellectual growth, but not necessarily any solution to America's treatment of workers. I cannot think of any sort of education an older person such as you and I could get that would realistically improve our standing and security in a country that legislates any economic wealth we achieve right out from under us and puts it into the hands of the rich. At least, that has been my experience.
I have come to examine alternatives to the standard American life of unaffordable house payments for a single family dwelling, the staggering energy and heating costs that are barreling down the pike toward us, and a host of other things most people will not believe until they get here. And one of those things that makes much sense to me is alternative lifestyles -- banding together in living arrangements with other like souls facing the same stress and difficulties. It's only gonna get worse as we reach the age where we either do or do not get all or part of the Social Security insurance we paid for all these years.
So my feeling is that we should move in that direction early. We're not going to be able to make the house and heating payments anyway on an SS check. No white knight is gonna ride in to save us. Not in a country that has to borrow every day just to pay the interest on its national debt (not a sexy topic with average working folks, but one that will eventually grind their lives down even farther.) Leave that sort of naive trust to younger folks who have children and who must necessarily entertain more false hope than we weathered old birds who've seen previous financial foxes comer to feast in the henhouse. The only alternative left for us is to find alternatives.
For instance, my wife and I live in a house whose standard operating costs have risen to the point of unaffordability and will only get worse. And in this market the odds of selling it are not too good, though that may yet happen since we have a lot of equity to sacrifice in the market's race to the bottom. Anyway, if it doesn't sell we will find someone else to live with us (actually, more with my wife, since I have chosen to live most of the time very cheaply on $4,000 a year in Central America, away from the Empire) as an equal member of the household to share costs. Now I know Americans have been sold this bill of goods about single family home ownership, etc. But no one ever owns a house anyway except for the banks from whom we rent. Few working people making payments today will ever pay their home off and settle down into retirement in it with reading glasses, a dog and the newspaper.
At any rate, I no longer believe any of the old saws about bootstraps and improving one's self and income to the point of being secure. Despite the charade so many millions of working Americans are conducting -- such as not being a house payment away from homelessness and bankruptcy (miss one and statistically you will never catch up) millions are seeing their homes disappear from under them, which is one of the best kept secrets on the financial page.
In the end, we are never going to gain any ground running around looking for a kind employer among the business class, which looks out for itself first and foremost, and pits people like your trucking dispatcher against fellow workers to do the dirty work in order to keep her own job and the good favor of the owner or boss.
Sorry if I sound like some kinda Dear Abby trying to give advice. It's just that when I hear a heart rending story such as yours I cannot help but share my take on dealing with this utterly exploitative system of ours -- the one that will chew us up and spit us out, and complain that the old ones have too many bones.
Because I do not want to sound like an old bitter sourpuss, let me leave you with this heartening news. The Dow Jones advanced 500 points in a single week, hitting 14,000. According to the newspaper in front of me, "Americans have never been richer, jobs have never been more plentiful." And columnist William Kristol writes that we owe it all to the tax cuts for the rich and outsourcing, which has only strengthend the economy by making it more competitive, and all Americans more successful.
Now doesn't that make you feel lots better?
In art and labor,
Joe
