As we grapple with the new unemployment data, what they don’t tell us is about how this crisis is rippling through America, leaving devastation in its wake.
In researching my next book I have again been reading some of the accounts of the Great Depression. The symbol that keeps coming back to me is of the Dust Storms that swept through the plains during some of the hottest summers on record (check the highest temperature ever recorded for your state and it is quite likely it will be in the 1930s, especially if you live in the Midwest). With the mercury climbing into the 100s day after day–before air conditioning, before rural homes even had electric fans–people hauled mattresses outside at night just to stay cool.
Then they would awaken to an eerie, dark sky as the dust storm swept down on them like an avenging angel. Fine particles crept through the tiniest cracks and the towels and sheets people stuffed in doors and windows. Venturing outside required tying something over your mouth, but still the dust slithered into your body and every fold of your clothes. Children violently choked to death from what Guthrie called the “dust pneumony,” their coughs a kind of economic and social flu epidemic.
On the farms the dust piled like blizzard drifts, covering machinery, outbuildings, and the crops people had hoped would pull them through the year. In “Dust Bowl Blues,” Guthrie sings of “dust so black that I couldn’t see a thing,” “wind so high that it blowed my fences down,” and “buried my tractor six feet underground.”
As writers about the Depression have recognized, although those dust storms only infected part of the country, they became metaphors for what hit the rest of America, where ill winds also blew with abandon and the horizon became so dark people wondered if they would ever see the stars and sun again.
Fragments of doubt, like those fine particles of dust, swept through the land insinuating themselves into people’s lives just as the storms had done to the farmers, making their way through windows and doors, then working their way into people’s minds. As households failed along with the farms the country became a vast, aimless and dangerous army. Some rode the rails, making the tops of boxcars look like passenger cars with the roofs blown off, while others took to the roads.
New Fragments of Doubt
Today, new fragments of doubt have crept from the dark corners of our minds out into the open where they threaten to boil into a symbolic repeat of those days in the 1930s when the clouds of doubt blotted out the sun. I have termed this the “Pull Tab Depression” because there seems to be little explanation for why one person is laid off and not another.
It reminds me of that scene in John Ford’s “Grapes of Wrath” where the tenant farmer Muley squats in the dirt after a bulldozer has flattened his house. Figuratively, the man driving the bulldozer wears goggles so you cannot see his eyes. As Muley ponders it all he lets the dust slip through his hands.
Muley’s first impulse was to shoot the man, but then man says even if he did another one would come along to do the same thing. When Muley asks who he should shoot, the man has no answer.
To someone who has just lost a job or worries about losing one, explanations by people like me about such things as the repeal of Glass-Steagall matter little. The New York Times recently published a symposium on the crisis, “Fear Factor in the Workplace,” which found that many workers are confused and scared by the seeming irrationality of the layoffs.
Mitchell Lee Marks, who teaches at the College of Business at San Francisco State University, captures the felling well:
What really disturbs surviving employees about downsizings is that they cannot control or rationalize the events. If I have a co-worker who frequently arrives late and does low quality work, I can rationalize her layoff by saying to myself, “She didn’t carry her weight and deserved to be let go.” If, instead, my co-worker seems to work as hard and as well as I do and then, through no fault of her own, happens to be the victim of a “reduction in force,” I cannot rationalize that. More important, I fear that I cannot control my situation: in the first scenario, I have a sense of control over my fate by continuing to do high-quality work. In the second scenario, working hard or working well doesn’t seem to help me retain my job.
The Vanishing Safety Net–Health Care
Behind the fears lies the new reality of our times–the old safety nets don’t work. I was talking to a friend last week about the crisis, she said that one difference between now and the Great Depression is that we at least have some safety nets in place like unemployment insurance. Plus there are programs such as Social Security and disability that did not exist in the 1930s.
But what is becoming clear about this crisis is that for today’s workers we need to revise our thinking about safety nets. The first devastating impact of unemployment is loss of health care. True there are COBRA plans and layoff settlements that permit some workers to retain their benefits for a limited period of time, but once these run out, people are on their own.
In my area of the country hospitals are laying off nurses–let me repeat that–laying off nurses–because people are postponing elective procedures and even postponing necessary procedures because they cannot afford them. When I went to the doctor’s office yesterday it was the quietest I had seen it. The parking lot looked almost deserted. The good news is there was no wait. The bad news is that the reason for the quiet is that people are not going to the clinic.
There is currently nothing in place to protect laid off workers who have lost their health care. They can go to emergency rooms for care, but that is about it. After some period of time, in some states, they may be eligible for special health care plans for low income people, but many states are cutting back on these. Congress still has yet to renew the children’s health insurance bill, so the most vulnerable among us are without a safety net.
The Vanishing Safety Net–Food and Shelter
The mortgage foreclosure crisis is not merely about people who have found themselves holding questionable mortgages, it is also about people who have lost their jobs or seen a sudden drop in income so they can no longer afford to live in their homes.
Where does a suburban family go when they lose their home? If they are lucky they might find somewhere to rent. If they are even luckier that somewhere will not gauge them and the place will not be full of cockroaches. Some may also be lucky enough to live with relatives, or have friends or family to pick up those missed mortgage payments.
One city that has admirably attempted to deal with homelessness is Portland, Oregon. For several years it has reported a drop in the number of people sleeping on the streets, but a report released just before Christmas showed:
According to the city auditor’s annual government performance report, released last week, homelessness in Portland is up 33 percent over four years ago, when the plan to end homelessness was initiated.
That same Portland report also noted a rise in the number of people using what in the Depression people termed “soup kitchens”:
Patrick Nolen, community organizer for Sisters of the Road Cafe says that five years ago, Sisters was serving about 250 meals a day, and now they are serving about 425 a day, almost all to homeless people.
Portland is known as a relatively progressive city which also has not seen some of the more devastating impacts of this depression, but other parts of the country are finding dramatic increases in homelessness.
Just about the same time that Portland was releasing its data, the United States Conference of Mayors issued a report on hunger and homelessness in 25 major cities.
We forget that in the past year the cost of cereals increased 12.3 percent and the cost of fruits and vegetables increased 10.3 percent. So while each of us struggles to deal with our grocery bills, imagine what these increases are doing to food shelves and others who feed the homeless or those unable to make ends meet.
All the cities in the mayors’ study reported an increase in the number of people seeking food assistance, but most telling was that they noted an increase in middle class and suburban families requesting assistance. As usual a graph tells the story:
Note the gaps between the red line and the blue one for most cities. Behind those gaps are real people struggling to survive.
What I have seen in few comparisons of the Great Depression and the current one is that during the 1930s there were soup kitchens maintained by a variety of organizations, but today many of those functions are performed by government and when government funds are cut back it has a impact on the lives of people served by programs dealing with hunger and homelessness.
The mayors’ study reported that 18 of 20 cities reported having to cut back the level of assistance provided at food pantries and emergency kitchens, with eighty percent reporting a reduction in the quantity of food persons can receive at each food pantry visit; sixty percent reporting having to turn people away due to lack of resources, and forty percent reporting setting limits on the number of times persons could visit food pantries each month.
As a systems person it comes as no surprise to me that hunger and homeless are related. However what did surprise me were the data from the mayors’ study showing that people themselves saw the connection. When asked what three things would be most helpful in addressing the hunger problem, 77 percent of cities cited a need for more affordable housing, 55 percent requested an increase in food stamp payments, and 45 percent cited a need for more utility assistance.
As for homelessness, again a graph tells the story:
According to the study the only two cities who reported a decline attributed it to policy initiatives along with “methodological changes,” a nice way of saying they changed their way of counting the data so it did not look so bad. Not unexpectedly the leading cause of homelessness is “lack of affordable housing.”
The report’s outlook for this year should give us all pause and certainly supply food for thought in the Obama Administration:
Cities continue to develop aggressive strategies to prevent homelessness and to move persons quickly from shelter into permanent housing, but city budgets for housing and services could be adversely affected by the economic slowdown.
The Need for New Systemic Safety Nets
This is the first time since the 1930s that America has faced such a deep and broad-ranged economic crisis. A majority of existing safety nets are predicated on outmoded ideas. Health care is the most conspicuous example of this. The existing safety nets either cover short-term unemployment our those already living in poverty. The gap between the two is a huge hole in the safety net.
The same goes for hunger and homelessness, although in a slightly different way. Food shelves and homeless shelters largely provide for temporary relief for individuals and families, but we have not had to cope with such a large number of people losing their homes since the 1930s. We have no policy in place to deal with a housing crisis of this magnitude.
As the mayors’ study implied, all these factors are interrelated. People without adequate health care become more vulnerable to illness or injury, which forces them to use what meager funds they have left to deal with the crisis. People will cut back on food or even not pay their mortgages if it means making sure their children receive adequate health care.
For half a century we have seen these problems and the programs designed to address them as separate, but this crisis is teaching us that they are not and that efforts to deal with unemployment need to be systemic, incorporating all three areas.
What America Is Learning
This crisis has become a lesson for America, because white, middle class Americans are learning and experiencing what the poor, the elderly, the disabled have known for years. They, too, fell through those same holes in the safety net, only few people noticed or cared. Like much else in America, now that poverty has moved from rural and inner city America to the suburbs, suddenly we are noticing the holes in the safety net.
As the Times symposium noted, the impact of this depression also does not merely involve health care, food and shelter; it involves people’s sense of self-worth. In a larger sense it also has a major impact on how they view the world. If we see the world as a “Pull Tab Depression” in which chance rules everything, it means rational actions count for nothing.
That provides a fertile breeding ground for irrational actions or outbursts of anger and resentment. People may become fatalistic or decide to take matters into their own hands.
The Need
At the very end of his life Franklin Roosevelt proposed an Economic Bill of Rights that was never passed by Congress and since has become a footnote to history. Very few people have even heard of it. Yet it is precisely what we need in this current crisis.
Here is what FDR said in his last State of the Union message:
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however-as our industrial economy expanded-these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all-regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.
People have been asking what Barack Obama should say in his Inaugural Address. FDR’s words would not be a bad place to start.
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