Last month, there was finally some good news on the jobs front, as the unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent and the economy created 140,000 private sector jobs. However, the continued slow-burning crisis in housingcould easily short-circuit any burgeoning labor market recovery, as the Wall Street Journal detailed today:

Some economists fear the continued slump in housing could short-circuit the recovery in jobs by making it harder for Americans to relocate to find work.

In theory, as the economy improves, people tend to relocate from places where jobs are scarce to areas where companies are hiring…While some relocation continues, economists believe mobility overall has been muted in part because of the housing bust.

Low home values have made it much harder for Americans to move because selling a home is so difficult. That is especially true for the 10.7 million Americans—or 22% of homeowners with a mortgage—who owed more than their homes were worth as of the end of September, according to figures from real-estate firm CoreLogic.

According to work by Prof. Joseph Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, homeowners who are underwater — meaning they owe more on their mortgage than their home is currently worth — are 30 percent less likely to move than non-underwater borrowers. So the housing crisis is locking people in place, even if moving could help them find a job and increased mobility could alleviate the unemployment crisis.

Borrowers being stuck underwater is bad enough, but adding to the bad news is the fact that, after slowing down their foreclosure processes to deal with the fallout from the foreclosure fraud scandal, banks have picked it back up, with foreclosure jumping 21 percent last quarter. And there’s little reason to believe things are going to get much better in 2012, as scheduled foreclosure hit a nine-month high in November, meaning a slew of foreclosure is right around the corner. Continued foreclosures will drag home prices down even further, sinking those already underwater down even deeper, in a vicious cycle that will weigh down the wider economy.

This blog originally appeared in ThinkProgress on December 28, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Pat Garofalo is Economic Policy Editor for ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Pat’s work has also appeared in The Nation, U.S. News & World Report, The Guardian, the Washington Examiner, and In These Times. He has been a guest on MSNBC and Al-Jazeera television, as well as many radio shows. Pat graduated from Brandeis University, where he was the editor-in-chief of The Brandeis Hoot, Brandeis’ community newspaper, and worked for the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life.

The headline news on Friday that the unemployment rate in November dropped 0.4 percent to 8.6 percent may help President Obama avoid losing his job next year. But the reality behind the figures will not—and that reality includes a big dose of stress, anger, despair and insecurity even beyond the ranks of the unemployed, according to two new reports.

The number of jobs in the country grew by 120,000 in November, slightly below the rate of the past year (though it could be revised upwards as the Labor Department just did for the previous two months). That’s barely enough to cover the growth of the labor force, and it reflects the loss of 20,000 public sector jobs–a continuing erosion of anemic private sector growth as a result of budget-cutting.

The bad news behind the lower unemployment rate is simply that the labor forcce last month shrank by 315,000 workers, who presumably have given up searching for a job. Although the Great Recession has been particularly rough for men, women–unmarried and disproportionately African-American–more than accounted for November’s labor force decline.

Other trends reinforce the bad news:

* long-term unemployment as a share of joblessness rose, approaching record levels, and the average duration of unemployment reached a record 40.5 weeks;
* underemployment remains fairly steady and high;
* wages are declining for those who have jobs;
* although health care continues to add jobs, most of the new jobs are low-wage, insecure openings in retail and services.

Since the 1980s each recovery from a recession has been slower and more “jobless” than its predecessor. This much deeper recession is no exception; at the current growth rate, economist Dean Baker projects it will take 16 years to return to the less-than-fabulous pre-recession state of the job market.

But the hardships of the recession extend beyond the ranks of the jobless.

Wider Opportunities for Women, just released a report, Living Below the Line: Economic Insecurity and America’s Families. The “line” defines an “economic security” budget level for different households that is higher than the official poverty line but far short of what most Americans might describe as a middle-class standard. (For example, the budget assumes a family of four rents an apartment for $821 a month and has no immediate prospects for buying a house.)

WOW’s study finds that 45 percent of U.S. residents live in a household that lacks economic security. Women, especially single mothers, and then particularly African-Americans and Hispanics, are  most likely to live in economic insecurity. But the study concludes that although it does not directly address the condition of the middle class, there are “fundamental financial weaknesses in the ‘middle’ and problems with the very conception of a middle. That nearly 40 percent of the nation’s adults and 45 percent of adults are their children lack basic economic security incomes suggests that the nation’s economic middle is not very broad and may not, in fact, exist.”

Losing a job is extreme economic insecurity, especially when Republicans are playing “protect the rich” games. In response to the Democratic proposal to finance programs that extend the duration of unemployment compensation through a surtax on millionaires, for example, Republicans reportedly advocate instead funding it by continuing to freeze federal workers’ pay and eliminating many of their jobs.

USAction, a national coalition of citzen groups, captures some of the suffering of the unemployed in a new report based on stories from nearly 1,200 of its laid-off members, “Hardly Working; Stories From Un- and Under-Employed Americans.”
They found three broad themes: frustration at discrimination in hiring (with discrimination on age and against the unemployed standing out, in addition to the usual discriminations; emotional and financial distress; and despair about their futures and the future of the country.

For example, 59-year old Wayne Persons of Mount Laurel, New Jersey, had a successful career as a sales manager until his company went out of business two years ago. “Between the fact that we were in a bad economy with too many people out of work with not enough jobs to go around, combined with my age, combined with the fact that I was unemployed, it became almost impossible for me to get a job interview, let alone get a job,” he said at a teleconference on release of the report, “and I was looking very hard for over two years.”

“I just don’t understand what happened to this country,” says Molly Wasserman, who lost her successful job track when she moved from New York to Ohio to care for her mother, who was ill with cancer. “I don’t recognize my place in it any more. More and more of us are marginalized, ignored or happily forgotten because we’re not working….What exactly is a person supposed to do who is not being hired? Are we just supposed to die? Are we supposed to commit suicide? Are we supposed to die, homeless in the streets?”

Steve Hanken, 61, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, told In These Times his career has felt like “a steady roll downhill.” Now he has a temporary, part-time job at the local office of the state Department of Human Services where he watches a shrinking staff deal with increased demands as the recession’s toll accumulates. A college drop-out, he moved from one skilled machinst job to another as employers downsized, then switched to an unpredictable career executing archaeological digs, often supervising large crews and doing lab work.

Hanken, a former Democratic party central committee member, now feels like a man without a party—until a third party emerges. “Obama promised to do a lot and did nothing,” he laments. “The other side says they want to do nothing and they will. They’ll protect the wealthy and the rest of us can go to hell.”

“I don’t know where democracy went to in this country,” says Hanken, who wants to see banks more regulated, more bankers and CEOs in jail, and more of the nation’s wealth shared with those who need it and will spend it. “I used to think people in government were looking out for me,” he says. ”Now it seems they’re looking out for themselves and their friends. I’m baffled. I don’t know what to do. I think  it’s a matter of time before we little people are all under the bridge.”

This blog originally appeared in Working in These Times on December 2, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: David Moberg, a senior editor of In These Times, has been on the staff of the magazine since it began publishing in 1976. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy. He can be reached at davidmoberg@inthesetimes.com.

There is new evidence of the cost of right-wing austerity policies in the latest report on downsizing activity from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., which headlines the fact that there have been more layoffs in the first 11 months of 2011 than in all of 2010. A key reason, according to the report: Cuts in government spending.

“For the year, government agencies have now announced 180,881 job cuts, 30 percent more than the 138,979 job cuts announced by these employers through November 2010,” the firm said in a news release, and a significantly higher percentage than the percentage of cuts announced overall in the private sector.

“With one month remaining in 2011, job cuts for the year total 564,297, officially surpassing the 2010 year-end total of 529,973. The 11-month total is 13 percent higher than the 497,969 job cuts announced over the same period a year ago,” the firm said in its statement.

This chart shows how the cuts break down by sector, compared to 2010:

The report notes that a series of automatic budget cuts in domestic and military spending, triggered by the failure of a deficit-reduction supercommittee to come to an alternative agreement, is destined to make things worse, although perhaps not as bad as some proposals for a “grand bargain” that would have made even deeper cuts and promoted even more layoffs. In addition to the job losses from those automatic cuts, the report notes the looming threat that economic problems at the U.S. Postal Service could result in an additional 200,000 layoffs in the coming months.

The facts in the report underscore the impact of the austerity agenda that conservatives have successfully foisted onto the nation at both the state and federal levels. By pushing premature federal budget cuts during a period of economic stagnation and by blocking aid to state and local governments that would have prevented their adding to the ranks of the jobless, conservatives have not only set the stage for nearly the 181,000 public sector layoffs counted in the Challenger Gray report, but have helped worsen the private sector job market as well as the effects of the government layoffs ripple through the economy.

Don’t be surprised if the “layoffs getting worse under President Obama” line shows up in conservative talking points in the coming days. Also, don’t be surprised if they fail to mention that 34 percent of the layoffs this year are layoffs they advocated and encouraged—and are actively working to increase.

This blog originally appeared in Campaign for America’s Future on November 30, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Isaiah J. Poole has been the editor of OurFuture.org since 2007 and also directs the Campaign for America’s Future’s online communications. Previously he had worked for 25 years in mainstream media, most recently at Congressional Quarterly, where he covered congressional leadership and tracked major bills through Congress. He also served as a founding member of the Washington Association of Black Journalists and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.

Last month, President Obama announced that the United States will complete a troop withdrawal from Iraq, bringing home 39,000 troops by year’s end. America’s heroes will be returning home to a stagnant economy, a persistent housing crisis, and declining wages. It is fair to say that America is facing an unemployment epidemic that will continue into the foreseeable future if there is not a concerted effort on the part of the government to incentivize job growth in the private sector.

According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, the national unemployment rate is 9.1 percent. What’s more, service members who left the military in the last decade are unemployed at a rate of 12.1 percent, up drastically from a year ago when the rate was 10.2 percent. The number for post-9/11 veterans is even more staggering at 13.3%. The October jobs report was discouraging for recent service members who saw their situation worsen while the overall workforce saw a decline in their unemployment.

When soldiers returned from WWII they were welcomed with employment opportunities in industries that are now bleeding job loss. Those who did not seek a college education through the GI Bill could secure a good manufacturing job that would allow them to enter the middle-class.  According to the Economic Policy Institute, the picture is quite different in 2011, with 2.8 million American jobs lost in the last decade.  Roughly 70 percent of these came out of the manufacturing sector.

A USAToday article on the post 9/11 veteran unemployment crisis explains that many former soldiers worked in mining, construction, manufacturing, transportation, and utilities, all of which are industries that have been deeply affected by the recession.

In order to combat this pervasive unemployment, the Obama administration has taken action to incentivize the hiring of former service members including the “Returning Heroes and Wounded Warriors Tax Credit” which will give businesses tax credits if they hire unemployed veterans. In a nod to the increasing role of social media in the labor market, the Labor Department has partnered with Facebook to provide job training and search resources to those looking for work. Other tools already exist to connect jobseekers and employers via LinkedIN, using referrals, and almost half of employers suggest they use social media sites to screen employees. What’s more, as recently as October 2010, 86% of job-seekers admitted to looking online during their job searches. Although the Facebook and Labor Department partnership is new, it is a positive step towards fully harnessing the potential of the Internet to help the unemployed find good jobs.

Efforts from the administration to spur veteran hiring are steps in the right direction, but they are not sufficient on their own. Obama acknowledged the importance of the private sector when he challenged American firms to hire or train 100,000 unemployed veterans or their spouses by the end of 2013.  Programs such as Helmets to Hardhats, established by the union construction industry to offer returning soldiers the opportunity to enter construction trade apprenticeship programs in an earn-while-you-learn environment, will hopefully make a dent in the sad trend of veteran unemployment.

A nuance often overlooked in the veteran re-employment conversation is employer resistance to veteran hiring.  A recent Raw Story article highlighted the resistance many veterans face, especially in the private sector where employers are accustomed to hiring through strict channels of discovery and rehearsed indicators of skill.  To combat this kind of prejudice, AT&T is launching two new online resources: a custom military skills translator which will enable servicemen and women to use their current Military Occupation Code or Military Occupation Specialty to find corresponding civilian career opportunities at AT&T, and the Careers4Vets program which connects interested veterans with mentors within AT&T.

Mark Siegel, a company spokesmen, said, “For decades, we have aggressively recruited military talent from both enlisted and officer ranks. The technical skills and leadership experience gained in the military transfer well to our company and culture.” America, a country that has always been on the cutting edge of innovation and technology, should be emulating AT&T’s efforts to hire veterans.

Just as the post-WWII generation enjoyed the rewards of a booming economy and increased college enrollment, America should strive to create an era that is marked by widespread job growth in the technology sector. Deloitte predicts that next generation wireless broadband build out will create 371,000-771,000 jobs and GDP growth between $73 billion and $151 billion by 2016. Now more than ever, employment opportunities must be made available to brave veterans who are returning home in increasing numbers. It is simply not fair to expect our soldiers to fight for America, only to return home to fight for a job.

About the Author: Steve Cooper is the editor of We Party Patriots, a labor and political blog with a national focus. He educates union members on the benefits of social media, offering instruction on engaging on Facebook and Twitter. When not ruining his posture and finger muscles through endless computer use, Cooper is an avid chef and musician.

The 2012 campaign trail is already littered with silver bullets and peppy slogans about boosting America out of its unemployment slump. But for the most part, the plans that politicians have trotted out–from Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 mantra to the GOP’s latest corporate welfare formulas, to Obama’s limp blend of free-trade policies and woefully inadequate stimulus–stick faithfully to the path of neoliberalism, paving the way for more outsized corporate profits.

So does anyone have a plan to steer industry toward the needs of communities? Researchers at Cornell University have located a few novel ideas, well outside the Beltway, that are blazing small trails in economic disaster zones. Their study focuses on project labor agreements that are designed to meet workers’ needs for decent wages and working conditions, while upholding principles of equity in local hiring practices.

Community workforce provisions in labor agreements have been used in various cities to help low-income and working-class people land solid jobs with opportunities for advancement, while building in corporate accountability, to prevent employers from exploiting local workers or undermining labor rights.

The Cornell report points to key policies established by pro-worker labor agreements:

• Requirements or goals for hiring of local residents
• Hiring and workforce development of economically disadvantaged and so called at-risk individuals, who are local residents
• Hiring and workforce development of women and members of minority groups, including African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and others
• Hiring of veterans or Helmets-to-Hardhats Programs
• Apprentice Utilization requirements, and requirements or goals for percent of employed apprentices that should be local residents
• Utilization of women/minority-owned and local small businesses
• Utilization of union-supported Pre-Apprenticeship Programs, as well as of community-based pre-apprenticeship programs
  Involvement of community-based Organizations in the recruitment and monitoring efforts
• Development of an implementation and monitoring process or plan

To be sure, many project labor agreements fail to include all or even most of these principles. But the report’s basic thrust is that such elements can be successfully incorporated into broader jobs programs that leverage public resources for local development.

Take a look at a labor accord between the Cleveland University Hospital and the local construction trades union. The plan outlined goals for hiring graduates of a local vocational school’s pre-apprenticeship program, and emphasized creating ‘contracting opportunities for minority, female, and local-small business enterprises in Northeast Ohio.” The plan ran into various obstacles, including a trend of workers and small business fleeing the devastated area altogether. But in the end, according to the report, “The projects created more than 5,200 construction jobs and generated more than $500 million in wages and benefits,” while meeting guidelines for diversity and local hiring. Not bad for a city where economic decline over the past few years has driven people from their homes and deepened vast income inequalities.

In New York City, the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, which represents about 100,000 local union workers, has entered into project labor agreements that promote hiring of veterans, women, public high school graduates and public housing residents, along with other “adults in need of economic opportunity.” The agreements studied, applied to public construction projects estimated to generate tens of thousands of jobs, have exceeded targets for inclusion of women, public high school graduates and new local apprentices (with most of them coming from communities of color). In one of the country’s most segregated urban landscapes (and ground zero of a new anti-corporate grassroots movement), any jobs program premised on social equity marks a modest step toward constructing a fairer economy.

A separate report by the National Employment Law Project outlines various state and local job-boosting initiatives that show how public funds can be leveraged to help raise labor standards, generate sustainable employment, and even streamline the state budget:

• In Portland, an initiative to upgrade home energy efficiency using a federal grant is paying median wages of $18.00 per hour, drawing on firms that are 100 percent Oregon-based and nearly 30 percent minority- or women-owned. A similar statewide initiative is now underway to upgrade 6,000 homes over the next three years and create or retain 1,300 jobs….
• More than 140 cities and one state—Maryland—have adopted living wage standards for businesses performing government contracts. Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have set minimum wage rates above the federal level of $7.25 per hour, and 10 states increase their rates annually to keep pace with inflation.
• Currently, 23 states have work-sharing programs, which, according to the Department of Labor, saved 265,000 jobs between 2009 and 2010.

These initiatives don’t offer the structural reforms that would be necessary to truly rebalance the country’s corrosive wealth imbalance. Nonetheless they demonstrate a more innovative approach to the jobs crisis than the low-hanging fruit of tax cuts and fiscal austerity that Washington bandies about every election cycle. If state and local policies that can create good jobs aren’t percolating up to the national debate, it’s not because results don’t speak for themselves, but because Washington just doesn’t want to listen.

This blog post originally appeared in In These Times on October 15, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Michelle Chen’s work has appeared in AirAmerica, Extra!, Colorlines and Alternet, along with her self-published zine, cain. She is a regular contributor to In These Times’ workers’ rights blog, Working In These Times, and is a member of the In These Times Board of Editors. She also blogs at Colorlines.com. She can be reached at michellechen @ inthesetimes.com.

Some 25 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work, and wages are essentially flat. Workers are struggling to get the few jobs that are available—there are 4.7 unemployed people for every one job open.

As if those odds weren’t difficult enough, jobless workers face another obstacle: Many employers are discriminating against the jobless by prohibiting them from even applying for open positions. Their “Help Wanted” signs come with a caveat—if you are unemployed, you need not apply.

American Rights at Work alerts to an action by the advocacy group USAction, which is taking a stand against this unfair policy. Click here to sign a petition and join USAction in asking the popular job search sites CareerBuilder and Monster.com to stop promoting ads for companies that discriminate against the unemployed.

Last month, The New York Times reported that its review of job vacancy postings on sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Craigslist revealed:

hundreds that said employers would consider (or at least “strongly prefer”) only people currently employed or just recently laid off.

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) also released a report last month that found:

employers and staffing firms continue to expressly deny job opportunities to those workers hardest hit by the economic downturn, despite increased scrutiny and strong public opposition to the practice.

The report coincided with the introduction in the House of the Fair Employment Opportunity Act of 2011, a measure sponsored by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) to create a level playing field for unemployed job seekers by prohibiting employers and employment agencies from screening out or excluding job applicants solely because they are unemployed.

This blog originally appeared in AFL-CIO Now Blog on August 22,2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: James Parks – My first encounter with unions was at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when my colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. I saw firsthand how companies pull out all the stops to prevent workers from forming a union. I am a journalist by trade, and I worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. I also have been a seminary student, drug counselor, community organizer, event planner, adjunct college professor and county bureaucrat. My proudest career moment, though, was when I served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections.

XX

Shonda Sneed of Yellow Springs, Ohio, was laid off in December 2009 and is about to run out of unemployment benefits. Because of state budget cuts, she also could soon lose the health care nurse who helps care for her mother who has dementia. At the last job she applied for, she was told 450 others had also applied for the same position.

Shonda Sneed talks with AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker at the AFL-CIO panel on the jobs crisis.

Sneed and Bob Stein, a 60-year-old former salesman who has been out of work since May 2010, are two of the 14 million Americans who are unemployed—and their story is not being told in the midst of the debate over the deficit. Sneed and Stein, who are both members of Working America, spoke to a forum on “The Jobs Crisis—Moving to Action: A Dialogue Between Workers and Policymakers” at the AFL-CIO this morning.

As Sneed said:

All I want is a decent job. I want to work. I love to work. I’m scared. I don’t know what’s going to happen to my mother. I have a home to pay off.

The forum, moderated by Bob Herbert, distinguished fellow at D?mos and an award-winning journalist, drew a sharp contrast between the policies that got our country in this economic crisis and are currently being advocated to get it out, and what is needed in order to spark a real economic recovery.

Stein says it’s frustrating to try and find a job in an economy that generated only 18,000 jobs last month. “I was set to lose unemployment as of the second or third week of December, and [politicians] were fighting back and forth and it was predicated on the Bush tax cuts. I was caught right in the middle of that,” he said.

The thing that was so upsetting is when you heard about the number of people about to lose their unemployment check. I thought, “OK, I understand that you’re adamant about this Bush tax cut thing, but you’re holding us all hostage. You’re playing politics with people lives. People use their unemployment. This will stimulate and help the economy.”

The panel also included AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.) and Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress.

Panelists noted that many in Washington continue to push deregulation and tax cuts as the way out of the economic hole the country is in, without acknowledging the role that those policies played in creating the current economic conditions. The strategy to encourage corporations to spend their billions of dollars in profits is doomed when politicians don’t first acknowledge the truth that working people drive the economy as consumers. Without good jobs or shared prosperity, corporations won’t spend and our economy can’t prosper.

Trumka said working people are frustrated with both political parties.

The time for excuses is over. People don’t care about why it [creating jobs] isn’t getting done. They just want to get it done. We can create jobs if we want to. It’s a matter of political will.

More and more economists are coming around to the idea that the economy is faltering because of a lack of demand, said Boushey. The best ways to increase demand, she said, is to invest in things that generate demand, like infrastructure aid to the states, education and long-term unemployment benefits.

Levin said the nation’s trade policies must be a part of any jobs policy. It’s important, he said, for trade agreements to include enforceable labor standards to develop a strong middle class in the nations we trade with who can then buy U.S. products. It also is important to ensure that American workers don’t compete with workers who are oppressed, he said.

Noting that the middle class is the engine of our economy, Franken said retaining tax breaks and loopholes for the rich, as Republicans have proposed, won’t increase demand. Rich people can only buy so much stuff, Franken said, then they save their money.

The idea that those at the top who are richer than anyone has ever been in history—why they can’t pay a higher percentage in taxes is crazy.

This Blog originally appeared in AFL-CIO Now on July 11, 2011. Reprinted with Permission.

About the Author: James Parks’ first encounter with unions was at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when his colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. He saw firsthand how companies pull out all the stops to prevent workers from forming a union. He is a journalist by trade, and worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. He also has been a seminary student, drug counselor, community organizer, event planner, adjunct college professor and county bureaucrat. His proudest career moment, though, was when he served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections.

Want to know what it feels like to be fired?

It’s easy, go out and let all the air out of your car’s tires. Sure you can get from point A to point B, but it’s a bumpy and precarious ride. Welcome to life as a recently fired person.

Your immediate concern after being fired isn’t yourself, it’s all the colleagues, friends and potential employers that you’ll want to connect with. Your question is how you can present a good face to all of them? But the reality is that the problem isn’t a “them” question. It’s a “you” issue.

This advice is going to sound pedestrian. But you need to start very simply with a list of things that will boost your confidence and feelings of self worth. Exercise, volunteering, taking courses, escapist entertainment, etc. Generally anything that helps you to smile or otherwise improve yourself would fit into this category.

Unfortunately those are not the places that most of us logically turn. Alcohol, drugs, overeating, gambling, are the places that often provide an overwhelming gravitational pull during tough times.

So the big challenge is how to avoid negative addictions so that you can pursue positive ones. Damn, if it were only that easy to do.

But that is only the first step. What you quickly learn is how quickly salt water can be unexpectedly poured into your wounds. This happens whenever your former job is brought up. For me, luckily, it was at a dinner party. Someone asked about my job and I just went off. Trashing my boss and the way I was treated. Wow, even as it was coming out of my mouth I was surprised at my anger about the whole situation.

Anger. It’s there whenever you’re fired. So you’ve got to learn how to deal with it.

I’ve now learned how to be circumspect about the entire ordeal. But you need to realize that gaining confidence and self-esteem are just the first step. You’ve got to learn how to dispassionately discuss what happened to you in bland and forgettable language. “We didn’t see eye to eye.” “Creative differences.”

The challenge is how ultimately contradictory this process is. You need to find the confidence to not trail blood into your next job interview. At the same time you have to process your anger and learn how to talk about what happened dispassionately.

And you thought doing a job could be complicated?

My a-ha: Self-esteem and self-awareness can lead you out of the wilderness, but it’s a complicated dance.

Next installment: Networking When Not Working

About the Author: Bob Rosner is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist. For free job and work advice, check out the award-winning workplace911.com. Check the revised edition of his Wall Street Journal best seller, “The Boss’s Survival Guide.” If you have a question for Bob, contact him via bob@workplace911.com.

I remember the feeling of being on a short leash when I was growing up. Whenever I forgot about it, my parents would yank it just to remind me.

Unemployment is like that too. I got an email for a mandatory meeting with four days notice. There was no option for rescheduling it, and the letter said that if I didn’t show I would lose my benefits.

I’m not complaining, I understand leashes.

I showed up at the appointed time to be greeted by fifty other people who’d been tossed under the bus. There was remarkably little conversation.

If I expected any sense of a community forming among the others in the room, it quickly dissipated. There were not tables available to fill out the form that I needed to get access into the room. So I leaned on the top of a computer.

I was half way through my form when the woman using the computer I was leaning on told me that she needed to use the top of the computer to store her papers. It was interesting, because she was sitting at a huge empty desk. But clearly the only space that she really needed where I was writing.

No, this was every man, and woman, for themselves.

Finally they announced that the meeting would begin. We were herded into a room for an explanation of how to fill out the various forms. It was like dealing with the post office, but much slower moving.

The woman said that we needed to fill out the goldenrod form in pen. When one guy said that the lobby was full of pencils and he’d filled out the form with that, the woman let out an audible shrug and snatched the form out of his hand.

There were rules, but we also learned that there would be exceptions too. A valuable lesson for surviving my newfound bureaucratic existence.

After an hour, I got my shot for a one on one session. I clutched my resume and followed her to her cubicle.

She took one look at my resume and said that I wouldn’t get far with it. That I would be considered overqualified. I did get the sense that she actually cared about me. She just didn’t make that much eye contact, I guess that when you work with unemployed people, like in a hospice, you want to keep a bit of distance.

Overqualified, just echoed in my head as I walked toward my car.

My a-ha: My parents taught me well about surviving short leashes

Next installment: Keeping the Faith

About the Author: Bob Rosner is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist. For free job and work advice, check out the award-winning workplace911.com. Check the revised edition of his Wall Street Journal best seller, “The Boss’s Survival Guide.” If you have a question for Bob, contact him via bob@workplace911.com.

I woke up in the middle of the night physically shaking, frozen in fear about how I’d pay my bills. I had totally soaked through my sheets, so I had to climb out of my unintentional water bed.

Once I realized what was going on, I decided I would go online and do some research about Unemployment Insurance. Okay, I can hear what your thinking. Jeez, Mr. Workplace Writer, wasn’t that the first thing you would do after being let go?

Just because I write about the workplace, it doesn’t mean that I can be totally objective when confronting workplace challenges myself. Again, that’s the purpose of this blog, to give you an honest, and sometimes embarrassing, view of the process of getting knocked down at work and learning how to pick yourself back up.

I actually got excited about the idea of going to the unemployment office. As a workplace writer it would be interesting to stand in line with other people who’d been recently pummeled at work to compare notes.  Okay, that last sentence is a bit twisted, but please remember the source.

I learned something remarkable during my middle of the night tour of the Employment Security website. There really is no longer any such thing as the Unemployment Office. It’s all done electronically now.

In fact, it only took me about fifteen minutes to sort out how to file my entire claim. At 3 am.

For anyone who fears the embarrassment of a room full of down and outers and being grilled by some bureaucrat, well those days are now gone. It has been replaced by a series of drop down menus and helpful phone operators. Really, every issue that I’ve come up with so far has been responded to and addressed in a matter of ten minutes or less. They even have a system where you don’t have to stay on hold, they’ll call you back when it’s your turn to talk to someone.

Okay, that last paragraph sounds like I’m trying to get hired by them to do PR for the Unemployment Insurance folks. That was not my intention. But I do want you to know that this process should not inspire fear. It’s automated, easy and only minimally damaging to your ego.

I’ve also heard from people who’ve written to me through the years that they would never stoop so low to ask for unemployment insurance. This has always befuddled me. Unemployment Insurance isn’t charity, it is a fund that you paid into while you were gainfully employed.

It’s no different than buying a gift card at a store. You are paying the cost of the card only to cash it in at a later date. That’s how I’ve always seen Unemployment Insurance.

My a-ha: Unemployment Insurance rocks, spread the word.

Next Installment: Getting advice

*For more information about Unemployment Insurance visit this Workplace Fairness page on unemployment insurance:
http://www.workplacefairness.org/general-unemployment-info

About the Author: Bob Rosner is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist. For free job and work advice, check out the award-winning workplace911.org. Check the revised edition of his Wall Street Journal best seller, “The Boss’s Survival Guide.” If you have a question for Bob, contact him via bob@workplace911.org.