Restart

This post is a reset button. I thought I could keep up with a blog, write one post a week or something. Epic fail. Life, though relatively undemanding while unemployed, still cycled through periods of stale mental activity and frantic time commitments. But seeing as life will be making one of its many transitions this spring, I figure my blog can join the renaissance.

Today is the last day of my unemployment. I still don’t quite believe it, but I believe it enough to post it publicly. This last year and a few months have led to me be skeptical of everything that might previously have been considered a sure thing. Even a signed job offer seems surreal until you begin to act on it. And so tomorrow, my first day of work at my new job, perhaps I will fully believe.

It is fitting that this final day fall on the 55th anniversary of President FDR’s death. His Social Security Act is what created the unemployment assistance that was part of a few things that buoyed my wife and I over the last 15 months. We unintentionally visited his monument last week while visiting the cherry blossoms in DC. Seeing the bronze replica of the bread line reminded me of soup kitchen lines in San Francisco and in front of our old apartment in Cambridge, MA. It did not remind me of anything personal, which could be considered a sign of our national progress in matters relating to unemployment (that fewer people who lose their jobs must experience Depression-era loss). Some of those affected in this recession did indeed endure such lines, waiting to find work, collect food stamps, or get free meals. I am very grateful that we did not have to do this.

During this past period of my life, I have been thinking more and more about labor issues. I made my own naive mistakes in trusting our employment system, though I wish it were something we could all be sure of. Layoffs and downsizing have their detractors, backed both by studies and anecdotal reports. Regardless of what side you take, it appears our economy is going to take a long time to re-employ the millions of unemployed workers. I was let go from a division of a large corporation that, so we were told, was growing rapidly (double-digit profits the past two years and no forecast of any major stalling). I was banking on a continuation of my employment.

This major change in my life has closed the door on previous ways of thinking, and for that I am grateful. I am more realistic about the work I will do in my life and more aware of periods of no work. At the same time, I feel freer to imagine ideal situations for myself and to actually plan for them. Employment is never guaranteed, and thus we all need to push ourselves to do tasks which are diverse and applicable to many potential situations. I may have been laid off from what was at the time a sort of dream job, but my current outlook appears better than it ever did.

I hope that the economy and our ways of employing workers can change for the better. We all deserve the security of being able to live, and since we’re nowhere near getting rid of the need to pay for this ability, we ought to have a more humane labor standard. I don’t know what this looks like, but I am not going to forget my months of recession. To that end, I will periodically post some thoughts, hopefully related to things I’m reading (i.e. evidence to support any wildly idealistic claims). It may not be the specific work for which I will be paid in the coming months (hopefully years), but hopefully someday I can apply these thoughts in a way that saves someone’s job or creates a new one. Perhaps I can even discuss ways to get around the need to pay (with wages) for the ability to live. I think we all need to investigate the employment system and the way we work, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves how fragile our workplaces are.