The Unemployed--The Invisible Ones

Several million Americans are surviving on Unemployment Insurance; they are listed. Thousands more are registered with State employment agencies for news of job openings; they are listed. Thousands/millions (?) more have been reduced to part time status; they are the estimated under-employed. Then there are many, many more who have run out of benefits and given up looking; no one quite knows their number.
In the past few weeks I’ve run into a new class of under/unemployed who aren’t included in the 9.7% unemployment figures—the forcibly retired. They certainly aren’t listed when anybody counts the casualties of this recession.
Let me offer two examples. My casualty insurance agent technically represented one company, but he owns his own office building and hired his own staff. I’ve known him for over thirty years and been with him as a client for many of those years. He’s in his early sixties.
A year or two ago I kidded him about retiring. Very sincerely he replied, “Next year I’ll have two kids in college, one just starting. I can’t afford to retire!” Early this year the company he has represented for decades cut back.
They closed the local offices, forced “early retirement” to the people old enough to be vested and left us with an eight hundred number in Detroit. My friend’s building is empty (who’s renting business space in this economic climate?); whether he wanted it or not, he is retired.
Who else realizes that his pension pays a lot less college tuition, books and fees than his income from running a full time agency did? He was in good health; he enjoyed what he did—he is definitely among the unlisted unemployed, a real casualty of the recession. What can he do around here?
Then there is the lady at our bank. She’s been there about as long as we’ve been banking there. She, too, has to be about sixty. She’s in excellent health, enjoys her work, and makes an excellent job of it. She’s single, divorced, completely dependent upon her own resources.
She has been for years our go-to banker. Any problems, we called her. She’d make phone calls, check her computer files and come with any answer we needed—or be able to refer us to precisely the person who could help us. She even got some banking charges reversed for us.
The other day my wife stopped to see her, and our favorite banker told her that next week is her last week. Her bank got bought out by a larger, eastern bank. (Too many “irrationally exuberant” loans, as Alan Greenspan might have put it.)
The big thing about combining two companies or banks is all the duplicate people you can lay off. The logical thing was to look at her and say, “She’s been here long enough for her pension to vest; we can call her retired without having to pay for unemployment insurance.”
The first of March—she’s gone. We are certainly going to miss her—but nobody asked us. I don’t think anybody asked her, either. She’s on no list in any labor department—but she’s as unemployed as any guy who once worked in a now closed factory.
That’s just two people in my limited circle of acquaintances in a small town in western Michigan. With all of the business retrenchment, consolidation and take-overs that have gone on during this economic down turn, I scarcely believe they are unique.
I suspect there are a whole lot of them—tens, hundreds of thousands, possibly more—a whole category of the unemployed, the underemployed, certainly those with greatly reduced incomes that do not show up on anybody’s list.
They are, I suspect, in permanently reduced circumstances. No matter how booming the long delayed job recovery, these folk are unlikely ever to find employment that earns what they made when they were fully and happily employed.
They will not be contributing significantly to the consumer buying boom we are all depending on to lift us out of this mess. That could be bad news—for all of us.