So I'm listening to this guy on the radio, a caller to a talk show, who is saying how he used to be against extended unemployment pay, but now that he's lost his job he has changed his mind. It seems he had a pretty good job, but he's a middle-aged guy and his company - according to him - realized it could save money by hiring a younger guy for less money and put up with someone with less experience.
Now, right off the bat, I have to admit I can relate. Hey, what "middle-aged guy'' in the current economy hasn't lived in fear of "the boss'' deciding to cut the high-salaried employees loose in favor of someone right out of college? And I don't know about you, but in my circles, there are too many guys who find themselves unemployed and, as much because of their age as anything, feeling unemployable. It's scary.
Anyway, the talk show host says unemployment is not the answer - which is right if you live in one of those states like Alabama or South Carolina where unemployment is capped at something like $260 a week, no matter how much money you were making when you were let go.
On the other hand, other states pay more, and with an almost indefinte extension of unemployment benefits (if you know how to work the system), if you're in the right state I can see the disencentive to get back to work - if "getting back to work'' means taking just any job. Apparently, any job is not always better than no job at all.
I have heard of cases where people in states where unemployment benefits are better than others have banded together, pooling their unemployment money, saving up to start businesses. That's creative.
But I digress. The unemployed guy on the radio and the talk show host continue to talk, and the host decides to cheer up the unemployed guy by saying, "look at it this way: you have a chance to do something for yourself. Start a business. ..." and he gives all these examples of people who have been unemployed and started a business and now are on their way to becoming millionaires.
And it hit me: maybe we're in the midst of a new kind of Industrial Revolution.
Stay with me through this. I'm not an economist and only an amatuer historian, but I do remember how, during the various Industrial Revolutions, people left their farms and family businesses to go to work for newfangled factories that led to corporations. And as the factories grew, they began to be a far more secure place to work. Some even developed "mill towns'' where the workers lived and shopped and sent their kids to school and had doctors; self-contained and self-style Utopias (see Robert Owen and others): industry-owned communities where generations could work, marry, live, raise a family, be educated, die, repeat.
The small family run businesses and farms couldn't compete, and security was found in working for someone else. During the middle part of the 1900s, that was the definition of security: working for a giant corporation that, if you were in management, took care of you or, if you were a worker, you joined a union that promised to take care of you.
This is a broad generalization, of course. And no one knew they were in the Industrial Revolution. It's not like there were banners or uniforms, "Come join the Industrial Revolution." It just gradually happened as people found themselves migrating to urban areas and coming to rely on corporate entities to provide wages and benefits for them and their families.
Now it seems too many of the once-giant corporations can no longer promise life-long security. And not even labor unions - also a product of Industrial Revolution - can change what is happening with the economy.
The solution? Maybe it is working for yourself. Starting your own business, or going in with a few friends and starting a company. Maybe it's a family business again. Maybe it's contract work.
The point is, the only real security in the work place these days seems to be in being self-employed, a return to the entreprenueral spirit that kicked the Industrial Revolution into high gear, but with a caveat of no more mega-companies that employ mega-numbers of workers. It doesn't seem like anyone should expect to actually hit 65 without changing jobs several times over the course of their work-life.
We go that way kicking and screaming because we've been raised in a culture that taught us security comes from working for someone else, the same way our great-great-grandfathers kicked and screamed as their sons and sometimes daughters left the family business to go join the faceless masses working in cities and factories.
This is a huge generality, I know. There have always been and will always be people who work for others. Slaves, serfs, indentured servants, apprentices, whatever.
But maybe we're being forced back into that old-fashioned American trait we used to admire so much: self-reliance. Stand on your own two feet and take care of yourself because nobody else will.
Now let me be up front and say that idea scares the heck out of me. I like working for someone else. I like someone else taking the risk and simply giving me a check for doing my best to help make them profitable enough to keep taking care of me.
But there is no denying the economy is changing. We're headed in one of two ways: either we go back to creating our own businesses (whatever that looks like in this high-tech environment), or we let the government take care of us (more on that in the next post).
So maybe as painful and scary as this is, it could be really good.
For you, of course.
Me? I still like the idea of someone else taking care of me.
I work hard for the money.
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