What’s it Like Being Long Term Unemployed?
Outside my office for the past two years, an intelligent young man has sat at a computer. Apart from working on some assignments I have given him on a paid basis, his work has been voluntary. For years I have been committed to getting people into work. In the year 2005, my staff at Wesley Mission Sydney and I got 15,000 long-term unemployed people into real jobs in which they stayed for more than a year. We helped another 70,000 in training and into part-time or short term work.
Further, I have been responsible for employing over 4,000 staff every year. Yet this young man at the computer outside my door has been continuously unemployed. None of my managers have been able to place him permanently. Consequently, the problem must be his. He obviously has a social problem, is uneducated, relates poorly. Right? Wrong! That is the way most people think.
I want to show the other side in Frank’s story, told in his words. His story is not a unique one among the ranks of the unemployed. The unemployed truly are an aggrieved lot and can rightly feel aggrieved about their situation and society’s attitudes towards them. Apart from the damaging and debilitating effects that often accompanies unemployment, to be unemployed, especially long-term unemployed, means to be vulnerable and at-risk, to be socially marginalised and to feel forsaken, to be and to feel stigmatised and vilified, to usually be treated disrespectfully by others, and it often means a focus on the present and a lack of sense of future. This is his personal experience of being in the ranks of the long term unemployed.
“I have been unemployed, for around eleven and a half years. The root cause of my predicament, so I’m constantly told, seems to be over qualification and lack of relevant work experience. I graduated from Wollongong University in 1990 with an engineering/mathematics degree. Without being able to find any work in my field, indeed without finding success of any sorts on the jobs front in a very depressed market, I took up a scholarship to undertake a PhD in the area of optical fibre/sensor technology hoping that this would open more doors. After completing my PhD, I was truly devastated to learn of the lack of jobs available in the field and the intense competition in a largely barren job market.
Soon after the conferring of my PhD I spent several years at the ANU as a visiting fellow. This enabled me to build my research profile, especially my research publication profile, and to gain further experience in research. Although my time there was productive, it was to no avail on the jobs front. Likewise all those training courses I have undertaken and was advised to undertake by various job network consultants since finishing my PhD have been to no avail.
It may seem counter intuitive, but despite having received all this education and training my job prospects have not improved. Indeed the education and training I have received have really become more of a liability than an asset. It seems the more learned you are, and the longer the education is not put to use, the more sceptical prospective employers are about your motives for pursuing courses that, by their contention, you don’t intend to do anything with in any event. What’s more, the longer you don’t put your training to use, the more difficult it is to get work because employers question what you have been doing since completing the training. Compounding all this is of course the erosion of your skills because of non-utilisation of your training.
True, I can embark on another course of study, but I’ll just be back at square one again. It’s not that I am trying to postpone having to work; it’s just that there is nothing available for someone with my skills set. Despite my academic success and my accomplishments they haven’t gotten me a job. It seems, in society today, that you can do everything right and still be left on the margins. I have now resolved not to undertake any further training because without the necessary experience so often demanded by employers nowadays it will be of little or no avail.
Not only do I feel I have made a grave mistake in undertaking all this study and training, but people all over have made me deeply regret and have even caused me to apologise for doing this study and training. In hindsight, all those years spent in study and training, basically all my efforts to advance myself in the world which so far have come to nought, could have been much better, and more wisely, spent employed in low level menial jobs which I seem to be consigned to.
I know I’m not alone in my predicament. There are many university trained researchers, that is to say higher degree research graduates, who are in much the same fix that I am. But that does not palliate things. Not only is unemployment a real concern for this group, but many in this group are working in positions for which they obviously are overqualified and clearly are ill suited. Like many of them I do not have the luxury to pick and choose; I am slaved to take what work may come. And there’s not much encouragement to draw from that. I also continually hear talk of labour shortages, but I’m not all that encouraged when I look at the labour force statistics.
Since 1989 I reckon I have applied for between 3500 and 4000 jobs in all sorts of areas, ranging from menial, minimum wage jobs to more professional jobs befitting my training, but with limited success.
Of the few paid jobs I have found all have been dull and menial and of those all have been part time/ casual. In fact all the jobs I have landed since graduating have been like this. I still spend a solid 20 to 25 hours per week actively applying for jobs but I don’t hold out all that much hope, being essentially marginalised from the workforce as I am.
Indeed experience tells that once you are marginalised from the workforce, it is tough to get back into. Employers often are wary of employing people who have been out of work for a long time. Sometimes there is legitimate reason for their wariness, but often they do so unfairly. True, your skills, productivity and your enthusiasm can be severely damaged by a long stint of unemployment. But that does not make you a write off or a basket case as many like to think.
But being out of work for a long period of time and lacking necessary work experience does make getting even low-skilled jobs difficult, even in the black economy! Then there are issues of finance, including income and debt, consuming many unemployed people. For me there has always been difficulty in paying not so much rent or utility bills but other vital things like car registration, petrol, groceries and interview attire.
True, the unemployed could derive an alternate, secondary income, that is supplement their welfare benefits, if they turned to the black economy or to crime.
In an effort to make myself more competitive and more attractive to potential employers I have, as a substitute to normal paid work and in addition to undertaking further training, actively pursued and undertaken voluntary work. I reckoned that by doing voluntary work I would not only be able to gain work experience but be able to do something worthwhile for society and for myself. While these things have come to pass where I am concerned, I have come to see that voluntary work does not cut much of a bar with employers today and counts for little when applying for jobs. And while voluntary work has been uplifting, it has not lifted me out of my predicament.
Contrary to what many often believe, obtaining voluntary work, indeed any unpaid work, is no easy thing. Sometimes it can be as hard as, or even harder than, getting paid work as I well know. Though I have landed several voluntary jobs, they have not come easily. Of the 60-70 organisations I have sought voluntary work from over the last decade or so, only a few were prepared to take me on.
I know much has been made about why the unemployed don’t engage in voluntary work in order to improve their prospects. I can tell you that once you are marginalised organisations shirk you. Even though I offered my services gratis to many organisations, there were always reasons why it was not possible to use them or to use me in some capacity. So even one’s work as a volunteer can become a threat, and there is subtle societal pressure for the unemployed not to do any unpaid work at all.
It would go without reckoning that any form of legitimate work would be of certain benefit to the unemployed. Indeed the thrust of mutual obligation is premised around this belief. Yet there is a prevailing attitude by many employers and oddly by job network providers to resist placing unemployed people in any job, especially jobs beneath their education.
The reality for most jobless people is that they do not have the luxury to pick and choose what they want. Most often have to take what turns up regardless of any past standing – that is the hard, cold fact of the matter. I am often asked what kind of work I’d like to do and what I’d enjoy doing. To talk of such things to someone in my position is nonsense. You might just as well ask a destitute homeless person what kind of abode they’d prefer, when all they really want is just a roof over their head. It’s the same for the unemployed. Unemployed people often have to focus on present needs and often can ill afford to think beyond their immediate situation.
Of course it is important to think about the future and about where you are headed in life but many unemployed people, like myself, are often that consumed by their predicament that they can only live in the present – in survival mode – and take each day as it comes, hoping things don’t deteriorate.
The isolation and the alienation of being unemployed can be damaging and detrimental, as can the accompanying prejudice and vilification. I have become an invisible nonentity, which is the common lot of the unemployed. I would, for instance, go to events or church and people would try to avoid me. I would also try to become involved wherever I could, offering my services gratis, but like my experience with many not-for-profit organisations there were always reasons why they possibly couldn’t involve me and in the same breath why I possibly couldn’t become involved.
One product of being unemployed is that you drop out of social and communal activities, indeed from the milieu of mainstream society, not so much because of your own volition but because of lack of acceptance from society generally and because of want of money to participate in normal societal activities. Anyway, these have been my primary reasons as they surely are of others. Any means that can help a person remain in the social loop and any means that can help a person maintain social networks and communal supports ought thus be encouraged.
Since I have been unemployed only two people outside of my family have contacted me to ask after my well-being. Silence and indifference largely is the state of the relationship people and institutions desire to have with me. So my relationship to, and faith in, others has changed irrevocably, for the worst.
Also because of my vulnerability, people feel free to break confidences and to misinform. The sheer prejudice and discrimination and the continual disrespect and disparagement encountered at all levels and from all over has merely added to the distress and despair of being unemployed.
There usually are no ready-made solutions to people who find themselves unemployed, however by offering nothing tangible – something that may possibly provide a way out – not only adds to the overall frustration but exacerbates the misery of being unemployed. Having no solutions also confronts the unemployed with their own sense of vulnerability and creates a catch-22 situation. The charge can be made that society just doesn’t care and so no matter what protests are made to the contrary you can’t change this situation.
How does society generally relate to the unemployed?
Apart from being generally stigmatised as bludgers, cheats, delinquents and all the rest, large sections of society still quite unjustifiably blame the unemployed for their own plight even in face of sobering statistics. Attributing individual causes to unemployment, such as lack of effort and motivation, low self-esteem, lack of social and enterprise skills, and poor work ethic and attitude, can bring about the very responses that are perceived as making the person unemployable. Despite public and employer perceptions, most unemployed people, especially young unemployed people, care very much to work and have the right mind-set.
It seems that those who most strongly attribute unemployment to personal shortcomings have the harshest, most unforgiving attitudes to the unemployed and the poor in society. Rather than reproaching social institutions or government failures they blame individuals for their own fate. They see welfare recipients as a lazy, dishonest and irredeemable lot, living off the hard earned money of others. What I have found most disconcerting though is that many job network counsellors who are employed to help the unemployed trivialise the problems confronting the unemployed and often make the unemployed feel they are directly to blame for their situation.
In the eleven and a half years I have been officially unemployed I have, with reference to a forty hour week, spent about five years actively job searching, around one year undertaking further training, just over three years doing voluntary work, and about three and a half years in paid employment, working in mostly menial positions and mostly on a sporadic (casual) basis. That equates to around twelve and a half years in a forty hour week or to over forty three hours a week over the eleven and a half years I have been officially unemployed. Where I am concerned it has been far from a cosy, carefree life.
Even though many long-term unemployed people, like myself, have a strong work ethic, those in the ranks are still very much maligned in this regard because society’s views of the work ethic cause people to be judged by what work they do and how hard they work. To assert that those who are well-to-do have achieved their success through hard work and those who are poor deserve to be, because they have failed to exploit opportunities, I find quite objectionable.
I can say that I have made the most out of all the opportunities that I have been afforded; few as they have been.
What I find most objectionable is the slur that is constantly hurled at the unemployed by many in the community. It may be funny and consoling to some but often the remarks go beyond the pale. I remember several years ago a senior political adviser categorising the long-term unemployed in Australia either as ex-criminals, paedophiles or mentally ill. I’ve escaped none of these labels.
Indeed when first assessed by a job network provider I am invariably asked if I am on any medication or if I have any prior criminal convictions. Strangely they never ask whether my lack of work experience or lack of competitiveness is an inhibiting factor! Though every time I mention this, they always invariably dismiss it as being irrelevant. Even when I do find settlement I don’t expect the maligning to cease for years, if not decades, to come.”
Frank’s story leaves me feeling gutted. I want to people to see other like Frank in a different light. I want to be more active in helping him into long-term employment. I want to change society’s structures. I want to encourage you to contact him. A job today would make the difference. I will answer any reference question you may care to ask if you email me at gordon@gordonmoyes.com .
GORDON MOYES