I Hope They Starve In The Streets

Broken Quanta

My contempt for these guys knows almost no bounds. A man who chooses not to work despite the fact that he could work and needs to work isn't fit to scrape the scum off the bottom of my shoe. He certainly doesn't have any "dignity" to speak of. For those who won't click, or who don't want to go through the Times' tedious registration process, here's the drift of the thing:

Alan Beggerow has not worked regularly in the five years since the steel mill that employed him for three decades closed. He and his wife, Cathleen, 47, cannot really afford to live without his paycheck. Yet with her sometimes reluctant blessing, Mr. Beggerow persists in constructing a way of life that he finds as satisfying as the work he did only in the last three years of his 30-year career at the mill.

That "way of life" is being a jobless bum. And apparently, this worthless layabout is not the only guy too vain and slothful to take his ass to work. The article reports on three guys of different backgrounds, all of whom have decided that they just can't stand the psychological strain of gainful employment. Apparently, this is some kind of trend, reflected in various workforce statistics that the author reports on. Strangely, though, the piece seems sympathetic to these losers. The exact reason we ought to feel anything but contempt for them is unclear, presumably because no such reason actually exists.

Totally Ignorant About Capitalism

Louis Uchitelle, the author of The Disposable American: Layoffs And Their Consequences was on CSpan-2 today discussing the book. Mr. Uchitelle showed once again his remarkable depth of understanding about the current labor situation in particular and the economy in general. I have read the book, and my comments about the book can be found here.

I was interested in the questions asked after his presentation. The questions were varied, but the one that was the most interesting was the one asked by a man that first read a quote by Samuel Gompers, then proceeded to tell Mr. Uchitelle that he was totally ignorant about capitalism. The questioner's point being that if layoffs are the only way for a company to be profitable, what's wrong with that? It is no doubt not the first time the author has heard comments like this, and most likely the questioner was not the rudest the author has encountered.

It isn't that the author is ignorant of capitalism. By what he's written it seems he understands it very well. It is the fact that he does not agree with unrestrained, free market capitalism where maximum profit is gained by the disregard of the ones that are the creators of profit. And who creates profit? Who creates basic wealth? Labor. For the sake of short-term, maximum profit, labor is taking it on the chin. Poor wages, no benefits, no job security for labor while a handful at the top of the pyramid make more and more. The upper echelon recieve high salaries, huge expense accounts, great benefits, while they repeatedly use layoffs and plant closures as profit-making strategies. And for them, it works. Like bands of corporate marauders, they float from position to position, company to company, skim off the gravy and move on.

This is but one part of the debate that the author is trying to put forth to society. Some others are the moral, ethical, and social aspects of layoffs. How they affect productivity, job security, worker's rights, and society in general. So for someone to accuse the author of ignorance shows me that debate is necessary. Without honest dialogue, where beliefs and fears are brought forth in a civil manner, instead of name-calling and ideological rantings, these issues will never be addressed. And they need to be addressed. Nothing less than the future of labor, of our economy, our country , is at stake.

From An Economist

Free Time is Not Free

We have been discussing the issue of minimum wage. The economist in me was captivated by the "Quotation of the Day" in today's email version of the New York Times.

"I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me."
- Alan Beggerow, unemployed steel worker

The quotation came from a very interesting and fairly in-depth article by LOUIS UCHITELLE and DAVID LEONHARDT in today's New York Times entitled "Men Not Working, and Not Wanting Just Any Job."

What Mr. Beggerow has come to realize is that in accepting a job, he is selling not only his labor and his skills, he is selling his time. And time is a very valuable commodity. Most of us never really have the opportunity to truly gauge just how valuable our free time is.

That is another aspect of the minimum wage discussion I have largely overlooked.

Just how all of this is going to play out over the next decade is far from clear. Huge numbers of Baby Boomers are entering their 60's. Will they continue to work, or will they discover the true value of their free time?

If they leave the workforce – as they very well may – they will create a massive across-the-board shortage of skilled, experienced workers. This could drive unemployment in the U.S. to record lows, drive up the cost of labor, and put the immigration debate on the back burner.

The Boomers have proven themselves to be very independent. But once they discover the joys of free time, I'm betting it is going to require large sums of cash to lure them back to work.

It's definitely something to think about.

Comments From 'Free Republic'

Some of my favorite comments:

• They'e obviously not scraping by *that* much, as their individual weights look to be around 300 lbs. Where is their sense of shame? A generation ago, men like this would have been scorned by their communities
• Good liberal voters!!!! A good sterotype.
• A Day in the Life at 1300 Loser Ave.
• Cut off the damn welfare! When he gets down to a svelt 250 he'll go back to work!
• He can thank his (former?) union for artificially elevating his sense of self worth to the point of being unemployable. Simply put, he can't find a job because he thinks he's worth more than the market does.
• For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.” 2 Thessalonians 3:10
• They are also white, a statistical aberration, and the New York Times has once again shown us their visceral hatred for the average Joe.
• I'm not sure this is the best example of what the Times story wants to illustrate. He isn't spending his entire day watching Oprah. Reading, learning, and writing aren't the worst things a man could be doing on what used to be called a sabbatical. Who knows ? Those unpublished novels might reach a publisher yet. A new Louis L’Amour wouldn't be a bad thing.
• Do you think the dog knows he's a future meal?
• He and his wife look like wildly successful chin farmers
• Mrs. Beggerow seems to be a total moronic dupe dishrag. A usefull floormat to a lazy loser.
• Of course not, but I know plenty of 9-5ers who haven't read a book in 20 years. At least this guy is doing that
• Well, this story when you read the whole thing definitely has sympathetic bent to it. However, in just punching fun at it, we are missing a factor here that is quite real. There are a lot of people that just give up after they try to reenter the workforce. We have in this country glorified retirement, the general idea that we MUST work to live. That we should live to WORK. The concept of doing what you WANT to do rather than what you SHOULD do (according to the judgments and opinions of others) is an aberration.This story wasn't about people who simply CHOSE not to work, they chose not to work under the conditions that were offered to them. They may have been able to work, but under conditions that they did not see as being worth it.
• 2 more proud NYTimes readers.
• I think if you are too heavy and get resulting health problems you can claim disability. Maybe that is the the plan..How did he teach math at a community college with no more than a high school education?
  
Somethings stinks about this article.
• He was teaching a class directly relevent to his experience. A sheepskin doesn't provide that.
• And this would be Bush's fault that he lost his job and just can't bring himself to actually look for something he doesn't deem 'demeaning'. Which by the looks is something like getting paid to do absolutely nothing. And the reason they are 300 lbs is food stamps. Garonteed.
• As long as they are not living off of the people, I don't think that it is anyone's business what people look like or if they have a job or not!
  
  
  

Comments From The GOPUSA Message Board

Some Of The Nastiest Comments

"I've known about this change in the philosophy of liberal men for awhile but this really gets to the bottom of it. Naturally the Times doesn't have a clue how revolting this article is. I hope everyone reads it because it's your taxes that are keeping these lazy slobs at 300 pounds"

"So Mr. Beggerow would gladly work if someone would let him do what he wants to do. Isn't that nice. Perhaps he doesn't realize that most job interviewers are quite perceptive, and will likely pick up on that attitude, thus eliminating him from consideration. Methinks what Mr. Biggerow really wants is to sit home and eat."

"Thanks for posting this. I attribute this narcisism to the breakdown of the 2 parent household. We are now witnessing a generation(s) of men raised by women (mom, grandma, or day care). These men have no concept of a fatherly figure nor an understanding of what it means to be a responsible male. I agree that one way to snap these people out of their woe is me attitude is to ELIMINATE entitlements."

"This article is so interesting to me because I've encountered someone exactly like they describe and who is doing exactly this. Their wife works but they no longer do since they were let go from a job of many years. The person is happy about it and criticizes those who do work. There are apparently a lot of them."

"BOTH of my husbands. I thought I was the only woman married to such selfish, self-centered, self-absorbed men."

"Sorry to hear about your misfits. It sounds as if you were married to male creature, not real men. Men dig ditches, if that is the only job available."

"Sorry folks, but this article is saying exactly what I have been for the past few months: that there is work that Americans WON'T do, and the main reason is that the govt competes with the "unskilled" labor market. Why would one go to work when they can make more and have better benefits from sitting on their "royal" butts? They would (and do) say that they simply "can't afford to go to work." Stupid women and other family members aside...if these lard-fannies didn't have the "entitlements" they would "dig ditches" if they had to."

"I saw this on TV this evening. UNbelievable! What man wouldn't get off his butt at ANY given time and take every opportunity to not only be an example, but actually PROVIDE for his family? Good grief, people.The TV clip I saw showed a guy making his wife's lunch, kissing her as she left for her executive job and then sitting down, hoping he could "hit it big with his BLOG"! And I though, "You Pansy!" But I see what is happening. With thousands of people living "scot free" off government handouts, why not find out how to qualify and just "do nothing".Barring being a quadropalegic or on my deathbed, I wouldn't think of sending my wife to work while I "sat home". I'd clean a public bathroom before sitting home and "giving up". These guys will live stupid and die stupid."

"That's not the end of the story tho...in addition to these "entitlements" is subsidized housing (here would be a 3 BR apt for bout $100/mo, the OTHER $1300 paid for by who? US!!). Then there are food stamps, school breakfast/lunch programs (for those with families), WIC, not to mention at the end of the tax year their REFUND!! For "earned income credits", etc... It's just sickening!!!! Maybe, just maybe, IF our govt wasn't so frigin stupid, we would see guys like this standing on corners looking for day jobs instead of the Illegals... And for those of you in favor of minimum wage, and it's never-ending increases, just remember that when the cost of living goes up, so do the "cost of entitlements"....to US!!"

From 'The Progressive'

Lazy Men
By Ruth Conniff
August 1, 2006

On Monday, The New York Times ran a fascinating front-page feature on a new trend: men who won't work. The article focused on a couple of men who represent a new trend in widespread, prolonged unemployment. The men featured—an ex-steelworker and a formerly six-figure-earning electrical engineer—are using their savings and second mortgages to fund an inactive lifestyle. They are reminiscent of the character in Herman Melville's Bartelby, the Scrivener who did less and less, saying only of his withdrawal from life, "I prefer not to."
Despite The New York Times article, most of the male unemployed are not lazy or lacking in "personal responsibility.”

The article makes some interesting cultural observations. For example, that not working is heavily celebrated as "the good life" in a culture that touts millionaire retirees in their 40s and 50s. That women's entry into the workforce has reduced pressure on men to find their whole identity in wage-earning. And that Americans generally have the aspirations and habits, but not the funds, to be the idle rich. The future doesn't look bright for the nonworking middle class men in the story, but for now they prefer to defer it.

Alan Beggerow, the former steelworker who lost his job in 2001, has an almost Buddhist present-focus. He is enjoying reading, writing pulp fiction, and getting a lot of sleep. He says he no longer dwells on the future much. Since he doesn't have much money, all that retirement planning and worrying he used to do just doesn't seem relevant anymore.

A common thread among the men the Times interviews is their unwillingness to take low-paying, no-benefits jobs, or jobs that just seem distasteful to them. They are pessimistic about the idea of continuing to improve their lives through work: The most they could hope for is subsistence, and degrading work, in their estimation. They'd rather stay home and read.

I suspect this story will fuel an outcry among conservatives. A particular target will be the news that men like Beggerow are able to maintain themselves in part because of Social Security disability payments and Medicaid--two government programs that are already under assault by would-be privatizers. The idea of lazy stay-at-home husbands disdaining a hard day's work is just what the privatizers need to cut the last legs out from under the social welfare system.

That's a shame, because a closer look at the statistics the Times presents shows that most of the male unemployed are not lazy or lacking in "personal responsibility," to borrow a phrase that fueled welfare reform's undoing of Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

At the very end of the long article, which spends a lot of time on displaced dot-comers and other highly skilled and once highly played workforce dropouts, the Times covers another group that makes up a large portion of discouraged workers--men who have been released from prison, and can't find a job. Odd jobs, off-the-books part-time work, homeless shelters, and soup kitchens make up the web of supports that hold these men's lives together.

In total, of the 13 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 54 who are not working, 43 percent have a household income of less than $25,000, and 71 percent have less than $50,000 a year. Only 24 percent have any college education at all.

So the large photo the Times ran of Christopher Priga, 54, the former electrical engineer, sitting in a trendy cafe reading a book, is hardly representative.

An accompanying bar graph that charts the trend since the 1970s is striking. Less than 6 percent of 30-to-54-year-old men were not working then, compared with more than double that number today.

The big story of this time period is the rise of the low-wage, no-benefits work force, the decline of union membership and manufacturing jobs with family-supporting wages, and the grim outlook of men whose fathers had lifelong careers without lay-offs and plant closings. These are the factors that are driving the insecurity of today's workforce. Instead of delving into them, the Times focuses on the personal quirks of a few men who could easily be transformed into the apocryphal Cadillac-driving welfare queens the pundits and politicians derided when the assault on welfare began.

In his book "All Together Now," Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute--writes about what he calls the YOYO mentality in America--You're On Your Own. It eschews common solutions for a radical individualism that threatens to tear apart our social fabric. He calls for an alternative perspective he calls WITT--We're In This Together--as the only solution to the economic problems that threaten to undo opportunity and fairness in American society.

It would be a shame if Social Security and Medicaid--two programs that still embody the nobler communal values of the New Deal and Great Society eras— fell prey to the You're On Your Own mentality. The concept of social insurance still enjoys widespread support, and keeps alive the sense that we are in this economy together. But the folks who are fueling the worship of wealth that skews our culture and those who would like to keep heaping tax cuts on the rich would like you to think that a few lazy men want to suck up your tax money to fund their idleness.

You can just imagine the outcry on rightwing talk radio--send these guys to work at Wal-Mart! As if all of us should be dedicating ourselves to round-the-clock, low-wage work so the owners and big investors can fund their own idle lifestyles.

The Times piece was interesting from a cultural and existential point of view. But politically it could have some really negative effects. We live in such demoralizing economic times. With high-income tax cheats costing the government between $40 and $70 billion a year and opportunities for hardworking lower and middle income people disappearing, we should focus on these larger conditions instead of blaming discouraged workers for losing faith.

From Edward Winkleman

A comment about the article byDavid Brooks that can be found here

The "Productive" Class

Back when I was blogging politics day and night (when Bambino, a notorious blog widower, coined the term "bullsh*t websites"), I had exhausted the contempt-conveying phrases in my vocabulary throughout a series of ultra-shrill tirades against New York Times columnist David Brooks. He remains my first example of a thoroughly loathsome pundit, displaying all the integrity of Vidkun Quisling, but none of the charm.

Today, however, Brooks entered the realm of surreal self-parody (must be slow in the pundit world as well, although none of the pundits not working hard to deflect attention away from the Administration's accelerating spiral down past the nethermost position in American Presidential history seem to have any trouble finding topics to write on).

Anyway...The New York Times has deemed such drivel worthy of payment and hidden his column behind their "Times Select" firewall, so I'll have to retype the choice passages from the copy I purchased from my local vendor.

With the Middle East peace process in tatters, Iraq a literal hell on earth, killer heatwaves scorching the planet, and bin Laden & Co. still trotting the globe plotting, what does our Mr. Brooks decide his readers have to know he thinks? Why that rich people are overworked and horribly put upon and poor people are lazy, of course.

Through some screw-up in the moral superstructure, we now have a plutocratic upper class infused with the staid industriousness of Ben Franklin, while we are apparently seeing the emergence of a Wal-Mart leisure class ---devil-may-care middle-age slackers who live off home-equity loans and disabilty payments so they can surf the History Channel and enjoy fantasy football leagues.

Brooks' alarm over this was spawned by an article the Times ran earlier. That one is still free:

Millions of men ... men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work.

About 13 percent of American men in this age group are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960’s. The difference represents 4 million men who would be working today if the employment rate had remained where it was in the 1950’s and 60’s. [...]

These are men forced to compete to get back into the work force, and even then they cannot easily reconstruct what many lost in a former job,” said Thomas A. Kochan, a labor and management expert at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “So they stop trying.”

Many of these men could find work if they had to, but with lower pay and fewer benefits than they once earned, and they have decided they prefer the alternative. It is a significant cultural shift from three decades ago, when men almost invariably went back into the work force after losing a job and were more often able to find a new one that met their needs.

Now I'm a workaholic, so I'm not sure I can relate to those following this trend, but to leap from this article to the conclusions Brooks makes reveals a classic case of fitting the data to support a predisposed position. Again, from Brooks:

Buy I try not to judge these gentlemen harshly. What I see is a migration of values. Once upon a time, middle-class men would have defined their dignity by their ability to work hard, provide for their family and live as self-reliant members of society. [Gee, I'm glad he didn't judge them harshly.] But these fellows, to judge by their quotations, define their dignity the same way the subjects of Throsetin Veblen's "The Theory of the Lelisure Class" defined theirs.

They define their dignity by the loftiness of their thinking. They define their dignity not by their achievement, but by their personal enlightenment, their autonomy, by their distance from anything dishonorably menial or cumpulsory.

GRRRRR.... One of the examples Brooks uses to make his case is that of Alan Beggerow, who got laid off at age 48 from the steel mill he worked in. That's right, Davie...steel workers typically have lofty delusions and distaste for menial work. Beggerow worked there until he was forty-eight! If, as my father did, Beggerow entered the steel mill about age 23, that means he performed a truly grueling, very physical job in hellish conditions for two and a half decades. Further, like my father, he most likely left that job with a series of serious health problems and a badly bruised, if not broken, body. After he got laid off, Beggerow taught math for a while at a community college, but when that ended he decided he'd rather live off what little he had accumulated than take a job he felt was beneath him. For Brooks to challenge that choice suggests he's never spent a day working in a steel mill, let alone 25 years.

What Brooks is really getting at here of course is why the uberwealthy are better than the poor (and you can bet this article about the "willfully" unemployed will weasle its way into some future column defending the tax cuts for the upper 1% of Americans). He's so remarkably deluded he actually laments:

[The lives of t]oday's super-wealthy...are marked by sleep deprivation and conference calls, and their idea of leisure is jetting off to Aspen to hear Zbigniew Brzezinski lead panels titled "Beyond Unipolarity."

Ahh...those unfortunate souls, jetting off to Aspen, celebrity panels and conference calls. Yeah, that's much tougher than filling out job applications at the local McDonald's when you're in your fifties. Why it's just not fair, I tell you. Let's not make them pay any taxes whatsoever. Clearly they're suffering enough already.

Brooks is working here, actually, off a myth that's been gaining ground among conservative bloggers. Its spin is that the wealthy are the "productive class," suggesting they do all the work and hence deserve the lion's share of the government's consideration. It's a notion I find so insidously mendacious, that it's hard not to punch someone offering it.

Then again, with the current Adminstration and its rubber-stamp Congress stacking the deck so heavily against the poor (slashing entitlement programs, refusing to raise the minimum wage, and passing truly evil bankruptcy legislation), is it any wonder that the poor take the advice offered in "War Games" that since you can't win, the only reasonable response is not to play? I mean, I know the Bush & Co are hellbent on creating a permanent indentured servant class, but they can't be surprised that folks aren't happy to both join it AND still have to clean their toilets.

One more aspect of Brook's article should be noted. It reeks of the foulest form of misogyny. Focused on the importance of the traditional role he feels men should play in society (ignoring working women in total), he ends his column on the following enlightened note:

The only comfort I've had from these distrubing trends is another recent story in The Times. Joyce Wadler reported that women in places like the Hamptons are still bedding down with the hired help.

He's attempting, one assumes, to be satirical. But who can tell, really?