Stumbling Blocks

My last interview, some time in late January or early February, didn't go very well. I knew it wasn't going to come to anything the moment the interviewer began looking at my job history. Gaps in employment are a virtually guaranteed interview killer in today's economy. I was at Bed, Bath & Beyond, doing a preliminary sit-down with the young lady who had taken my résumé. I knew as soon as she began looking over my job history that it was over. Not that she was paying attention to my facial expressions, mind you.

I was given the standard brush-off.

"We'll keep your application on file," so the bullshit goes. "And if something comes up that meets our requirements, we'll give you a call." That's how it usually goes, but this time the young lady (whose name I forget) instructed me to call the hiring manager the next week to see what opening, if any, might be available. I knew what the outcome of such a call would be, but I made it anyway. I got the standard line, from a young man who rambled on a little too long just to say they didn't have any use for me. Most of the time, however, it's just some form of, "don't call us, we'll call you," without them ever calling back.

Gaps in employment. A virtually guaranteed stumbling block to getting a job in today's economy. And that's just one of many. In late 2005 I left a food service job at Boston Market over issues having to do with the inability of my boss to schedule a shift properly, and adhere to basic food safety standards. The Boston Market restaurant at which I worked was one case of food poisoning away from getting shut down, one poorly-timed trip to the bank by an employee instead of the manager on duty that would result in a robbery. And the day I left that place, it was a matter of being woefully understaffed just as lunch hour began and several catering orders came to pick up at once.

So I left, but not without creating quite a stir with my asshole boss's newly christened regional manager. Needless to say, the idiot who had driven me to finally take drastic action to correct the aforementioned problems got a long overdue scolding (with the accompanying long overdue shift in management practices). That was the start of my third extended bout of unemployment in a decade.

The first had come in 1995, when a fall in the back yard Memorial Day weekend resulted in two broken wrists. I wouldn't find work again until December of that year. The second extended bout lasted quite a while longer. In 2001 I had quit my job at Blockbuster Video, the victim of intra-store politics that had driven me to make a fateful decision to enlist in the United States Air Force. Between the time I left Blockbuster and the time I went for basic military training (BMT), I had found gainful employment at an investment firm owned by Key Bank. My initial MEPS physical had a minor stumbling block; I have psoriasis, and have had it for as long as I can remember. Fortunately -- or unfortunately, as events would later prove -- I got to enlist anyway, with a waiver.

BMT is where my old wrist injuries came back to haunt me. They proved too weak to withstand the required routine of push-ups, and so I washed out. In that regard, having an old injury or latent chronic illness come back on me, I was by no means alone. I don't have an exact figure, or a link as of this writing, but a surprising number of trainees don't make it past BMT. For two months I languished at the 319th Training Squadron at Lackland AFB, Texas. What's the 319th?

Medical holds and crazy people being discharged.

It's also the holdover squadron for trainees who haven't for some reason been assigned a training squadron. I was one of the medical holds. Until your case moves forward, you're in Limbo. You could go back to training, or be discharged, depending on the nature and severity of whatever condition you are afflicted with. My assigned squadron was the 324th, but my wrist injuries became aggravated during Zero Week. Those two months in the 319th were, in many ways, like being in a prison. When I finally returned to Ohio in late June of 2001, I was in a bad situation -- but fortunately, not a completely hopeless one. I didn't end up homeless, which easily could have happened. Instead, I was able to spend some time living with relatives before striking back out on my own.

But job-wise, times were tough. Between June 27th, 2001 ans January 19th, 2003 I worked maybe a total of four months. Six, if you count an under-the-table job at a comic book store. And a few days working for a Wendy's burger place, spread out over a couple of weeks, before they simply stopped calling me in. Not enough hours to give me, and I think they didn't have the guts to tell me I'd been laid off.

Things were pretty bad for me. Even as I started my new job at Boston Market in 2003, I found myself forced to move back in with my parents. And I was again out of work going into 2006. I did manage to find work for about a month with a telemarketing company, but I was laid off from that. That industry has a ridiculously high turnover rate, because of the sales requirements. You have to make a certain number of them per hour, and often people entering the industry last only one or two months -- if that. I met people who didn't even last a week.

I spent most of the rest of 2006 unemployed. Fortunately, my volunteer work on political campaigns helped land me a job of sorts, as an Americorps VISTA working with Cleveland Tenants Organization. The monthly stipend was lousy, just barely enough to cover my transportation expenses to and from work, my telephone bill, and for my own food costs. But a term of service for VISTAs lasts only a year, and there were no other openings available so that I might sign up for a second year.

So now it's back to being unemployed, four months now, with yet another big gap I can't get past. Interviewers are trained to assume that there must be a problem with the prospective employee, but most often that's not true. People get laid off, they get sick or injured, and since this inexcusable occupation of Iraq began, people return from active duty to find their jobs gone forever.

Gaps are just one stumbling block to finding work in a depressed economy, especially one as depressed as Ohio's. It doesn't help that the latest recession discourages businesses from hiring, and it didn't help that my year as a VISTA came to an end in December -- just as the holiday hiring had come to an end.

Some people think that chronic unemployment, poverty, and even homelessness are a self-inflicted problem. I've yet to see even one example where this false assumption has proven true. For homeless people, those who have fallen as far as they can in America today, the challenge of re-entering even the economic status of 'working poor' is nearly insurmountable. As one web site puts it:

Simple things like finding a job, taking a shower and answering the phone are things we take for granted, but are problems for many homeless people.

Did you ever think about how a homeless person goes about getting a job? What address and phone number would they use as a contact? How do they obtain housing if there is no recent reference with an address and landlord?

A lot of these things we take for granted, but they are real concerns for the homeless. There are some working centers sprouting up offering bus tickets, resume help and a message system for retrieving job calls, but there needs to be more.

• Food is also an obvious issue and if this isn’t taken care of first, everything else takes a back seat. Some people have started community gardens offering their land in plots to whoever would like to grow food, but don’t have the land.
• Frequently unemployed homeless people are simply tagged as lazy, but there are a lot of homeless people who want to work, but face numerous stumbling blocks. When their appearance is unkept and their clothes are weathered, they are often shunned from simple restaurants where they may be seeking a meal as well as the privilege to use the washroom.
• There are some homeless people who face mental illness issues, but they often fall through the cracks of the system and have a harder time accessing health care. They can be seen as scary and crazy, but a rich artist or movie star with mental health problems is often described as eccentric. Addictions are sometimes a problem as well with similar dynamics in attitudes between the rich and the poor.

Here we do not have a caste system, but some homeless people can get treatment similar to the untouchables. This sort of banishment treatment can add to the homeless feeling of despair and reinforce issues of low self esteem and unworthiness.

Homeless people do not have regular access to clean clothing, personal hygiene, telephones, or transportation -- things we take for granted. These are more stumbling blocks to climbing out of homelessness and poverty. Few employers, if any, seriously make job offers to the homeless. Given the despair this creates, it is no wonder that many fall victim to substance abuse. It's very easy to drown one's self in alcohol when no one cares enough to even treat you like a human being, when society makes it clear that one is not wanted.

Paul Krugman wrote in a recent New York Times column that poverty does, in fact, literally poison the mind -- and that new data proves it.

“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life.

Pretty crappy, huh? But that's not the end of it. Krugman goes on to write:

In 2006, 17.4 percent of children in America lived below the poverty line, substantially more than in 1969. And even this measure probably understates the true depth of many children’s misery.

Living in or near poverty has always been a form of exile, of being cut off from the larger society. But the distance between the poor and the rest of us is much greater than it was 40 years ago, because most American incomes have risen in real terms while the official poverty line has not. To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child’s brain.

America’s failure to make progress in reducing poverty, especially among children, should provoke a lot of soul-searching. Unfortunately, what it often seems to provoke instead is great creativity in making excuses.

Some of these excuses take the form of assertions that America’s poor really aren’t all that poor — a claim that always has me wondering whether those making it watched any TV during Hurricane Katrina, or for that matter have ever looked around them while visiting a major American city.

Mainly, however, excuses for poverty involve the assertion that the United States is a land of opportunity, a place where people can start out poor, work hard and become rich.

But the fact of the matter is that Horatio Alger stories are rare, and stories of people trapped by their parents’ poverty are all too common. According to one recent estimate, American children born to parents in the bottom fourth of the income distribution have almost a 50 percent chance of staying there — and almost a two-thirds chance of remaining stuck if they’re black.

That’s not surprising. Growing up in poverty puts you at a disadvantage at every step.

I’d bracket those new studies on brain development in early childhood with a study from the National Center for Education Statistics, which tracked a group of students who were in eighth grade in 1988. The study found, roughly speaking, that in modern America parental status trumps ability: students who did very well on a standardized test but came from low-status families were slightly less likely to get through college than students who tested poorly but had well-off parents.

People don't choose to enter into poverty, nor do they choose to stay there. Things happen. People get sick or injured. Workers are laid off. Extended bouts of unemployment turn prospective employers off. Depressed economies reduce the number of available jobs. Feelings of hopelessness, despair, and low esteem creep up and take over. The lure of substance abuse proves too strong for many. Others can become, or start out, mentally or emotionally ill, thus harming or destroying employability.

Stumbling blocks, dear reader. They're killers. And the worst part is, so many in this country remain lethally ignorant of them. Lethally, because the ignorance helps perpetuate the refusal to take poverty seriously in this country, because it helps people who should be making more effort to aid their fellow citizens make excuses for doing too little -- or nothing at all. Ignorant people are another stumbling block to addressing poverty in America, because they don't know enough about the problem to recognize how serious it really is.

One of the things I learned during my pre-service orientation is that ignorance of how big a problem poverty really is can serve to hinder efforts to fight it. People make assumptions they have no business making, because they're not the ones who have to struggle every single day with the terrible burden of unemployment, limited or nonexistent resources for climbing out of poverty, and homelessness. Most VISTAs, upon completing their year of service, do (I hope) come out of it with a much better idea of how big the problem is, and most importantly, why so many Americans have so much trouble climbing out of it.

Earlier today I challenged a particularly nasty and ignorant individual to actually learn something about poverty and homelessness by signing up for a year as an Americorps VISTA. Naturally, being the willfully ignorant and heartless jerk he is, he refused the challenge. And thus he chooses to perpetuate the lethal stumbling blocks of public ignorance and apathy.

It's a sad testament to the state of our Union when so many of us choose to remain part of the problem, passing judgment on those whose situations they'll never understand.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future