from In These Times:
Don’t Count on Tomorrow: The New Credo for the UnemployedWednesday
Jan 5, 2011
9:39 am
By Stephen Franklin
Long ago, on New York City's docks, Frankie drilled into me the American credo about climbing the ladder to a better life. “Kid, you gotta finish college,” he would say. “You gotta do better than this. All you need is to work harder and you can get there.”
Frankie, a massive fellow who had spent his life on the Manhattan docks, was my protector and career advisor. He would find a clean place to hide my college books in the mornings when I showed up. And when a fight broke out, he would warn me.
If you ever worked in a steel mill in Ohio, a lumber camp in Alabama, a diner in Maine, a cotton mill in North Carolina, or any blue-collar, back-breaking job anywhere and it was clear that you had a good chance to move on, you probably heard the same lecture about the American worker’s credo: "If you get knocked down, stand up and try again. Yeah, life’s is tough. So what. You have it in you. Set your goals high and you’ll wind up somewhere near where you want to be."
One of the many things we seem to have lost in the Great Economic Bust is a widespread belief among those down and out that they will ever get back up on their feet. This finding comes from a recent survey on the unemployed called “
The Shattered Dream: Unemployed Workers Lose Ground, Hope and Faith in their Futures" (PDF link).
It was produced by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
How deep is the disappointment of the unemployed? ...........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6809/dont_count_on_tomorrow_a_new_credo_for_the_unemployed/
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
