A Story From the Front Line of White Collar Unemployment:
Since stories abound about how "jobs" and "trade" are now the hot issues in the presidential campaign, and since all of the candidates are awfully damn fond of talking about this particular jobless person or that without actually allowing said jobless person to speak for him/herself, the Rude Pundit is sharing an e-mail he received about a reader's search for dignity and worth in this Bushwhacked economy. In a minimally edited/corrected form, here it is:

"I grew up in LA, but moved to SF in 1984 to go to college. I stayed in the Bay Area, more or less, until 2000. I had previously been involved with the Dot Com boom. Honestly the whole thing appalled me; the unbridled greed and arrogance was more than I could take. Also, as a history major, and probably one of the few people in this country to actually learn from history, I KNEW the Dot Com thing was a bubble. So I got out while I was ahead, and moved to LA where there is a wider variety of industries to choose from. No, I did not, and do not, want to enter the entertainment industry. I grew up around Hollywood elites, and am not in the least bit star-struck and don't feel attracted to the industry at all. I've seen it from the inside, and it ain't such a much.

"I got a job pretty quick. Although history is my passion, accounting is what pays the bills. I ended up at a medium-sized light-industrial company in beautiful N. Hollywood. They do bulk mailings. It was run by a two brothers and a sister. And 90% of the 165 workers were recent immigrants from Latin America (all legal). The one brother who was owner and the sister ran the place like their little fiefdom; people got fired on the spot for no reason, communication from the bosses generally took the form of expletive-laced screaming, the workers were terrified of them, and they were expected to be grateful when once a year they MAYBE got a 25 cent raise added to their minimum wage salaries.

"Oh, and then there was the fraud; the siblings being reimbursed by the company for such business expenses as Zales Jewlers and the Luau Bar at the Honolulu Hilton - paperwork that I had to OK and sign off on. One of my pre-Dot Com incarnations in SF had been as a union steward. So I can't tell you how many times I wanted to hop up on a table in the warehouse and pull a Norma Rae. Oh, and on top of it all, the owner brother was a fundamentalist Christian who left his Christian principals at the church door; he was the most greedy, most tyrannical of the whole family. Perhaps the fact that most of his employees were Catholic made them subhuman in his eyes.

"Well, needless to say, I didn't last long. I got 'laid off' in November 2000 (the week of Thanksgiving) for refusing to sign financial paperwork that I considered fraudulent at worst, and unethical at best. Very Enron-esque. However, revenge really is best served cold. First thing I did when I got home was to put a call in to the IRS fraud hotline. NEVER piss off your accountant. They know where your financial skeletons are hidden. It took a year, but they were audtied and got into vast shitloads of trouble. Heh heh.

"However, since then, I have been unemployed. The economy here in LA fell apart right when I lost my job. I have been temping ever since. And while now things are beginning to look better, it's been a long difficult coupla years. I had to declare bankruptcy for one thing.

"Have you ever been a temp? It is THE 21st Century form of slavery. I call it a modern form of slavery because the temp has no control over what happens to him/her, at least in terms of work. You have to be willing to work anywhere, for any salary, under any conditions, because even temp jobs are difficult to find. The agency that assigns you has all the power; no matter how bad it is, it is in their interest to keep you on site for as long as possible. And if you quit, you are then put on the Shit List, and that agency will not find you any more work. And, given that the temp agency biz is so incestuous, chances are that the agent who put you on the List will show up in one of the other agencies at some point (LA itself has only three major agencies that handle accounting temps.) So in temping, your reputation makes or breaks you. Additionally, as a temp you are the kleenex of the labor market; I can't tell you how many times I've gone home at night to find a message from the agency saying 'Don't go in tomorrow. They don't want you any more.' Boom. That's it. No work. Fortunately for me, I have an excellent reputation.

"To say the least, temping is such a degrading, de-humanizing experience, that your self esteem takes a real hit. For much of 2001 and 2002 I was clinically depressed and borderline suicidal. And of course I had no health insurance, so I couldn't get treatment.

"Right now, my chances of getting a job are getting better and I have several irons in the fire. I got through my depression and no longer want to off myself. So I am recovering, no thanks to any government program (I make too much money to qualify for anything, but I don't make enough to actually provide for anything as a single un-childed person other than the bare bare essentials) or anything. I suppose the Republicans could use me as their poster child. However the last three years radically changed my philosophy of life, killed my previously abundant optimism and positive outlook, and has really made the idea of participating in The System a repulsive one. Now I am a cynical, almost bitter person fast approaching middle age. I feel like a major chunk of my best years - my 30's - has been taken away from me by forces that were largely beyond my control (the recession, getting laid off, etc.) and while I've done everything I could to get by, I am definitely NOT better off than four years ago.

"I have two elderly parents in declining health. When they kick the bucket, I have made the decision to leave the country, most probably to Canada, where I have a cousin who could sponsor me (he went to Canada to escape Viet Nam). But even this makes me angry, because I'm not the only bright, intelligent, hard working, talented person who wants to escape this place. Nearly all my friends - men, women, straight, gay, white, non-white, etc. are at least fantasizing about leaving. And that's a sad state of affairs when the best people want to leave. I mean, that happens either in third world countries or dictatorships."

The Rude Pundit is not a "journalist," so, no, he can't vouch for the story, but the gut says it sounds awfully real and really awful (and a whole helluva lot more reliable than Matt Drudge).

Let's open this up. Send your stories of being sodomized by job loss and unemployment and what it means to be on the Bush Superhighway of Economic Doom to: rudepundit@yahoo.com.

This is a call to all the places that link to the Rude Pundit - put out the word that this blog wants these stories. If we receive some interesting ones, we'll print them. Let's put a human face on the degradation of the American worker.