I’m writing this on behalf of my sister in law “Karen”, a lovely, hilarious, generous, sharp-tongued Detroit Red Wings superfan whose work life seems to mirror the overall decline in US labor in the last thirty years. I’m not the praying sort, but her situation prompts me to say a few words on her behalf to – well, the universe at least, and DailyKos readers who might understand her situation.
Karen is fifty-five years old. She was what the newspapers would’ve called “happy-go-lucky” in her youth in the early 1970s, spending her days smoking pot and drinking with her friends in Detroit. From the few photos I’ve found, Karen was a real beauty back in the day. She married the handsome and well-dressed fellow who parked cars at a fancy restaurant. Karen took a job baking cakes for a local upscale supermarket in 1977; their son Jared was born in late September that year. The family received money from her grandmother for a down payment on a little house in Dearborn Heights.
Her husband worked a series of low-paying jobs over the years – security guard, bouncer – before settling in with Karen’s father (my father in law) as his right-hand man in the wholesale meat delivery business. Business boomed with the 80s and 90s alongside high-protein diets and, some dips notwithstanding, a relatively prosperous economy. But bear in mind that this was in Detroit, so ‘prosperous’ is relative. Karen and her husband extracted as much equity as they could from their home, which had declined precipitously in value over the years. Her bakery wages held steady, then decreased relative to general expenses (gasoline, insurance, health care.)
Karen and her husband managed to eke out a living through the years, raise their son and provide him with most of the high-tech gadgets that he craved. In 2009, during a routine delivery run, my father in law lost consciousness and fell out of the driver’s side of the truck. A passerby kindly called 911. He was diagnosed with advanced lung and brain cancer in March 2009; he lasted perhaps two more months before he passed away. There was no money for a proper funeral; a man showed up at the door, took the body and then returned a few hours later with a small package of ashes.
Towards the end, Karen’s father had accepted a large order from a new, unknown client. The man took his delivery and disappeared, leaving the fragile business $50,000 in debt. The business never recovered, and Karen’s husband, now fiftysomething with a back stooped from years of heavy labor and little work experience beyond delivering meat, was unemployed. Since he was self-employed, he didn’t qualify for unemployment insurance. That was sometime in 2010; he hasn’t worked since and will likely never work again. The son is financially independent but not flush, working a string of blue-color jobs (security guard, interstate truck delivery, forklift operator in a warehouse.)
In 2011, Karen doubled up her shifts at the bakery to compensate for her husband’s lost income. (Yes, she was still at the fancy store, baking cakes for thirty years.) She subsequently lost thirty pounds from hard work and not too much food and bought two pairs of jeans at the thrift store that she could lash to her waist. “She doesn’t look good,” my husband said after a visit. She forgot to renew her car registration and lost her license for about six months, which meant that her husband had to drive her to the bakery every day, six days a week. They do not have health insurance. I saw her over Christmas; he was right, she looked like hell. Being the sole breadwinner in a low-paying job will do that to you.
Yesterday, my husband told me that Karen’s boss – the grandson of the original owner who’d hired her 35 years ago – said to her, “I’m tired of looking at your face. You’re fired.” Who knows what he actually said, the takeaway is the same: my 55 year old sister in law has now just lost the only job she’s ever held and the family’s sole breadwinner is unexpectedly out of work. We are all in shock.
And I ask you: what are they supposed to do? She’ll be able to collect unemployment, hopefully, for awhile, but then what? Who is going to hire a 55 year old baker? Who is even hiring in Detroit? It’s not like they can sell their house for any money, either. Will they need to move in with my 80 year old mother-in-law, who lives in a large ranch house in the Detroit suburbs all by herself? Or perhaps crash with her 25 year old son and his out of work girlfriend in the trailer park in Romulus?
I recently started working again after over a year of unemployment; Karen’s story scares me to the core and reminds me of the terror that year of not working entailed. Are any of us safe? Are we all, as my husband maintains, self-employed in the general sense that we cannot ever depend on an employer? I’m not that much younger than Karen, but I still dream of a fulfilling job versus the part-time one I finally managed to score. But thinking about career fulfillment seems like a luxury these days, something for the younger kids to enjoy until they, too, get tossed out as they age.