Left Behind

CHRIS PASKI HAS a binder containing computer screen shots of every job he’s applied for in the last year and a half.

“I keep track of everything—I’m an engineer,” he says.

Paski blitzed the commutable radius around his Exton, Pa., home with résumés. He extended his search to Washington, D.C. If he found work there, he planned to sleep in a travel trailer during the week and return home on weekends. Despite impressive experience as an aerospace systems engineer and sending out 270 résumés, he’s scored just one interview. He’s still looking, and he says his faith is intact.

“I know the Lord will take care of me, but he seems to be taking his time,” Paski says, laughing.

But Mike Heaney of West Chester, Pa., doubts that God has a plan for his job search. He remembers a previous bout of unemployment when he lived in North Carolina that changed him.

It was a dark time, he recalls. Problems in his marriage escalated because of unemployment. That led to divorce. Money was tight and medical benefits a luxury. When he needed some major dental work, he drove from North Carolina to Mexico, where it was done for 75 percent less. “They call it dentistry tourism,” he says.

He attended job support groups at a church where he repeatedly heard that God had a plan for anyone who was unemployed. But after seeing the devastation that unemployment caused to the people there, he disagrees with that—a belief he says he’s reconciled with his Catholicism.

Going through a spiritual crisis isn’t uncommon for the jobless. It’s triggered by a job market where the unemployed are in a Hunger Games-style fight for survival: Find a new job in six months or a time bomb goes off. They’ll be labeled then as “long-term unemployed”—out of work for 27 weeks or more, as defined by the U.S. Labor Department.

After a year of unemployment, just a third will find any kind of job, according to a Brookings Institute study released in 2014. However, only 11 percent will find steady, full-time employment during the same time period. Rand Ghayad, then a graduate student from Northeastern University, made up 4,800 fake résumés for 600 real job openings. He varied the content to determine what made employers interested in job candidates. Employers rarely called the people who were out of work for six months or more, he reported.

Studies such as Ghayad’s indicate that the perception among some human resources departments is that the long-term unemployed are damaged goods.

“They have labeled them as having stale skills,” says Rick McHugh, staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project in New York City. “But I’ve never seen any place that shows that at a certain point people forget how to do things. There’s a group consensus that this exists, but it’s something they’ve deduced, not proven.”

IN PENNSYLVANIA, some of the long-term unemployed turn to Joseph’s People, an ecumenical nonprofit organization founded at St. Joseph’s Parish in Downingtown. The group has grown to 14 chapters throughout the state, with about 2,000 members. Co-founder and president Cheryl Spaulding estimates about 75 percent of them are long-term unemployed. They are generally 45 and over and can be from any industry, she says. About 90 percent hold a bachelor’s degree, nearly half have a master’s degree, and about 5 percent have a Ph.D.

The chapters hold biweekly meetings with events such as mock job interviews, résumé writing workshops, networking seminars, and guest speakers. The members also often act as a support group to each other. The all-volunteer organization does everything they can to help. But Spaulding has seen the worst of what can happen to the long-term unemployed.

“They will frequently go through all their retirement funds, and depending on their age they’ll go through all their children’s college funds,” she says. “They go through all their savings, they’ll second mortgage their house, many of them will lose their house, and marriages fall apart. It’s a complete disaster. It’s the thing that I think this country should be ashamed of itself for, because we basically destroyed an entire group of middle-class people.”

If the long-term unemployed don’t land a full-time job after an extended period, they could fall into one of three categories.

If they’re in their 60s, they take Social Security benefits as early as possible and retire prematurely, wounded from the loss of income. Another group will settle for the abyss of underemployment or the treadmill of several part-time jobs. The most unfortunate lose their homes or are evicted from their apartments. If they don’t have family or friends to take them in, they could end up homeless.

Brenda Caley of Coatesville, Pa., is a technical writer who for a time was homeless due to unemployment. With a boom in companies hiring contract labor instead of full-time employees, it’s led to insecurity, inconsistency, and erratic pay for some workers. For Caley, gaps between jobs over the past eight years have caused problems.

At one point she was homeless for seven months—some of which she spent camped in a tent in the woods with her two German Shepherds. She also stayed at low-budget motels and at homes of friends and acquaintances, sleeping in chilly basements, hot attics, and guest rooms. During bad patches, she used food banks. She’s currently been hired for another contract assignment. But she says the experience changed her spiritually, and that one day she’d like to do some kind of ministry.

“People tend to be more effective when they’ve been there themselves,” she says. “If I were ministering to a homeless person, I could be effective because I’ve been homeless.”

When psychiatrist Victor Frankl reflected on his time in a World War II concentration camp while writing his landmark book Man’s Search for Meaning, he compared the psychological state of being in a concentration camp to unemployment. The unemployed also didn’t know when or if their sentence would end. And the lack of work removed what Frankl believed was essential: a sense of purpose and meaning.

Clergy and spiritual directors who counsel the long-term unemployed recognize the agonizing loss of purpose that comes with extended unemployment. Work fulfills a spiritual hunger for community, for using skills, and for providing for one’s family. When that’s taken away it can trigger an economically induced dark night of the soul.

KIRT BARDEN WENT through one. Living in New Orleans in 2005, he counted 22 trees that toppled around his house when Hurricane Katrina was raging. For days he lived with no electricity and stood in line waiting for rations. His aunt and mother-in-law died from storm-related medical problems. His insurance examination business was decimated.

He left New Orleans and moved to the Downingtown, Pa. area to be closer to family. He spent 14 months looking for a job and sensed age discrimination—which he says even people in their 40s can face.

“I was angry, and my first reaction was ‘Why did you do this, Lord?’” he says. “But then I realized that some things became more important to me than God. My idol was living for the corporate world.”

He believes he came out of the adversity a much more spiritual person and now serves as a consultant in several industries.

Jim Bogdan, who performs spiritual direction and pastoral counseling at St. Joseph’s Parish in Downingtown, says unemployment can trigger a deep re-evaluation of one’s life.

“Has God caused it so you will re-evaluate? Possibly,” he says. “But I don’t believe God wants to knock us down; I believe God wants to lift us up all the time. But in our culture and in our economic society, we’re at the whim of employers and those who seek profits first.”

Economist Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute says there’s one central problem keeping employers from hiring the long-term unemployed.

“There’s not enough demand in the economy to put more people back to work,” she says. “You have the unemployed as well as wage stagnation. There’s not a lot of pressure on employers to raise wages when they feel they can hire someone who will work for less.”

So the tight job market has produced a pecking order of the unemployed. At the bottom of the list are the long-term unemployed who are disproportionately men, people over 50, and African Americans. Until the economy recovers more significantly, the long-term unemployed may be last to be hired.

McHugh of the National Employment Law Project has studied all the recessions since World War II. Generally, the downturns last about two years. But the current downturn has dragged on much longer. And this one has a different tone, he says. He’s surprised at the lack of protest from the unemployed and some progressive groups who have traditionally organized them.

“There seems to be this assumption that you have to accept the political realities instead of trying to change the political realities,” he says. And the political reality is that not much is being done.

Early in 2014, a White House plan to help the long-term unemployed received widespread media attention. It was an online voluntary pledge for companies to hire the long-term unemployed. More than 300 companies signed on. Most were small companies. However, some Fortune 500 companies took the pledge too. But are they hiring the long-term unemployed? Several inquiries were sent to corporations on the list asking how many long-term unemployed they hired, but they went unanswered.

Instead, there are monthly government reports that the economy is creakily improving. But it’s not happening quickly enough to help many of the long-term unemployed.

“They’ve been left behind,” Spaulding says. “The message is that we’ve moved on, and we don’t need you.”