Unemployment

In the last 20 years most of the world has enjoyed full employment. Both men and women; and in many places even the children had more than enough work. If one’s salary was not enough to cover the expenses of uncontrolled consumption, you took two jobs. If pay wasn’t good, one could switch countries, legally or illegally, in search of better economic opportunities.

In the last 20 years more than 20 million people entered the United States in search of better living conditions. Europe also saw its populations, decimated by old age and low birth rates, grow. Even in Latin America we witnessed work related population movements from one country to another like never before in history. For reasons more political than economic, but certainly motivated by the prospect of greater earnings, Venezuela imported 20% of its population in the last 10 years from countries like Cuba, Colombia, China and others. Al of this has ended for several years. Many of the immigrants are back in their native countries. It is preferable to be unemployed in one’s own country, surrounded by loved ones that can lend a helping hand, than in a place were you do not have many friends or family.

Work is something noble and strange. We work more out of duty than out of desire. But if we didn’t need it we would do it anyways. Need and wants are tightly intertwined when it come to work. We hate Mondays and love Fridays (unless we live in Islamic countries where the work week begins on Sunday). I still remember my first day at work. I was so proud of finding a good job as an economist. I arrived at work on the Monday right after the ’67 earthquake in Caracas. I wasn’t sure there would be any work, even though I had walked by the building of Luz Eléctrica de Venezuela on Sunday, to make sure it was still standing. There it was, safe and sound on Avenida Urdaneta. And I arrived punctually on Monday at 8:00 a.m. They gave me a flamboyant grey metal desk, a pile of accounts to work on and a training manual. Everybody was nice and sensible. I was proud and comfortable. In spite of this, I found myself looking at the clock in horror. It was ten in the morning and I still had eight hours before the end of the work day (from 8 to 12 and 2 to 6). I felt overwhelmed and surprised by the cruelty that 50 or more years of my life working in an office implied. I would never again have the freedom of riding my bicycle through the neighborhood or seeing and speaking to my friends between classes at the university. There was no longer time to dream of becoming a trapeze artist or a famous singer. Or of being a writer, poet or actress. My destiny now was to clear up accounts as an economist, even when I didn’t fully understand the need for all the bookkeeping. I was employed and have been lucky to remain that way for more than 40 years. Being employed adds value to weekends and vacations. It domesticates us. It connects us with other humans. Those we like and those we don’t. Most importantly, being employed gives us a salary and a measure of what we contribute to the country’s production, and allows us to maintain a family and dream of a better life. Employment makes us feel useful. Unemployment is corrosive. It makes us feel worthless, disposable. We lose the normal connections that guide our decisions. One can’t decide in a void, one can only make decisions between contrasts and preferences. To be content we have to have restrictions and the ability to overcome them. Employment gives us those restrictions and the tools to overcome them.

Work and family are the two motors that give us identity and impulse in our lives. Unemployment is like a divorce, a destructive and at the same time liberating turn in our lives. But unemployment is worse than a divorce. Once you have gotten over the loss of your life partner, one can begin a new life in search of new friends and partners. Unemployment leaves us without income, insecure, and increases the chance of destroying the family as well. This is a nail that does not take out another nail, instead it crucifies us. Despite how painful and destructive a period of unemployment can be, it can always lead to a reencounter and rediscovery of our real goals. We can do a lot and reinvent ourselves many times in our lifetime. To reinvent ourselves we need to undertake, with valor and tenacity, a period of reeducation, rehabilitation and rebalance of our faculties. The important thing is to stay active and concentrated. Employed or unemployed, tenacity, education and the ability to serve others makes us better. One of the most useful expressions I’ve heard is that if the glass is half empty or half full depends on whether you are filling the glass or drinking its content. If we keep “filling the glass”, there is real hope that we can reconnect, actively and effectively, with the world. If we only drink from the glass, sooner or later we will find it empty. Community services are always an opportunity for employment if we can’t think of or come up with another job. John Stuart Mills, the famous economist, said: “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others or the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed no as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.” Serving others is the most satisfactory mode of self employment, and there is little chance of being unemployed in that occupation.