Fear and Loathing in the Unemployment line

My full time job as a digital paint and rotoscope artist for VFX was effectively outsourced ten years ago. I have only worked sporadically in VFX since the stock market "recession" and it took me YEARS to adjust to the change psychologically and economically. I consider that my life was destroyed. Absolutely destroyed. Most people seem to think I am joking when I refer to the event in that manner.

In the 1960's Detroit was one of the wealthiest cities in the USA. Today 75% of the single family homes are abandoned or destroyed. Nobody abandons a house and a mortgage unless their life is destroyed and they are running away in the middle of the night. Three quarters of the people living in Detroit had their lives absolutely destroyed by General Motors and the other Automobile manufacturers moving to different states.

This is one of the major defects of the current legal structure of the economy in the USA: "There is no real corporate accountability back to the workers." Since "at will hire laws" were passed in 1995, your employer has no legal obligation to you beyond a two week pay period, even though you have dedicated your life and your plans for the future (and most of your waking hours) to the service of that employer.

Prior to "at will hire laws" passed in 1995, you could legally challenge a job termination with the Labor Board. The Labor Board would have a hearing and if they judged in your favor, the employer would HAVE to hire you back again. I know this is true, because (in the early 1990's) I had a hearing about a job (with CST Entertainment) but I dropped the case when my demands were met (I was rehired at my original pay rate).

To give you an idea "WHY" jobs are being outsourced: About five years ago I was notified of a VFX job in Shanghai that I was qualified to do. This was specifically paid in Chinese currency at local wages. The pay rate was $300 a month (after calculating for the exchange rate). $300 a month! -- The Chinese citizen is given an apartment to live in by the government, so they do not have to pay rent like we do in the USA. (There is effectively no homelessness in China). But even with that added benefit, the wages are still considerably lower than in the USA.

Homelessness in China was common in the times leading up to the Communist Revolution. In the early 1900 there were years of drought in China and agriculture suffered. Many small land owners were conned into losing their property because they were starving and "forced" to trade their deed to the land for seed grain. The starving farmers used the seed grain for food and lost their land in the process. The Red Army was made up of many of these homeless peasants who were conned out of their inheritance by their "uncaring" neighbors.

In the 1950's a significant percentage of the entire USA economy was the corporation of General Motors. In a sense you could say that: "General Motors drove the USA economy"

The surprising thing is that the phenomenon of "having your career vanish" after twenty years, is not uncommon. A significant percentage of people over 50 (like me) in the USA, were absolutely unprepared to lose their vocation, and had no other skills to use to earn money except at minimum wage jobs. And many of us had worked 50 - 70 hours a week (every week) for the previous ten years. If you are presently between the ages of 18 and 28, you stand a great probability of experiencing the same "economic shock" at sometime in the next thirty years. All I can say to you is, "GOOD LUCK" and "HANG TOUGH."


copyright (c) 2018
William Schaeffer