No one person can speak for the thousands of unemployed and under-employed* workers in Elkhart County this Labor Day. My personal experience of being under-employed, and of leading Elkhart County Works Together for the last half year, leads me to offer a few personal reflections this Labor Day, and to be so bold as to use the pronoun “we” to reflect that experience.

A good place to start is by quoting Amy Hapner, featured on the front page of the Elkhart Truth this morning, who tells those who are currently employed, “Be very, very thankful you have a job.” Being without a job for a prolonged period makes us more aware than ever of the blessings and benefits of working.

It’s lonely being unemployed. We shop and go to church and look to the outside world as though we’re “normal,” but we are experiencing a reality that is very different than we experienced before. Our reality is very different than most of our peers. It often makes us feel isolated and lonely.

We often do not know what to say when people we haven’t seen for awhile ask us, “So, what are you doing?” Saying we’re “trying to keep from going crazy” seems a bit melodramatic. Saying we’re “sitting around the house crying and eating too much” is too honest. Telling friends, “I’m jealous of your job” might be a bit unsettling to them.

So we tell people we’re looking for work. That answer is true – and it also fits the role we’re supposed to play. Unemployed people soon learn the new social norms that govern our lives. Apply for work (3 times a week). Re-train for a new career. Brush up on our skills. Re-write our cover letter for each application. Stay active. Finish projects around the house. Volunteer. Network. Get in shape. Be positive. Do all that, and the government will continue to give unemployment benefits, and our social networks will look on us with approval.

Social commentators once used the term “deserving poor” to describe people who worked hard but could not get out of poverty. We know that we have to follow the rules to be seen as the “deserving unemployed.”

We also know that we can do everything right – everything on that list and more – and not find a job. We know experientially what the economists describe with numbers: across the nation, there are six unemployed workers for every job that is available. It’s much worse in Elkhart County. There is one sense in which all the advice we’re given – advice we follow – is a charade designed to make the whole society feel better.

The fact is that we are facing a huge structural jobs gap, in which not being employed is not the fault of any particular worker, and there is nothing that millions of people can do right now to get a job.

That reality leads some of us to re-adjust our understanding of what we’ll do for employment. We come to realize that many of us are not going to find new jobs that build on our hard-gained education, or the professional skills we built up over many years of working. In many ways that is a more bitter blow than realizing we will not earn as much in a future job, or that we will have to drive (much) further every day to get to work.

This reality can also lead to re-adjusting our understanding of what we will do with our lives. All of us – employed and unemployed – whether we are recent college graduates, young married people with young children, or empty nesters with a decade or more of working life ahead, have expectations of how our lives will unfold. Will we buy a house? Will we have a retirement account? Will we always pay our bills month to month, or will we have a margin? Will we “retire” at 55 and pursue a second career or go into service? When everything is unfolding according to the script, we might not even be aware of those expectations. Those of us who lose jobs become aware of our expectations as we see them seemingly fading out of reach.

There is not a neat conclusion to this note. Our experience is not like that. It is what it is, and we keep working through it.

* At ECWT we use one phrase, “unemployed and under-employed”, because many people are working three shifts a week, working a part-time job without benefits, being called back to get out a temporary order, are self-employed but working only sporadically, etc. These people are not reflected in the official unemployment rate, but they are severely impacted by the economic downturn.