The Experience of Unemployment

My Facebook friend, John Osman, has kindly asked me to comment on my twenty-two years of unemployment: which started in 1994 when I came back from Canada and was ended when I was retired in 2016.

For the last few years, even the Job Centre admitted that there never would be paid work for me and decided to switch me from JSA to Pension Credit.

And, no, I was never deemed or assessed for Disability Benefit income.

Now, back in 1994 I assumed that, as everyone said, 'Something would turn up'.

It didn't.

And, as we know, 'Unemployment us a price worth paying.'

It is, therefore, *deliberately created, monitored and managed*.

So that the cost is borne by Worked Class people: not, as a result of Revolution, by our Oppressors and Exploiters, The Middle Class and The Capitalist Usurers respectively.

Indeed, it is astonishing that, a) the Experience of Unemployment, which is part of The Experience of Virtually *Every* Family, is so little discussed or researched in Academic Circles (how many Professors of Unemployment Studies are there world-wide: none have I found) and b) that the shame associated with unemployment is an automatic killer aspect for those who are *made* and *kept* unemployed.

So, despite my efforts to, for example, return to teaching Chemistry in schools, nothing did ever 'turn up'.

Yes, in those twenty-two years I had all sorts of short-term, often Part-time and Seasonal jobs: in a Print Factory, in an office, trying to sell newspaper subscriptions by phone, etc, etc: the most awful being, probably, in a bottle, etc return deposit depôt in British Columbia, where the returns to be sorted included addicts' needles and used nappies. Ughh!

At first, I imagined that I was 'Between jobs': not 'unemployed'.

Partly that was because The Job Centre (or as a friend-then named it, 'The Joke Centre': a cruel jibe about a cruel inhuman place, whose degraded, degrading task is, not to find applicants jobs, but, rather, to smash them into beggary, prostitutions and worse) wouldn't register me for any Unemployment Benefits since I had some savings from my years of paid work, including a Pension that I cashed in.

So, the odds and ends of paid work came and went (mostly the latter) and I returned, as was Margaret Hilda's plan, 'To the gutter' where we, The Worked Class and the Untermench Class belonged.

Literally: at the Print Factory, which was supposed to be a High-Security Print Works, where Examination Papers etc were printed (and it wasn't: the back shipping door and gate were always open) we were not allowed to stay inside at Lunchtime. So we were corralled out, past a notice-board, where someone famously put up a samisdat copy if the Company's Accounts showing that The Company made essentially no profits (because of the Interest that it 'had' to pay to its Owners of many Centuries' standing: sound familiar? National Debt etc . . .).

So, once outside, the others disbursed and I remained: sitting on the car-park kerb, to eat my sandwiches.

Just where the Managing Director parked his car: a choice spot.

So, as time, place and savings dribbled on, I realised that, yes, I was unemployed and, as such, despite these odds and ends of paid work, it was an insult to those more deeply suffering than me from the shame of unemployment that I would accept the term if self& description as 'Unemployed'.

Ashamed as I was of it.

Now, during those years, I looked for books that might describe and, even, explain the Causes Of, and Experience Of, Unemployment.

I've, realistically only found three.

Of those, one was self-published, one a discard from the Public Library in Eugene Oregon in the US  (thank-you www.bookfinder.com !) while the one photographed was in the stacks at our local, West Sussex Public Library (thank-you to our Littlehampton Free Public Library staff!): in which is the surprising discovery that the term 'unemploynent' was only coined in the late Nineteenth Century.

Prior to that, the term was, apparently, 'Distress from Want Of Employment'.

I bet that Worked-class people had less genteel terms.

But another *excellent* book, 'The Common People' by JFC Harrison, also photographed, doesn't say what