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Today was another grim day in unemployment news. Last week's initial unemployment claims stood at 573,000 which is a 26-year high. That is over half-a-million newly unemployed people last week alone. Plus, every day lately seems to arrive with news of multiple companies announcing hundreds or thousands of layoffs.
This week in my (and everyone else's it seems) twitter stream and blog reader, amidst the happy news of birthdays and babies, were ever more announcements that friends lost their job.
Whether it is you that has lost their job or friends, family or neighbors, there is no avoiding talking about people losing their jobs. So how do we talk about it? Some use extreme negative language. Consider this headline and tag:
Laid off at 50: What next?
It's a nightmare. And if you think it couldn't happen to you, you're kidding yourself.
Money Magazine
Others approach it with a glass-half-full philosophy:
I loved my job, the people I worked with and for. That's something to be grateful for. And I am. It was a great place to be. - @Karoli
Others are in shock, like this blogger who thought she was recession-proof:
it’s really hard for me to write this morning, as i don’t think i am still over my shock from being laid off friday morning.
this whole weekend, i could not write. i could not articulate the myriad of emotions and thoughts that were flowing through me and my head as i took the past few days to process what has just happened with my job. i have been going through a mixture of bewilderment, disorientation, numbness, disbelief, and hesitation.
Financial Wellness Project
And just as FWP seeks the language with which to articulate the shock of losing her job, others struggle with whom to tell, how to tell and if they feel shame, just how painful it will be to tell.
What if it is someone who is much like a member of the family and you need to stop employing them because you've lost your job?
Given that the connection between domestic workers and their employers is often more intimate than other working relationships, when it is threatened by economic downturn, feelings on both sides run high. For employers, who form attachments to the people they entrust with their children and their homes, terminating or even scaling back the relationship can feel like betraying a family member.
Julie Scelfo, The New York Times: Trickledown Downsizing
And how do you talk about needing a new job if your family is in another country and you have been paid under the table and lack a safety net? One bright spot in Scelfo's article is the efforts many of the laid off employers make to seek new positions for their trusted baby sitters.
Jan Hoffman writing for The New York Times examined this psychology in a recent article:
The neighbor, a jovial suit-and-tie presence at the school bus stop in the mornings, disappeared for a while last fall. Nobody saw him for weeks. Finally he began to venture out — at afternoon pickup, in jeans and a T-shirt. A senior manager of a technology department, he had been laid off. Neighbors didn’t know what to say to him.
The Language of Loss for the Jobless
So speaking of your job loss can result in people around you not speaking to you because they don't know what to say. But, Hoffman also points out that one of the consequences of not telling can be that you can become very lonely while hiding away from those around you.
Hillary Rettig, reacting to the article, had some words of advice:
If you are currently between jobs, you might want to pay attention to which responses you get from which people, and how those responses make you feel. Then, really work to avoid those people who bring you down, while spending as much time as possible with those who make you feel supported. Being out of work is hard enough without dealing with people who are unsupportive or who project their own insecurities onto you.
Read her full post here
Ms. Theologian at Surviving the Workday: Spirituality in the Workplace thought the article would take a different approach:
I thought that The Language of Loss for the Jobless was going to be about using the language of grief to cope with loss of a job, but it’s far more about spinning your
