The new unemployment rate: 8.9%. Everyone who hears that percentage will know it is fraught with troublesome forebodings. Yet the modern habit of mistaking statistics for reality makes it easy to overlook the fact that the rate stands for an indigestibly large number of individuals— 9.5 million. Each point in the unemployment rate also represents, as the President explained last month, roughly $19 billion in potential but lost federal revenues, plus some $6 billion in financial assistance that the Government disburse jobless. Such statistical and elaborations usefully suggest the vast scope of unemployment and its staggering cost in both forfeited wealth and rescue efforts. Yet it is essential to remember that statistics tell nothing whatever about the reality of joblessness.
That reality is always personal and almost always lashed with a confusion of difficult emotions. Indeed, the psychological cost of joblessness is more hurtful to many victims than the strain of making financial ends meet. A few individuals, true enough, are so oddly disposed that they can take unemployment with upbeat nonchalance, making a lark of it or seizing the opportunity to switch careers. Still, Americans more typically take a cruel psychic bruising when they lose a job (never mind the cause). And if joblessness goes on for long, men and women of all ages, occupations and economic classes tend to suffer a sharp loss of selfesteem, a diminished sense of identity, a certain murkiness of purpose, a sense of estrangement from their friends—a sort of feeling of exile from wherever they feel they really belong.
The loss of a job remains, by definition, an economic event. Naturally, it is the economic aspect of the world of the jobless that has become most familiar to the public: the struggle to pay the rent and keep food on the table, the suspenseful search for new work. The intangible atmosphere of the jobless world is less familiar only because it is ordinarily more private, often downright obscure. The most obvious personal wounds of joblessness are often easy to spot, as in the language of Ronald Poindexter, 34, a Washington bricklayer out of work for six months: "I feel sick." But the profound wrench of unemployment is not often disclosed as plainly as in the reflection of Connie Cerrito, 52, of New York City, who last July lost the cosmetics factory position she had held for 35 years. Says Cerrito: "My job was my whole life. That's all I did. It's unbearable now. Staying home is terrible. I can't go on like this."
Common among the jobless is a sense of being condemned to uselessness in a world that worships the useful. Out-of-work people who do not develop such feelings on their own are apt to be given them when they visit the unemployment office: there the applicant is more often treated like an alien culprit in need of interrogation than an unlucky citizen in need of assistance. Says a young writer who was among the anonymous hundreds that Harry Maurer taped for the oral history Not Working: "I always get the feeling that the people at the umemployment office think I'm a bum or something." Says another of Maurer's subjects, a welder. of the umemployment rites: "You get a feeling of rejection. Especially the feeling that they're better than you."