Not Working: Losing a Job in Today's Great Recession
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In the summer and early fall of 2011, the writer DW Gibson set off on a journey across the United States. His purpose: to interview Americans who have lost their jobs in the ongoing economic disaster that has destroyed the livelihood of millions. The result: a book that takes the pulse of the victims of today's financial crisis and delivers a prognosis combining an extraordinary mix of pathos, anger, solidarity and humor.
Together with two companions, a filmmaker and a playwright, Gibson travelled from the collapsing new economy white-box factories of California to the rusting and derelict industrial plants of the Northeast. Along the way, he talked to the recently unemployed of all stripes - a college graduate fired from her first job after just a week at work, an HR executive dismissed after herself laying off hundreds of her colleagues, a cleaner fired in a cafeteria during her lunch break, and a real estate executive whose first inkling that something was amiss occurred when he arrived at his office to find it abandoned.
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Each of these stories is different, and the detail of how people experience the trauma of being "let go" provides a fascinating core to Not Working. But, beyond the specifics, important general themes emerge: the range of the recession which, despite the particular vulnerabilities of people of color and the less-educated, is impacting communities right across the country; the sense of isolation and purposeless that accompanies losing one's job and the widespread feeling that the victims are somehow responsible for their fate; and the inventiveness, generosity and good humor of many of those trying to rebuild lives shattered by lost income and self-respect.
Inspired by the great oral historian Studs Terkel, whose Working dominates the canon of American social history, Not Working is a book of burning importance for America today, a critical intervention in an election year when stubbornly immovable 9% unemployment is certain to be the central issue. In these pages we see unemployment not as a statistic but as a real tragedy in the lives of many Americans whose compelling stories demand to be heard.
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