The occasional times I've been between jobs and tried to make use of the state employment agency, I found it essentially useless. I have a fair potful of marketable skills (complete with substantial experience), some of which generally draw fairly decent pay, but all the state employment agency ever had was entry-level stuff, and not much of that. I found I was a whole lot better off operating by word of mouth. I let as many people as possible know I was looking for a job and gave them a run-down on what I could do and what I preferred to do. If I couldn't find a job on my own, it wasn't long before some friend gave me a call, said, "Call this number," and a few days later I was working again.

It's kind of tough if you've been working at a good paying job and then you get laid off because your company didn't get the government contract they expected. It happened to me and 67,000 other Seattlites in the early Seventies. Things got pretty damned skinny around these parts for some time. I was very lucky because while my former Boeing co-workers were competing to find work where there was no work, I learned that a local classical music radio station had an opening for an announcer (I was a regular listener to the station, that's how I learned about it). I applied for the job, and because I have a pretty good speaking voice (years of singing) and because I was the only one of several dozen applicants they'd interviewed who could read a list of composers' names without bitching them up, I got the job. These days similar "local Depressions" are happening all over the country because of companies closing plants in various localities and shipping jobs overseas to take advantage of cheaper labor. Then the only jobs available in the locality involve wearing a paper hat and throwing hamburgers out the window at passing cars for $7.16 an hour (in Washington State; $5.15 in most states; $2.65 in Kansas; and some states have no minimum wage), often for only four hours a day. And in some areas of the country, there are not many of those jobs left either. They've either all been filled by skilled workers, both blue and white collar, whose jobs have been "outsourced" and/or because the fast-food emporiums are closing because many of the folks in the town can no longer afford to eat out, not even "Happy Meals." It's called the "ripple effect" (as distinct from "trickle down").

Due to the nationwide net loss of jobs (Bush talks only about jobs created, ignoring the substantially larger number of jobs lost) in communities here and there around the country, there is an increasing number of people living in their cars, in abandoned buildings (should they be so lucky) under bridges, or in cardboard packing crates, not because they are lazy or because they can't work, but because they a) can't find a job when there are no jobs (not even the state employment agency can list jobs when there aren't any), or b) even if they have found a job, it only pays enough for them to eat or pay rent, but not both.

Not as bad (yet), but surprisingly similar to the Thirties. . . .

Simply telling people to go to the state employment office is very glib, but it isn't very realistic.

Don Firth