In most parts of the world, from Paris to Beijing, mass unemployment brings the specter of mass social unrest. Not here, though, where 13 million people have accepted joblessness with nary a peep of protest.
Many reasons -- from Prozac to Pentecostalism -- have been cited to explain American passivity in the face of economic violence. But the truth may be far simpler: In America, being unemployed doesn't mean you have nothing to do but run around burning police cars. Unemployment has been reconfigured as a new form of work.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the white-collar world, where the laid-off are constantly advised to see job searching as a full-time job. As business self-help guru Harvey Mackay advises: "Once you're fired, you already have a job. The job you have is tougher than the last one. It's more demanding." How demanding? He says you need to "plan on 12 to 16 hours a day."
Picture it: People across America rising at the usual time, suiting up in full corporate regalia and setting themselves down at their laptops to fiddle with resumes, peruse Monster.com and pester everyone on their address lists for leads.
Some people have no doubt found jobs in this manner, but there have been no scientific comparisons of the technique with, say, printing a resume on a sandwich board and parading around Times Square.
If there is something familiar in the image of laid-off workers soldiering on, it may be because of films like "Tokyo Sonata" and the 2002 French film, "Time Out," in which the heroes -- laid-off executives -- conceal their status from their families and continue to mime the daily commute to work. In the movies, this behavior seems pathetic -- a case of terminal denial -- but it's exactly what the American "transition industry" of career coaches and outplacement firms recommends: If you don't have a job, fake one.
In real life, it's OK for a man to tell his wife he's lost his job; he should just never reveal that he has time on his hands. A February article in the New York Times featured a laid-off Illinois man who justified his refusal to do more around the house by saying, "As one of the people who runs one of the career centers I've been to told me: 'You're out of a job, but it's not your time to paint the house and fix the car. Your job is about finding the next job.' "
