Abstract
A quick Internet search reveals that the unemployment rate in America is 5.8 percent. However, this does not mean that 5.8 percent of Americans are jobless (that number is closer to 42 percent). Instead, this is the percentage eligible for unemployment benefits. They are the “lucky” ones who can receive up to half of their previous earnings while searching for new jobs.
The beneficiaries of the unemployment insurance system are the subjects of Sarah Damaske’s fascinating new book. States determine the rules for eligibility and benefits. As few as 30 percent of workers qualify for unemployment compensation, with women, those with less than a college education, and racial/ethnic minorities among the least likely to receive benefits. The Tolls of Uncertainty is an indictment of this unfair system.
Working with a team of researchers, Damaske delved into the work histories of one hundred Pennsylvanians receiving unemployment benefits. The sample is equally stratified between men and women, and middle and working-class respondents. The vast majority are white, a limitation she acknowledges (but also one that reflects the stark injustice of the system). Using a life course approach, Damaske probes their working lives, asking about job tenure, what unemployment means to them, and how they navigate their job search. She finds that gender and class pattern their pathways into unemployment and their different strategies for finding new jobs. Follow-up interviews address whether job losses have scarring effects on future employment. The result is predictable but nevertheless scandalous. The Tolls of Uncertainty reveals that middle-class white men are vastly overrepresented among the beneficiaries who fully recover from unemployment, while other groups tread water or end up worse off.
The “guilt gap” referred to in the book’s subtitle is the gender difference Damaske detected in white middle class men’s and women’s experiences of the unemployment system. Women expressed guilt about their job loss, and compensated by doing more housework and child care. In contrast, middle-class men generally welcomed unemployment as a well-deserved sabbatical. They talked about going fishing, not upping their domestic contributions. This was probably bravado on their part since a number of them kept their unemployment a secret from their families, but even so, Damaske’s underlying point is an important one: middle-class white men expressed entitlement to take time off from work, while middle-class white women conveyed an urgency to return to work, in part to escape their increased household responsibilities.
The working-class respondents fared much worse. Compared to those in the middle class, they received much less income from the unemployment system, and they lacked savings and severance pay to tide them over until they found a new job. Of all the groups studied, working class women suffered the most. According to Damaske, “working class women bore a burden of guilt for losing their job, and they often made large sacrifices, both to their health and to their job search and leisure time” (p. 213). This group typically received poverty level wages and lost their health insurance when they lost their jobs. Many were single mothers, adding to their desperate circumstances. For example, she describes the plight of Tracy struggling to survive on a paltry benefit of $154 per week while navigating the labyrinthine rules of the unemployment system. Coping with unemployment became her full-time occupation, derailing her search for a new job.
Working-class men also supported their families with their unemployment checks, but in their case, this meant supporting a stay-at-home wife in addition to their children. Damaske views this traditional gender division of labor as a “disadvantage” because these families lack the financial buffer that a second income might provide. This is a controversial claim, as Damaske’s previous research shows. Full-time employment does not necessarily pull women and their families out of poverty because the low wage jobs available to working-class women rarely cover the costs of outsourcing their domestic labor.
The book concludes by suggesting sensible reforms to the unemployment system. Damaske urges government officials to make the policies clearer so more people know the rules and apply; to increase the benefit to 100 percent for those making minimum wage, and to expand the childcare credit and provide health insurance to those in the system. She also argues that no one should be forced to take a sub-par job, something that the unemployment system currently requires of working-class recipients.
These reforms certainly would help those who qualify for unemployment benefits. But what about the legions of jobless Americans who do not qualify? A more radical possibility is extending these basic protections to everyone, employed or not. When a publicly funded safety net is only helping middle-class white men to thrive, we need an overhaul of basic assumptions about what all people deserve.