Unsilent Generation

Entries categorized as ‘jobs / employment / unemployment’

The Cleveland of Harvey Pekar

July 13, 2010 · 2 Comments

Cleveland photo by scottamus (Ohio signs set) from flickr

I didn’t know anything about Cleveland when I first went there in the late 1970s. I got off the plane, not expecting much, and went to the office of Dennis Kucinich, then the mayor. Kucinich, in what I now recognize as the Cleveland political style, immediately launched into an attack on the new people-movers that were being installed at the airport. From there he went on to the power company and from there to the banks, and behind the banks, the mob (which later put a hit out on him). That was my introduction to the city of Cleveland–a city steeped in corruption that had nonetheless managed to elect this crusading ”boy mayor”–and it won from me a kind of  grudging respect that I’ve never lost.

I asked one of his aides if there were any independent journalists there, and he sent me to Roldo Bartimole, who was then–and still is now–the city’s leading muckraker. Meeting Bartimole was a crash course in Cleveland politics. But if I wanted to really know about Cleveland, someone told me, I should read Harvey Pekar. Pekar was a comic book writer, and at that time he was still an underground figure in an underground world, operating in the shadow of R. Crumb, another Cleveland native who had helped him get his start. Pekar worked as a file clerk in a VA hospital, and he lived in and wrote about the old Cleveland neighborhoods that looked like it hadn’t changed in decades–low-key but no-nonsense, a little shabby but comfortable. And he matched his city. As the obituary in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer put it:

Pekar chronicled his life and times in the acclaimed autobiographical comic-book series, “American Splendor,” portraying himself as a rumpled, depressed, obsessive-compulsive “flunky file clerk” engaged in a constant battle with loneliness and anxiety.

After that visit I did read Pekar, and ever since then, any thought of Cleveland for me has conjured up his work. I recalled it one afternoon during the 2004 elections, at a Democratic campaign rally in a Cleveland housing complex. The candidate, whose name I can’t remember, never showed up. I met a middle-aged couple standing off to the side. The man was wearing an AFSCME jacket and the woman a raincoat. It was cold and they were passing a cup of coffee back and forth. The woman’s “Bush Gotta Go” sign hanging limply from the crook of her right arm.  They didn’t seem to know much about the candidate, either. I asked why they were there. “Oh,” the woman said in a matter-of-fact voice, “you know, to help out.” There are people like that all over Cleveland. A lot of them are still union people, including some who don’t have union jobs. They’re not flashy and they don’t waste words, but they have a kind of resolve. They don’t really expect much to change, but they come along anyway to help out. They know that most of life consists of just showing up. Nobody pays much attention to them–but in Harvey Pekar’s comics, they were the superheroes.

In the last decade, the world bent over backwards to make Pekar into some sort of star, like when he was on Letterman or when the movie about him came out. But that wasn’t really him. He was like Cleveland’s old neighborhoods, a little run-down but with some kind of resolve that kept him going. According to the Plain Dealer, 

R. Crumb said Pekar’s work examined the minutiae of everyday life, material “so staggeringly mundane it verges on the exotic.” Pekar himself summed it up as revealing “a series of day-after-day activities that have more influence on a person than any spectacular or traumatic events. It’s the 99 percent of life that nobody ever writes about.”

Categories: Congressional Democrats · arts and literature · media · unions / labor
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Robert N. Butler, 1927 – 2010: Visionary Psychiatrist and Champion of Elders

July 7, 2010 · 5 Comments

If you’re like most people, you may find that at about age 70, life begins to close in on you. You’re supposed to be retired by then with an adequate pension and/or a 401K–only you don’t have a pension, your 401K went down in the big recession, and to tell the truth, you  don’t want to retire anyway. You want to work, but there the job market is tight, age discrimination is rampant, and thanks to the Supreme Court, there’s virtually no way to fight it. You don’t have the money, or maybe the nerve, to strike out on your own, unless you call flipping burgers striking out on your own.

The advertisements for retirement investments and hair color keep telling you that 70 is the new 40, that you’re only as young as you feel. AARP’s magazines say the same thing–but the world they depict seems unreal and, to tell the truth, somewhat revolting. Because you don’t feel young–you feel old. And in today’s America, that’s hardly a happy feeling. You feel shoved aside, irrelevant, a relic waiting to hurry up and die. You realize you can’t remember things as well as you once did, have more and more of the proverbial “senior moments,’’ and start wondering how long it will be until you sink into dementia, maybe Alzheimer’s, at which point your life will really be over.

There’s precious little in our society that acts as an antidote to any of these thoughts. But for the last half-century, there has been one man: Dr. Robert N. Butler. A psychiatrist, activist, and visionary, Butler died on Sunday at the age of 83, and is being eulogized in the obituaries as the founder of modern gerontology, the man who coined the word “ageism.’’ Butler founded the National Institute of Aging at the NIH, and helped found the American Association for geriatric Psychiatry and the Alzheimer’s Disease Association; he also launched the first medical department devoted to geriatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.  He wrote influential books, advised politicians, counseled the World Health Organization, and he founded and ran the International Longevity Center in New York. 

Through all of this work, Butler inspired thousands, perhaps millions of people to think differently about growing old, and to treat aging and the aged differently. For old people, that transformation is even more profound, because it means thinking differently about yourself. I am one of those people whose thinking was changed, in some significant way, by Robert Butler and his work.

I was lucky enough to meet Butler a few weeks ago at a week-long series of seminars his International Longevity Center put on annually for a small group of journalists, called the Age Boom Academy. That one week produced some of the most astute briefings on every aspect of health policy and the challenges ahead that one could hope to take in–from research on Alzheimers, to the political assault on Medicare and Social Security currently underway in the administration and Congress, to the day-to-day work on the ground across the City of New York. What I had feared might consist of a bunch of self-serving medical and psych professionals was instead an immersion into the real world of the politics and economics  of medicine, tempered always by Butler’s vision. Despite his concerns for the scandalous lack of funding for research on Alzheimer’s and the aging brain, as well as the growing shortage of doctors trained in gerontology or even general practitioners, he approached his work with unyielding  optimism. I had no idea he was battling a life-threatening illness.

On Monday I was on a train on my way to New York, where I had an appointment this week to sit down with him to further discuss his ideas, when I received an email and learned that he was gone. Although he had acute leukemia, Butler reportedly had been working until three days before his death. At 83, he had seemed like he was in the prime of life–not because he acted like he was 40, but because he had succeeded in redefining 83 as a different kind of prime, for himself and for others.

 In a speech not long ago at the American Academy of aging, Butler quoted Proust from In Search of Lost Time, “If we mean to try to understand this self, it is only in our innermost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.” He saw that quest as part of the journey into old age, and gave it significance and dignity. He said in his speech:

In the 1950s, psychology, psychiatry and gerontology textbooks devalued reminiscence and memories. Reminiscing was condescendingly called “living in the past,” and phrases like “wandering of mind,” “boring” and “garrulous” were used to describe elders who looked back. Actually, reminiscence was thought to be an early diagnostic sign of senile psychosis–what is known today as Alzheimer’s disease. However, I was seeing a different picture in vibrant, healthy individuals who were engaging in a fascinating inward journey.

More than fifty years later, Butler’s ideas are widely respected by psychologists and social workers, many physicians and research scientists, and even some policymakers. As far as they have caught on at all with the general public, it is thanks to his tireless work. He like to point out that demographics was on his side: More and more, elders will outnumber youth, and the voice of the geezers will grow stronger and stronger.

I was pleased to see, this morning, an eloquently written obituary in the New York Times by Douglas Martin. Fittingly, it included some remembrances of Butler’s past. As Martin notes, “Dr. Butler’s mission emerged from his childhood.” His parents split up less than a year after he was born, and he went to live with his grandparents on a New Jersey chicken farm. 

He came to revere his grandfather, with whom he cared for sick chickens in the “hospital” at one end of the chicken house. He loved the old man’s stories. But the grandfather disappeared when Robert was 7, and nobody would tell him why. He finally learned that he had died.

Robert found solace in his friendship with a physician he identified only as Dr. Rose. Dr. Rose had helped him through scarlet fever and took him on his rounds by horse and carriage. The boy decided he could have helped his grandfather survive had he been a doctor. He also concluded that he would have preferred that people had been honest with him about death.

From his grandmother, he learned about the strength and endurance of the elderly, he wrote. After losing the farm in the Depression, she and her grandson lived on government-surplus foods and lived in a cheap hotel. Robert sold newspapers. Then the hotel burned down, with all their possessions.

“What I remember even more than the hardships of those years was my grandmother’s triumphant spirit and determination,” he wrote. “Experiencing at first hand an older person’s struggle to survive, I was myself helped to survive as well.”

Butler spent his life passing on that painful but profound gift to thousands of other people. I feel fortunate to have been one of them.

Categories: Silent Generation · age discrimination · death / end of life care and choices · elder books / arts · generations / intergenerational issues · health care · older workers · pensions / retirement funds · radical geezers
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Sick of Journalists? Read This Declaration of Independence

July 4, 2010 · 7 Comments

Journalism, as it is practised in the United States today, is largely the work of technocrats, trained in expensive journalism schools. There is another kind of reporting, that of Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Ida B. Wells and the old school muckrakers. They were not just fact gatherers, and they hadn’t gone to school to learn their trade; they were journeymen, fellow workers with a passion for making America live up to just the sorts of values we celebrate on Independence Day–values which all too often ring hollow.

Djelloul Marbrook is a poet, fiction writer, and retired newspaper editor (Providence Journal, Baltimore Sun, Winston-Salem Journal, Washington Star). He blogs at djelloulmarbrook.com. Marbrook’s got a plan that frees journalism from the confines of mainstream publications–which in addition to being circumscribed and commercialized, also have no way of paying for themselves, and are dying a slow death. 

The concept of citizen journalism is nothing new. But Marbrook brings a new twist to the idea: he wants to harnass “one of our most spectacular natural resources, the aging.” Retired old people have the skills and the time, he says, to “undertake the kind of restlessly inquiring journalism that has been sold out for quick profit.” I’d argue that there’s another advantage, as well– something that happens to some of us when we reach a certain age. We’ve just lived too long to take any more crap, and while we may be creaky and forgetful, our bullshit detectors are keener than they’ve ever been.

Here, then, is Marbrook’s modest proposal for an army of muckraking geezers:

Here we are, a graying nation overlooking what may be one of our most spectacular natural resources, the aging. Instead of imagining what they can do for us, we can’t imagine how to care for them.It has been many years since idealism was a vital force in our newsrooms and the offices of media owners. Idealism has long since been trumped by the next dollar and the one after that. Newsrooms have been shrunk to shells of their former selves.media have dropped, to investigate local, county and state government, to look under all the carpets that now bulge with wrongdoing.

No amount of campaign finance reform or revising the two-party system, as California has just done, will ever be as effective as scrutiny of local government. Only the vigilance of an informed electorate will rescue us from big money and ignorant or reckless candidates. Money, here as everywhere else, is at the root of the problem. The media giants that have gobbled up the local and regional press have decided that it’s too expensive to cover local affairs properly. The people themselves must step into this vacuum, and there is a way to do it.

Among our retirees are the forensic accountants, the financial analysts, the medical people, the conservationists, the scientists—the vast range of talents and disciplines that reflect our society—who could undertake the kind of restlessly inquiring journalism that has been sold out for quick profit.

It is a myth that editors and writers are the only ones who can conduct such inquiries. We don’t need polish as much as we need truth. And remember—any group of retirees is very likely to include a writer or an editor or two, someone who can polish the findings of others, just as rewrite people used to do in newsrooms.

What has changed that might make this idea feasible? The hyper-commercialization of the press, of course, but also the advent of the Internet. And it is precisely this kind of development, this kind of social use of the Internet, that the communications giants are now trying to prevent by bribing legislators into giving them the right to limit access to the Internet by imposed pricing tiers.

We have all read stories about retirees looking for creative ways to express themselves, to challenge themselves. Well, here is a challenge that could actually change the country in a very big way. Never mind the Tea Party with its bags of resentment, here is something positive to do, and it doesn’t depend on ideology. Yes, you will have disagreements with your collaborators, just as news people have always had, and often your opinions will be sorely tested by the facts, but remember that journalism is not about the proof of an idea, it’s about truth. Some notions, some hunches will prove out, some won’t. Some good guys will turn out to be bad guys and some unlikable guys will turn out to be the good guys.

You think your local or county government is corrupt? Do something about it. You can. Gather a group of people, not like-minded ideologues, but skilled people of every persuasion, pick something to look into, and do it, post it on the web and watch the monkeys fall from the trees. Worried about libel? I bet you can find a retired lawyer to vet your posts.

This can be done all around the nation, and what will result is a nation dotted with the kind of feisty local news organizations that we once had before the corporate giants chewed them up and spit them out as trivial mush.

Start anywhere, with whatever interests your group. Make a list and see what excites your colleagues.

Or, if you’re a loner, fine, go it alone.

Think of it—an online newspaper that has guts, that isn’t bribed by its advertisers, that can take pictures, investigate events, and publish hour by hour. It’s a revolution waiting to happen. And it won’t take a huge investment. No bankers, no licenses.You don’t need journalism degrees, you need nerve, verve, will power, and the skills you acquired in long careers, whether in nursing or mechanics or policing or accounting. As many skills are relevant as there are in society, because journalism is about everything.

You don’t need to join another fractious, angry splinter group. You don’t need to picket. You’re stronger, much stronger, than that. You can actually force the politicians and corporations to change by exposing what they’re doing and not doing. And that is exactly why the media are now owned by the corporate giants, so they won’t have to worry about scrutiny.

There are few limits to what you can do. Some of you can write about gardening or astrology while others of you pore through records in town hall or the school administration. Whatever your creative impulse is, there is an outlet for it in a citizen journalism.Remember this: if we do not exercise our right to examine public records, that right will wither, and soon the government—whether local, state or federal—will claim that we don’t have the right. That is why what has befallen local journalism in our country is so disastrous. A right that is not exercised soon vanishes…

What I am saying, as an old-timer and a retired journalist myself, is that you retirees can do it. And, if you find the right business minds among you, you might even be able to create viable business models that will eventually create jobs in journalism. You can do it, I promise you. There is nothing magical about journalism. It’s just dogged work, the will to find out, and a reasonable mastery of the language. It’s not rocket science. It doesn’t need credentials. But it needs the high ideals that corporate greed has stomped.

 

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Categories: age discrimination · generations / intergenerational issues · media · older workers · radical geezers
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Ripping Off Workers’ Pay to Increase Executive Pensions

June 17, 2010 · Leave a Comment

You just can’t win. Here’s news from the always helpful Pension Rights Center on how executives deliberately structure pension plans in in a way that shortchanges rank-and-file workers, so that high riding executives get more money. In other words: stealing from the poor to give (even more) to the rich.

Certain rules in the Internal Revenue Code are designed to prevent employers from discriminating against non-highly paid employees in their pension plans. Unfortunately for the retirement security of their employees, some employers look for ways to get around the nondiscrimination rules.

Instead of sponsoring pension plans that treat all participants equally, some employers circumvent the rules by creating “carve-out” pension plans. These plans often provide rich benefits for senior, well paid employees-often the company’s owners and officers-while covering only a relatively small percentage (or in some cases none) of the non-highly paid employees. While these plans may comply technically with the tax rules as they are now interpreted they are fundamentally unfair. 

Case in point: An article in Physicians News Digest promotes the use of carve-out plans, noting that they allow doctors to “focus the majority of an employer’s contribution to a select group of employees, usually key or highly compensated employees.” In other words, a medical practice can save big bucks by providing one plan for its doctors, while offering many of its lower-paid employees a different, less valuable plan:

By including the key or highly-compensated employees in a defined benefit plan and the remaining employees in a more affordable 401(k) plan, you can keep your retirement plan in compliance with non-discrimination regulations, while keeping expenses at a minimum.

We have discussed the merits of a traditional pension over a 401(k) plan several times in the past. The truly insidious aspect of carve-outs is the fact that the higher-paid employees – the ones who are more likely to be able to save for retirement on their own – are given the better plan, while the lower-paid workers – the ones who can least afford to save for retirement – are stuck with an inferior one. 

Have these employers forgotten that the success of their business is not just a one-(wo)man show?  Or do they just not care?

Moreover, the IRS could probably limit somewhat the discriminatory impact of these plans by issuing new regulations on the technical rules that employers exploit to make carve-outs possible. 

Categories: budget / tax policy · corporations · legal issues · pensions / retirement funds · unions / labor
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On Memorial Day in Normandy, Evidence of What We Won–and Lost

May 31, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Photo: Eisenhower National Historic Site, National Park Service

On June 5, 1944, the eve of the largest invasion in history, General Dwight Eisenhower visited the English airfield where paratroopers were preparing to take off for their drop into France. “Quit worrying, General,” one of the soldiers told him. “We’ll take care of this thing for you.’’ The following day, 175,000 men landed on the beaches and fields of Normandy.

For children growing up in Washington, D.C., shushed into silence behind the blackout curtains while our parents bent over radios bringing the long-awaited announcement of the attack, it was all beyond  comprehension–save that every little boy was climbing into a tree to pretend he was flying his Spitfire over the Channel, or parachuting into the French countryside.

At age seven, I was one of those boys. Last week I had the good fortune to meet another member of my generation, whose experience of D-Day was something quite different. His name is Pierre Bernard, and he is retired to his family’s farm in the village of Maisons, a stone’s throw from the beaches that became the site of what the French call the Débarquement. In the spring of 1944, Pierre was twelve; with his parents and siblings, he worked the farm and waited for the Allied troops to arrive and free them from Nazi occupation. When that day finally came, Pierre recalls, the Germans simply vanished. British and then American troops soon passed through the village, moving quickly inland. His family was luckier than many others: Some 12,000 French civilians were killed during the battle for Normandy, along with more than 75,000 troops on both sides.

Today, long retired from his job as a cook in Paris, Pierre oversees a bed and breakfast in his old stone farmhouse. He’s never learned to use a computer, so his daughters help arrange who is to come, while Pierre, along with his two dogs, goes out each morning to bring back fresh baguettes and croissants. He serves them along with the jams and pates he makes himself, and sits quietly at the head of the family table, contentedly watching his guests eat breakfast.  And he’ll gladly trade war stories with a visitor who, like himself, is too young to have fought, but old enough to remember.

Normandy today still inspires awe at the courage of the men who stormed Fortress Europe: Omaha Beach, so wide and unprotected; the cliffs of Point du Hoc, higher and steeper than I could have imagined. But by now, the genuine remnants of the war—half-buried German bunkers, wrecked ships, and thousands of well-tended graves—are outnumbered by nostalgic renderings of the real thing: Army surplus stores are filled with Eisenhower jackets, berets, and rucksacks (many of them supplied by German companies). Towns compete for tourists–and a place in history—with tanks on their village squares and little museums dedicated to every aspect of “Jour J.” In Sainte-Mère-Église, where an American paratrooper famously got caught on the church steeple, a dummy is suspended from a parachute to commemmorate  the event. Then there are the British and American visitors tearing around in rented World War II jeeps, windshields down, and even a half-ton olive drab truck.  They look far too young to be veterans; too young even to have been alive at the time. The men and women who fought that war are fast disappearing (some 850 U.S. WW II vets die every day, according to the VA), and those who lived through it as children are now well into our old age.  

I was struck by how different Pierre’s old age in France is from mine in the United States—not because of anything that happened during the war, but because of what happened afterwards. In the postwar years, along with most other European countries (victors and vanquished alike), France implemented guaranteed pensions as well as national health care. Under a social welfare system that epitomizes what’s derisively referred to in the U.S. as the “Nanny State,” the average worker in France retires at age 60 on a full pension with complete medical care and various tax breaks. (And that’s after years of working 35-hour weeks, with two-month vacations.)

And what about aging Americans–including the waning ranks of the “greatest generation” that came before mine, who helped free the French and the rest of Europe, and then financed the continent’s recovery through the Marshall Plan? What can we expect? The most minimal of public pension systems, which was created before the war and has been under attack ever since; a private pension system that is now a shell of collapsing structures; personal savings decimated by Wall Street; and a partial and increasingly expensive health care system. More and more of us plan to work quite literally until we die–that is, if we can manage to keep our jobs, since we have little protection against age discrimination and no job security of any sort. In America, the war fought by “Citizen Soldiers” made our world all too safe for wealth and corporate power, often at the expense of the very men and women who won it.

In France, conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy has been chipping away at the Nanny State. His latest scheme—to raise the retirement age to 62—brought mass demonstrations across the country last week, and threats from the still-powerful unions. But even if Sarkozy’s latest initiative succeeds, as it well may, France’s elders will still be better off than their American counterparts have ever been.

Here in the U.S., we face a political juggernaut—most recently manifested in Obama’s “debt commission”–intent on cutting Social Security benefits, raising the costs of Medicare, extending the formal retirement age from 65 to 67 and beyond, and further tying our retirement and that of future generations to the vicissitudes of the securities markets through 401Ks and IRAs. Few voices are raised in protest against this attack on old-age entitlements. In fact, it seems to be one of the only true examples of bipartisanship in American politics, now that the Democratic Party, which once fought to build what social safety net we have, has collapsed into the arms of Wall Street. I expect it will progress with no more difficulty than “welfare reform,” in which another Democratic administration gutted our meager provisons for the poor.

In a Washington Post op-ed last Sunday, American Enterprise Institute president Arthur C. Brooks declared that “America’s new culture war” is a “struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise–limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution.” If only this were remotely true.  In fact, that battle was lost long ago—if it was ever fought at all.

Perhaps I only imagine that Pierre’s life is more tranquil than mine because he enjoys the security that comes with “European-style statism,” while my own well-being remains “determined by market forces.” But I don’t think so. Sixty-six years ago, as a small boy playing pilot in the lush green trees of a Washington spring, I could not have guessed that Pierre, waiting in his farmhouse nestled in the hedgerows of Normandy for the jeeps and tanks of the First Army, would someday become a symbol not only of my country’s greatest victory, but of its saddest defeat.

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Categories: Medicare · Obama Administration · Social Security · Wall Street / financial industry · World War II · economy · generations / intergenerational issues · health care · international · older workers · pensions / retirement funds · unions / labor · veterans
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Roszak’s “Making of an Elder Culture”

May 21, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Few may remember it, but before the advent of Social Security in the 1930s and Medicare in the 1960s, the old were widely viewed as a spent force. Nobody talked about happy retirement, in part because, these were people who remembered only too well the Depression. Few looked forward to leisure worlds because the poor house was too recent in so many people’s minds. Before old age entitlements, tending to the old was viewed as the job of the family. If you didn’t have a family, then it was charity–you joined the begging class. And even if you did have a family, you lived knowing that the young and middle aged couldn’t wait to get rid of you.

The same is more or less true today. Some days it seems the entire city of Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, is on a mission against the old. Of course, nobody would ever say that. But there is a war against the old going on here in the form of a vigorous, largely uncontested attack on entitlements—a fighting word for conservatives and conservative Democrats who simply can’t stand Roosevelt’s New Deal, Johnson’s Great Society, and everything the stood for.

In his book The Making of an Elder Culture, recently published by New Society, Theodore Roszak, the cultural historian who more than three decades ago wrote The Making of a Counter Culture, sets out some of the grim history of old people in American society, and in doing so places elders within our current political world.

The old were in fact the worst victims of industrialism, primarily because they were not deemed worth saving. They belonged to that class of unwelcome dependents called the impotent poor—those who could not provide for themselves…as comfortable as many middle-class elders may be today, they share with all older people a long sad history of bleak mistreatment they would do well to remember. For generations the old have suffered wrongs inflicted on them by harsh public policy and often by their nearest and dearest….in the modern western world where the old have been seen as the claim of the dreary past upon the bustling forces of progress.

In the early days of the industrial revolution, Roszak writes, “aged workers became poor. The workhouse and county home were little better than the concentration camp. They were fed gruel, bedded down on straw or bare wood…they had no place to turn  save for their children…They were pictured as withered, toothless, bent, lean.’’

You must remember that as recently as 40 or 50 years ago, there was no senior lobby. The political pros never talked about a senior vote. Today all that has changed–yet Roszak sees in today’s entitlement wars a serious threat to the well-being of elders.

In the same way that organized labor was once regarded as a potentially tyrannical force able to achieve its own selfish ends, entitlement critics began characterizing seniors as a threat to the democratic process…

Nobody of any political stripe wants to risk the charge of granny-bashing,but the facts are clear. In the United States, gaining even  modest degrees of security in retirement has been a struggle against business leaders, political conservatives, and free market economists for whom money is the measure of all things.

Always remember, Roszak says, “the well-to-do are the first to tell us that there is not enough to go around.”

In his book, Roszak envisions a society in which rather tan cutting social programs for the old, we will extend them to younger people. Noone would resent Medicare, for example, if we had universal health care for Americans of all ages. He sees a future where the old and the young join to create a new world devoted to common humane goals: ending poverty at all ages, assuring education–laying the planks of a new society on the New Deal and LBJ’s social welfare project. Such ideas face an uphill battle in today’s political culture–but are no less inspiring for that fact.

I’ll be writing more about Roszak’s work in future posts.

Categories: Great Depression · Social Security · age discrimination · corporations · economy · elder books / arts · generations / intergenerational issues · health care · older workers · pensions / retirement funds · poverty · radical geezers
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I Was Not a Victim of Age Discrimination at Work (Not)

May 5, 2010 · 1 Comment

When I was fired by the new owners of the Village Voice in 2006, after working there for 30 years, it had nothing to do with age discrimination. At least, that’s what the official documents say.  

For a number of reasons, I initially suspected that age had something to do with it. But I must have been wrong, because I later signed an agreement saying I had not been discriminated against on the basis of age. The document also happened to say that I would get some severance benefits I really needed, being 69 years old and suddenly jobless–but I’m sure that didn’t affect my decision to sign it.  

I have no doubt that the following scenario is experienced by thousands of older Americans who lose their jobs (though not, as I’ve mentioned, to me). They are pretty sure they know what is going on, and why. They discuss it with their attorneys, who are sympathetic but explain how difficult it is to prevail in such cases. The lawyers also tell them that the case could drag on for years–implying, though they don’t like to say so, that the geezers could be dead before it is resolved. So the geezers tell their lawyers to negotiate the best deal they can, and sign whatever they need to sign in order to get that deal. Or so I’ve heard. 

Age discrimination in the workplace (somethat that I, as I’ve said, did not experience), has always been notoriously difficult to prove to the satisfaction of the American justice system. But last June, the Supreme Court made it all the more difficult with its 5-4 ruling in Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc. The Court held that for workers to sue under the Age Discimination in Employment Act of 1967, they must prove that the employer would not have taken a particular action “but for” the person’s age. This sets age discrimination apart from all other forms of discrimination in the eyes of the law. As the New York Times put it in an editorial criticizing the Court’s decision:   

When employers discriminate, they generally do not admit it, so Congress and the courts have established calibrated rules of proof to give victims a fair chance. Generally, if workers can show that an illegal consideration, like race or national origin, was a factor in their being fired or demoted, the employer then has the burden of showing that it acted for nondiscriminatory reasons.  

That should be the rule under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, but the Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote, decided that it is not. Older workers, Justice Clarence Thomas declared for the majority, have the full burden of proving that they were fired because of their age. That is an unfairly difficult standard, and it is an unreasonable interpretation of the law.  

Last fall, the Democratic chairs of three key Congressional committees introduced legislation that would ”restore vital civil rights protections for older workers in the face of the Supreme Court’s decision in Gross v. FBL Financial.”  In announcing the bill, called the ”Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act” (H.R. 3721), the sponsors stated: ”In Gross, the Supreme Court rewrote civil rights laws, overturning well-established precedent and making it harder for workers facing age discrimination to enforce their rights.”   

Today, the Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Subcommittee of the House Committee on Education and Labor held its first hearing on the Court’s ruling and the proposed legislation. As the Legal Times blog reports:  

The AARP is supporting the legislation, and Gail Aldrick, vice chair of the group’s board, also testified today. Those registered to lobby on the bill include the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.    

Eric Dreiband, partner in a firm that does corporate defense work, testified in opposition to the bill, calling it a “broad and ambigous” measure that would “enable some lawyers to earn more money” but probably wouldn’t help older workers all that much. 

But Michael Foreman, who directs the Civil Rights Appellate Clinic at Penn State’s law school, called the proposed legislation a “fair, balanced, indeed conservative attempt to return the law to where everyone, the courts included, thought it was” before the Gross decision.  

The final testimony came from Jack Gross, plaintiff in the case that bears his name. At the age of 54, Gross was demoted by his employer, FBL–along with a group of other employees over 50 who refused to accept buyouts. He initially won his lawsuit against FBL, but it was appealed up to the Supreme Court, which decided against him. Gross told the Committee: “I hate having my name associated with the pain and injustice now being inflicted on older workers.” 

In the unlikely event that Democrats succeed in quickly passing the new law, it won’t come a moment too soon. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the recession has been terrible for older workers, who to all appearances have suffered more than their fair share of layoffs. In 2008, the EEOC saw a 30 percent increase in the filing of age discrimination charges, which outpaced all other types of bias claims. The numbers were so dramatic that the acting chair of the EEOC wondered whether “the public generally realizes that age discrimination is illegal.” 

It seems to me that even if they do know it’s illegal, much of the public–like the courts–don’t seem to take age discrimination too seriously.

But of course, I really wouldn’t know.

  

Categories: Congress · Congressional Democrats · Obama Administration · age discrimination · financial crisis / recession · jobs / employment / unemployment · legal issues · lobbying · older workers
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Michael Elswick Went to be with the Lord on Monday April 5

April 14, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Many younger people spend their time deriding the coal industry without taking into consideration the lives of the people who work in the mines. The miners are simply dismissed as a handful of left-behind workers from another era, who are now standing in the way of “sustainability.” What these people don’t understand is that coal was the backbone of the Industrial Revolution and the engine that powered America. It’s not just going to disappear; you can’t wipe out a history of 150 years, and you can’t forget about the people who have risked–and still risk–their lives in the mines every day.

Coal is a dirty business, and as I’ve written myself, a lot of the coal companies are just as dirty. There’s no doubt that changes have to be made in the coal industry for environmental reasons, not to mention the safety of workers. But until the climate changers get themselves down into the hills and hollows of West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky, and see the human faces of the coal business, they’re not going to get anywhere.

Ken Ward, a reporter for the Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, is a journalist who gets coal. If you want to know about the business and what it means to the people who live in these hills, take a look at his writing from time to time. This morning I went to Ward’s Coal Tattoo blog and found this entry,which seems to me to tell it all. So I am reprinting it in full.

elswick

Michael Lee “Cuz” Elswick, 56, of Elkview went to be with the Lord on Monday, April 5, 2010, after a terrible mining accident.

He was preceded in death by his mother and father, Lee and Willidean Elswick of Wharton.

Michael was an employee of Massey Energy, a dedicated coal miner of 36 years. He was a member of the Dunbar First Church of God and a very dedicated husband, father, grandfather and friend to all he met.

Michael is survived by his loving wife of 36 years, Bobbie Elmore Elswick; son, Jeremy Elswick; daughter, Jami Cash and husband, Philip; and grandchildren, Justin and Hannah Cash, all of Elkview; sister, Pam Miller of Wharton; and brothers, Larry Elswick of Charleston and Steven Elswick of Wharton.

He will be very deeply missed by all who knew and loved him.

God bless all the families who lost their loved ones that horrific day at the UBB Mine.

Categories: corporations · environment · jobs / employment / unemployment · public safety · unions / labor
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Obama’s Flyover: The President Should Have Gone to West Virginia

April 13, 2010 · 1 Comment

During the blitz of World War II, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill went into the streets of London to stand with his people against the Nazis. But nowadays, our leaders are mostly absent in times of travail. After 9/11, George W. Bush took three full days to make it to New York, waiting until the coast was clear before claiming his photo-op with the firefighters and cops and rescue workers at Ground Zero. And when Katrina devastated New Orleans, Bush opted for his famous flyover, viewing the suffering from a the comfort of Airport One at 2,500 feet. 

Last week, Barack Obama continued the tradition. It seemed the president just couldn’t find the time to take puddle jumper down to Massey Coal’s Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia  to comfort the families of those who died in the worst coal mine disaster in 40 years. Nor did Michelle Obama or even Joe Biden, who is talked about as the the administration’s liaison to working-class whites.

The governor of West Virginia, Joe Manchin, was on hand as the futile rescue attempts took place, but but his state is such a pawn in the hands of the coal industry that it was hard to take him seriously. Today, at least, he did take the step of appointing Davitt McAteer, a longtime reformer who headed the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration under Clinton, to oversee an independent investigation into the disaster. As I wrote last week, McAteer, who headed a similar investigation after the 2006 Sago disaster killed 12 miners, is without question the best man for this job. But his work will only have meaning if the government implements–and enforces–the safety improvements he recommends.

Obama, too, has promised launch an investigation into the causes of the mine explosion. But there already have been investigations into Massey Energy’s violation of federal safety laws. This was an especially dreadful disaster because the U.S. government, which had been equipped with mine safety laws at the insistance of  reformers, wouldn’t adequately enforce them, allowing Massey to drag its feet and rack up violations until the inevitable happened. That mine was just waiting to blow up, and the feds effectively stood by and permitted a greedy company put profits ahead of its workers’ lives.

Instead of an investigation, Obama ought to call a federal grand jury to weigh criminal penalties against the owners and top officers of the company. And he ought to have taken the time to personally visit the place where 29 men died because the government–including his own administration, as well as his predecessor’s–failed to do its job.

Obama, like Bush before him, might have taken a lesson from what Lyndon Johnson did in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Betsy back in 1965–as described in this brief passage from the Louisiana Weekly:

On September 10, 1965, the day after Hurricane Betsy plowed through southeastern Louisiana, President Lyndon Johnson flew to New Orleans.  He went to the people, to shelters where evacuees were gathered, to neighborhoods all over the city.  There was no electricity and, so that people could see and hear him at one shelter, he took a flashlight,  shined it into his face and said into a megaphone, “My name is Lyndon Baines Johnson.  I am your president.  I am here to make sure you have the help you need.”
 

Categories: Bush Administration · Obama Administration · corporations · legal issues · public safety · unions / labor
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Recession Over? Some Americans Haven’t Gotten the Memo

April 13, 2010 · Leave a Comment

In case you missed the news, the recession ended in 2009. Some members on a panel of economists are now disputing that fact, to the surprise from politicians and mainstream media who long ago declared the greatest economic crisis of our time dead and gone, and are merely bickering over precisely when it dropped off the twig: Was it in mid-2009? Before then? After? 

Of course, some people just refuse to get with the program, insisting that with a national unemployment rate hovering around 10 percent , the recession isn’t really over. And that for older people dependent on deep-sixed 401ks, it most likely will never be over. People who are unemployed and on food stamps don’t think it’s over. People underemployed and still looking for more work are not receiving any trickledown. And for those lucky enough to have been receiving unemployment insurance, who now find it running out and still can’t find a job, things don’t seem to have materially improved. 

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Washington,D.C.-based think tank with a liberal bent, recently released a report that offers a different slant on this subject: 

The long-term unemployment rate — the percentage of people in the work force who have been out of work for over half a year and are still looking for a job — reached an unprecedented 4.3 percent of the labor force in March (see the chart). Yet Congress has allowed the Recovery Act measures that provide additional weeks of unemployment benefits and subsidized COBRA health insurance coverage for unemployed workers to lapse. Opponents’ arguments that these measures should not be extended unless they are paid for with cuts in other spending do not withstand scrutiny. Meanwhile, delay imposes unnecessary hardship on the long-term unemployed and weakens the economic recovery. 

Although there are growing signs that the economy is in the early stages of a recovery, unemployment remains very high, and the economy is not running on all cylinders. Demand for goods and services remains far below what the economy is capable of producing, and the rate of job creation anticipated over the next several months will represent only a small start toward restoring the 8.2 million jobs lost since the recession started. (That loss essentially erased all of the jobs created between 2003 and 2007 in the economic recovery that followed the previous recession.) 

Sam Smith over at prorev.com calls attention to another factor reported by Air Force Times: 

Disturbing new statistics from the Labor Department show that one in three veterans under age 24 is unemployed – and that the unemployment rate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans has jumped to 14.7 percent, half again as high as the national employment rate of 9.7 percent.The March unemployment rate of 30.2 percent for veterans aged 18 to 24 is a big jump from February’s figure of 21.7 percent, although it may be partly the result of a small sample used by the Labor Department in determining unemployment, said Justin Brown, a labor expert for Veterans of Foreign Wars. 

Then, there’s this from Black Agenda Report:

Official labor statistics show Black unemployment rose to 16.5 percent in March, up from 15.8 percent the month before, while white joblessness remained steady at 8.8 percent. At least a score of major Black population centers now register official unemployment levels nearing 25 percent, comparable to the depths of the Great Depression – and it took World War Two to pull the economy out of that pit.

With 5.5 job seekers for every actual job opening, according to the latest data, employers can discriminate in favor of whites to their hearts’ content, while continuing to lower wages and working conditions. It’s easy to casually fire Black people and even easier not to hire them. We will soon find out if a statistical “point of no return” in unemployment levels exists, from which communities cannot recover absent extraordinary assistance by a caring government.

Categories: Congress · Obama Administration · economy · financial crisis / recession · jobs / employment / unemployment · poverty · race / racism
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