Can We Just Talk About Unemployment Insurance?

Because I think a lot of people are un- or mis- informed about how that works and what it's like to be on unemployment.

I think first there's some facts we have to talk about:

1. Losing your job doesn't automatically entitle you to unemployment. There are rules and regulations and specific qualifiers for collecting unemployment. Basically, you have to be fired - not quit - and let go through no fault of your own - laid off. Otherwise your employer can (and probably will) fight it.

2. Your job pays into the unemployment system and they get charged/fined/whatever you want to call it for every person who collects unemployment. And so, they generally don't want you to collect unemployment and will do whatever they can to keep that from happening.

3. How much you collect is proportionate to how much got paid at your old job. There isn't a flat fee. It's all based on whatever your pay grade was before and you won't get more in unemployment than you were paid at your job, but....

4. How much you collect under unemployment is capped off at about $400 a week (in NYC) no matter how much you used to get paid at your old job. So, if you're used to getting paid $800 a week, you still can't collect more than $400 a week - and this is NOT tax free money, you still have to pay state and federal taxes on it. You can choose to have the taxes taken out before your money is given to you, so that you don't have to repay it later.

5. Unemployment is not unlimited monies for forever. There is a cap-off. After a certain amount of weeks, you are no longer eligible to get unemployment. They cut you off. Your unemployment "runs out" and then you are on your own. In NY this is generally about a year - and this is including regular unemployment, extended unemployment, and emergency unemployment (and I believe extended unemployment is no longer an option in NYC).

While I've personally never collected (or been able to collect or been unfortunate to have to try to collect) unemployment, I have lived with/under someone who did and I have gone through the process with people a few times. The first time was when I was younger and my mom (as well as all the other people in her worker's union) was laid off from her job, where she had worked for over 14 years.

Losing a job you've held for a long time is scary, especially a job where you had reason to expect you'd retire from (not get fired from). So after 14 years working as a nursing assistant at this big hospital, my mom was laid off and we faced a very scary time (she was out of work for a little over a year) when we didn't know how we'd get by.

To collect unemployment, the first thing you have to do is apply. You can do this online. You wait for a decision, and if you get it, you start receiving payments the week after your last day on the job.

For my mom, who made about $50,000 a year (including overtime), she got the maximum payment, which was about $400 a week - less than $350 after taxes. This was much less than she was payed at her job but still much higher than people on minimum wage in NYC get. With this much money, we had to give up most of our luxuries - like cable and eating out and vacations, no matter how small, and any unnecessary shopping. This was okay. We'd lived meagerly before. My mom was an immigrant from Trinidad, who didn't always have working papers and such.

Living in NYC on $350 a week - as anyone who lived in a city with a high cost of living knows - was tough, but do-able. Our rent at the time was $800 (CRAZY CHEAP for a 2 bedroom apt in a upcoming community in Brooklyn - and it was so cheap because my aunt owns the house we live in). We had a paid off car - a used car bought for $5000 years ago - and were paying almost $300 in car insurance. Electricity was about $100 a month. Gas was about $20 a month (we don't pay for our own heat). My mom's cellphone cost was about $100 a month. The cheaper internet and house phone we downgraded to cost $85 a month after taxes added. And we had to eat. It was a do-able wage (after paying off bills, we had about $80 a month for food for 3). We lived worry-ful but we lived, you know. My sister and I worked after-school gigs (picking up kids from school for me and a part-time store job for my sister). We made ends meet.

My mom had a lot of skills from her job but no degree or certification - the unemployment worker she met with (you have to do this to collect unemployment) was impressed by her resume and the amount of experience she had but angered that the hospital she worked for had kept them so in the dark about certification and such that she would need to get a similar job OUTSIDE of that hospital. To get work, she would have to get certified, which costs money. Money she did not have. The job did not give them any goodbye-funds, which is usually done when people are laid off. They only got their last check and were sent on their way.

Over the next few months, my mom saved where she could so she could afford to take some classes to get her NYC licenses for the job she wanted to work. About three months before she would have been done with the classes, unemployment services ran out for her and we pretty much barely got by until she completed the course and was able to get a job. The new job she got paid minimum wage ($7.25) while she trained and $11 an hour once she was no longer in training but a full worker. And even though she got full time hours (40 hrs a week) she did not get full time status, which meant no benefits - no paid time off, no sick days, no salary, no benefits, no healthcare no room for error, no nothing. So, as a woman in her forties, my mom started over and...you know, it sucked.

But that's not really what I wanted to talk about. I want to talk about what it's like to live under "government care." There's this mythos around how people on unemployment and welfare and other government care programs lived. The myth is that we're living the lifestyle of the rich and shameless all on someone else's dollar. Let's talk about how bull-shitty that myth is.

1. You pay into unemployment. If you ever had a job that was 'on the books' you've paid into unemployment. That's why your pay gets taxed to hell and back. So that if you ever lost your job, you can get some of that unemployment you've been paying into for your entire career. (This also counts for things like welfare and medicare and SSI. These are all things you pay for so that you can use if you ever need it.) So when you've been laid off after 20 years of working, the money you paid helps care for you. That's it. That's the plan. That's how it works.

2. People who have a job while you don't will forget that you once had a job. People with jobs who look down on people who are collecting unemployment suffer from a really weird form of amnesia that makes them forget that in order for you to collect unemployment, you must have been working very recently. So, the same "taxes" they're currently complaining about that "is supporting your jobless ass" is the same taxes that you so diligently paid all the years you did have job and is the same money they'll be dipping into if the worse ever happens to them. It's a funny effect. Though it's not funny at all and just really heartbreaking and confidence shattering.

3. You'll get paid regularly for a little while, which means you'll have money, but it's probably less than you once had and just barely (if even enough) to get you by. Like I stated above, in terms on unemployment, my mom got on the higher end of the spectrum because she wasn't working minimum wage. But still, she got about half of what her salary had been. Which means, we had to downgrade our life by about half. And even though it wasn't that bad for us - it would have been that bad for others.

Most people in NYC don't pay $800 for a two bedroom. Most people in NYC don't pay $800 for a studio. Most people in NYC are paying $2000 and upwards for rent and if we were "most people" we would have been in a hell of a lot of trouble. Even for "lucky people" we were still pretty broke. $80 per month for incidentals and food is very little for a family 3. Without the help of family and friends, we would have been in a lot of trouble. But still, there were people who acted like we were living like kings.

4. If you're getting support from the government, people think you should be out begging on the street. Really. If you're even remotely comfortable, it's upsetting to them. If you're not living in turmoil 24/7, they resent you. If they hear you let out any sounds of happiness, they'll hate you. My aunt - the one who owns the house we rented an apartment in - once smelled my mom cooking a meal and said "Oh! You're cooking dinner. You guys much be so rich!" and she meant it. She literally thought that, being on unemployment, we didn't deserve to have a hot home cooked meal. Till this day, I wonder what she expected us to do. Starve? Not eat? Live on crackers and water? I don't know.

But disparaging comments like this happen all the time when you're on government assistance. My aunt became the 'unemployment police.' If we took a walk to the mall (we were perpetual window shoppers), she'd leer at us when we came home, looking to see if we'd bought anything. If she heard us in our apartment laughing or having fun, she'd call up to know what we were doing. If we were smiling, she was upset. Like, what did we have to be so happy about. She literally couldn't imagine people on unemployment - poor people, in her mind - being happy without money. It burned her to the core. She decided that we weren't miserable enough and that bothered her...a lot.

And the sad thing is, a lot of people share this mentality. That if you're not on the streets begging, you're not miserable enough, then you're obviously getting too much help. If you're on welfare and you buy a $13 dress from Forever21 you're squandering their hard earned money. If you're collecting unemployment and you smile with your family, you're getting too much. Your life is too good. How dare you!

5. It was hard and scary. Going into it, you know unemployment doesn't last forever. You know, at some point, you're going to have absolutely no income. And you know, too intimately, that you're not hire-able. You've applied everywhere...twice. You don't get called back for interviews. You know you need to take courses/classes/training and you know it costs money you don't have. You depend on family and friends to help you out. Your sister offers to pay for this certification course. You're so fucking grateful but you're indebted to her and that's fucking scary. You have to pass this course and that exam of you're fucking screwed. Now no one wants to hire you because you're too fresh out of school. You pay your bills enough to keep the lights on. You save to pay transportation. You plan your meals and budget meticulously to keep you afloat. You ration your food precisely to last just long enough. Any unplanned expense will ruin you. You cannot afford to fuck up even a little. If your car tire pops, that breaks you. If your kid gets sick, you're fucked. If someone dies and you need a plane ticket to a funeral, you're out of the game. (This literally happened to my mom. Her brother died from sickle cell complications and getting a ticket home to go to his funeral never broke us - only my mother went because we couldn't afford tickets for my sister and I.) You kid has senior dues, how is that going to get paid? Prom? No. Trips? No. Textbooks? Ha.

6. You fall deeper and deeper into a whole that gets harder and harder to climb out of. Towards the end of my mother's unemployment, we fell into debt. And not the glamorous credit card debt people fantasize about. But the you-owe-back-rent and ConEd-is-threatening-to-cut-off-electricity and you-can't-afford-car-insurance-payments debt. The kind of debt the government is unconcerned with but is still very serious.

During the last three months of my mom's unemployment, when unemployment insurance ran out, we were living on my sister and I'd petty money from part-time after-school gigs. This was about $150 or so a week. My mom was taking a training course that kept her in school from 8 to 7 monday through friday and during free time. We had enough to (barely) keep energy and gas and internet and phone on and to feed us. (Believe it or not, in this day's economy and job hunting world - internet and phone IS NOT a luxury. Literally every job application has to be done online and correspondence by phone.) We had to let go of the car because we couldn't pay insurance - in NY not only can't you drive a car without insurance, you can't even keep your car registered without insurance, you have to turn in your plates. We could not pay rent. My aunt had never been happier. She was like delighted. Because we were finally like oppressively broke. We couldn't pay her rent and that gave her clout over us and that was like Christmas for her. It was a miserable and scary time. But even then, we managed to find happiness together and make each other laugh and that still bothered her. It was kind of sickening.

But what's worse is, you know that even when you get a job, there's no way you can pay back what you owe. Like, yeah, eventually you can pay off the energy companies or atleast make headway, but pay off three months of back-rent? How? When my mom got a job, she was making less than $200 a week after taxes for the first couple of months. After that, she was making about $350 a week. We could pay rent again, but pay the $2400 we owed and stay current? Impossible. My mom had to tell my aunt this and my aunt was absolutely giddy about it. It took her about a year under the new job to get current with basic bills.

Anyway, it's not a pretty picture. It's not the Unemployment Leech story you're sold in conservative narratives. It sucks. And, I think, it's probably something people can't (or won't) understand until they have to go through it. What's the big deal? they'll say. You still get money, right? You're not on the streets, right? They just don't get it and it's easier for them that way. It's easier to believe that people on unemployment are living lavish lifestyles and are just lazy people looking to get by and work the system.

And the attitude is the same if you're on unemployment, if you're on welfare, if you're getting health care through Obamacare, if you collect food stamps, if you're attending school on government funded programs...