On May 21st I was handed a large black envelope, with a note inside telling me that my Master's in International Affairs would be in the mail. On May 24th I celebrated 30 years of age. On May 26th I became officially unemployed. One month later, little has changed. I am still unemployed, still 30, and still a Master. But of what?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (henceforth the BLS) released the May 2015 jobs report a few weeks ago. According to that report (view here), there are 8.7 million unemployed Americans who are looking for work (or about 5.5% of the civilian labor force). If you factor in all of the people who are: 1. unemployed and seeking work, 2. unemployed and no longer seeking work (discouraged), 3. are working part-time because they could not find full-time work (involuntary part-time), and 4. are ‘marginally’ attached to the labor force (seasonal farm work, mostly) there are about 17 million Americans who are not working as much as they would like/need. I am one of them.
The odds, it should be noted, are overwhelmingly in my favor. The headline unemployment rate (5.5%) hides wide variations, which are mostly accounted for by age, education, and race. The rate for teenagers is much higher (17.9%) than for adults over 25 (4.5%), as you might expect. Adults with a Bachelor’s degree or higher have a minuscule unemployment rate (2.7%), especially compared with those who have not finished high school (8.6%). And the unemployment rate for white Americans is 4.7%; for black Americans it is 10.2%. Why that is and how we might change it are important questions, and one that I will discuss. But there's no way around it: people who look like me, talk like me, and come from households like mine have an easier time finding jobs.
All of which is cold comfort when I wake up each morning, kiss my wife as she goes to work, and am left staring at the vast expanse of colorless hours that I have heard is called the ‘workday’. A job search should be about finding gainful employment. For me it has become about something much smaller: getting through those hours with my sense of self intact. That is why I have created this blog. It is a journal of my quest for employment, purpose, and remuneration. It is the story of my slog.
What is a slog? From Google: slog (verb) 1. Work hard over a period of time. (noun) 1. A spell of difficult, tiring work. In other words, you can slog through a slog.
Now there is a very good argument to be made that the last thing a professional unemployee should be doing is wasting time on a blog. And yet...this is the only thing that I am actually good at. I love to write. It is how I process the world. I’m going to keep these posts short, semi-weekly, and hopefully amusing. I have some stories to tell from my Slog: how I got here, how I’m looking for work, and how workers treat us Sloggers of the world. I also have some questions to explore: should I be looking for work, or making it? Is it better to anonymously apply to a hundred online postings, or simply have drinks with enough people until one of them is hiring?
This blog might last a week (awesome), or a year (in which case it will probably double as a chronicle of my anti-depressant addiction). There may be some colorful characters (my wife, a.k.a. The Scurve), some villains (damn you, resume auto-readers), and maybe even an axe to grind. It may become a social experiment, or a too-deep rabbit hole into the funhouse of my mind. This is the fourth adventure I have chronicled, but the first one that might not ever end. Read on, and see for yourself.
Welcome to The Slog.
