Most of all at night, when I'm going to bed, or early in the mornings. That's when the worst case scenarios take on the shape of a ferocious hungry monster who is eating up all the remaining jobs, houses, food, and even my children's education, and making us all starving beggars.
How bad can it get?
We've already lost a large part of our 401K retirement savings, that was in lieu of a pension.
My husband lost his job.
My ex-husband lost his job.
My ex-husband's partner lost her job.
My renter lost her job.
The state of California is in a state of financial crisis as property tax along with house prices plummet and place my job at risk.
We found out last week that MIT will not give us emergency financial aid because our '07 income was too high and first we have to use up all our emergency cash reserves.
And today we find out that my husband was not alone: many of the top engineers and project managers at his major international corporation were laid off too.
The ugliest face of the corporation emerges at these hard times. While it could afford to keep the older employees around in the flush times it is increasingly apparent that these are indeed the ones to be let go of when the times are tough. And in many ways this letting go comes to those who can least afford it. Not like those financial analysts who earned 6 figure salaries and 7 figure bonuses. And not like the young people with their feet just out in the work world, who have so little still to lose. These are people who are stuck in the middle of their middle class lives, with real medical needs, real children to support, real house mortgages to pay, real college tuitions that are due.
So why couldn't the corporation do as some government agencies did: cut back on hours? on salaries? This is a time of crisis. No time to send people out into the job market that is not working.
I worry now more about the others than about J. What's happening to my husband's ex-boss's boss, who was laid off a week after J, and whose wife was not working? And what about the genteel soft spoken senior engineer, an image of what I had thought was the civilized side of this company that unlike the others would retain employees for twenty years? But it wasn't true. In this economy he got laid off like all the rest- no regard for his experience, the products he had developed. The money he had made the company.
So the shareholders can see a profit?
Because there really is no more work to be done? No products to be designed?
So someone at the top can get paid more?
Or because at essence the corporation really does have a psychopathic personality disorder- a total disregard for the human being? That '03 Canadian documentary "The Corporation" got it right.
It's so strange because this is a human made disaster. It is not an act of God, like an earthquake, flood, drought or fire, all of which so easily could hit and destroy California.
Sometimes it's hard to believe that it is real. But then it impacts you personally with the loss of a job, and it becomes all too real, how the whole world is interconnected in this state of a collapsing economy.
But if it's human made, this disaster, than it's fixable, and the fix is up to us.
We must let go of the corporation as it let go of those who gave over to it all of their skills honed from years of education and experience, those who like my husband and his colleagues were making real products, doing real service, bringing real profits, making the corporation exist.
The corporation is only as strong as those real people who made it, and it has to return to that human shape and form so it can be held accountable for its actions.
And we must return to that sense that we have some control over our lives, conquer the fears that rule our sleep, and get on with our lives.
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