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Doing Nothing, Globalization Style
(8)From this morning’s NYTimes :
ROCK FALLS, Ill. Alan Beggerow has stopped looking for work. Laid off as a steelworker at 48, he taught math for a while at a community college. But when that ended, he could not find a job that, in his view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid.
So instead of heading to work, Mr. Beggerow, now 53, fills his days with diversions: playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, writing unpublished Western potboilers in the Louis LAmour style all activities once relegated to spare time. He often stays up late and sleeps until 11 a.m.
I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me, he said.
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Alan Beggerow has not worked regularly in the five years since the steel mill that employed him for three decades closed. He and his wife, Cathleen, 47, cannot really afford to live without his paycheck. Yet with her sometimes reluctant blessing, Mr. Beggerow persists in constructing a way of life that he finds as satisfying as the work he did only in the last three years of his 30-year career at the mill. The trappings of this new life surround Mr. Beggerow in the cluttered living room of his one-story bungalow-style home in this half-rural, half-industrial prairie town west of Chicago. A bookcase covers an entire wall, and the books that Mr. Beggerow is reading are stacked on a glass coffee table in front of a comfortable sofa where he reads late into the night consuming two or three books a week many more than in his working years.
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Always on the coffee table is a thick reference work, Guide to the Pianists Repertoire by Maurice Hinson. Mr. Beggerow is a serious pianist now that he has the time to practice, sometimes two or three hours at a stretch. He does so on an old upright in a corner of the living room, a piano he purchased as a young steelworker, when he first took lessons.
Is this some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome or a social/philosophical breakthrough? Mr. Beggerow’s life sounds like the kind of idyll described by very famous literary figures, men such as Samuel Johnson, Henry David Thoreau, George Bernard Shaw, as described in Tom Lutz’s book Doing Nothing. (And who’s to say potboiler westerns are not sufficiently literary to justify this kind of life?)
Men like Mr. Beggerow, neither working nor looking for a job, also have become more common in the popular culture, making the phenomenon more acceptable. On the television show Seinfeld, Cosmo Kramer, who did not work, and George Costanza, who regularly lost jobs, were beloved figures. Personal-finance magazines whose circulations have grown rapidly over the last 25 years also encourage not working by telling readers how to afford retirement at 50 and by painting not working as the good life, which it apparently is for a small number of wealthy men. About 8 percent of non-working men between 30 and 54 lived in households that had more than $100,000 of income in 2004.
Men dont feel a need to be in a career, not as much as they once did, said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. Nor do men have the incentive they once had to pursue a career, not when employers are no longer committed to them.
And yet, it takes a certain toll. Mr. Beggerow’s wife is sticking with him even though they don’t have enough money to cover expenses . Other men in this position had less compliant wives and so they are divorced; 60% of these men live alone for some reason. According to this Times article, about 13% of American men 30-55 years old are not working. They are not looking for work and so they don’t show up in our low 4.6% unemployment rate. About two million of these men have felony records, mostly from drug convictions in the 1980s and 90s. Coming out of jail now, in their thirties, guess what? They can’t find work.
But these ex-prisoners are in the minority. Most of these men could find work of some kind but, like “Bartleby the Scrivener,” they prefer not to. Here’s Mr. Beggerow’s reason:
Mr. Beggerow will not take a lesser job, he says, because of his bitter memories of earlier years at Northwestern Wire, particularly the 1980s, when the industry was in turmoil. A powerful man, over 6 feet and 200 pounds, he worked then as a warehouseman.
What got to him was not the work. It was the frequent furloughs, the uncertainty whether he would be recalled, the mandatory overtime and 50-hour weeks often imposed when he did return, the schedules that forced him to work every holiday except Christmas, and then, as rising seniority finally gave him some protection, a six-month strike in 1983 followed by a wage cut. His pay shrank to $13 an hour from $17, a loss he did not fully recover until those last three years.
I was always thinking if there was some way I could get out of this, do something else, Mr. Beggerow said. What made me so upset was the insecurity of it all and the humiliation. I dont want to take a job that would put me through that again.
If I remember correctly (I don’t have to book at hand), Lutz theorizes that slackers emerge in times of change, when an old way of life is disappearing and a new one is not yet established. Guess that’s where we are.
“Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”
8 Responses to “Doing Nothing, Globalization Style”
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Charlie July 31st, 2006 at 10:14 pm
A former steelworker myself, I know how Mr. Beggerow felt.
BURIED
Tonight I am hidden
in a field of coils stacked precariously
one on top of another.I wait for the sount that will tell me
I have been found out–I wait.I see them walking by, looking down rows;
I am sure they have seen me now
I have made myself conspicuous.“They all look alike,” I hear them say,
my face has blended in with all the other
round, tightly-wrapped forms–I am hidden.No one will ever find me here.
cmw
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sherry August 2nd, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Thank you for sharing this poem, Charlie. I hope everyone will click through to the comments and read it.
I rather admire Mr. Beggerow, and I envy him some. He’s a braver soul than most. I’m not sure i’d want to be his wife though.
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Greetings, all!
Alan Beggerow here.
I have enjoyed reading the poems and such on this blog, especially the poem by the former steel worker. Yes indeed, been there,done that!
There has been much comment about thearticle on the ‘net. Trust me, I’ve been called everything from a no-good communist bum to a hero, and everything in between.
There has been the impression from the article that somehow I refuse to work while my wife is forced to. Such is not the case. When I decided to retire, we talked it over and I of course told her that if I didn’t work I didn’t expect her to. What’s fair for one is fair for the other in our partnership. in any case, I’ve posted some clarifications about our situation on my blog.
There’s also some insights about the interview I had with Tucker Carlson. That was quite an experience, let me tell you!
You’ve got an interesting blog. I’ll visit again. Take care, and
Keep on keepin’ on!
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[...] sy cat went to shop in a beautiful—is that Corolla green? Helen’s right, too good to… Alan Beggerow: Greetings, all! Alan Beggero [...]
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sherry August 8th, 2006 at 6:52 am
From an editorial in today’s NYTimes
Its easy to dismiss men who arent working as lazy bums. It would be more effective to attack the trap of layoffs and the lesser jobs that follow, which many of these men are trying to avoid. A place to start would be to assess the problem forthrightly. The Bush administration has often bragged about the economys relatively low unemployment rates rather than admit that they mask economic weakness. Administration officials have also talked up the economys job growth record by citing totals without context, thereby masking the fact the job creation during the Bush years has badly trailed historical norms.
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The NY Times editorial expresses the situation rather well, I think.
It is the fact that the economy is not as good as the adminstration portrays that is the bottom line in this debate. It has lead the supporters of this adminstration to personal attacks on the victims of this economic policy. Instead of examining the issue and discussing the underlying causes of unemployed men (and women), these supporters show their loyalty by in essence blaming the unemployed themselves as the problem instead of the result.
Don’t have a job? You must be lazy! Can’t find a good paying job? You must not be worth much! You lost a good paying job? Well, you were probably getting paid more than you were worth, and YOU caused your own loss! You’ve given up? How dare you! It is your responsibility to society to work and be productive! There are plenty of jobs out there! Get one! Doesn’t matter the pay! Either you contribute to society by working, or you’re dead weight!
It is like blaming a wet sidewalk for a rainstorm, and makes just as much sense.
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Blue Pilgrim August 25th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
I happen to know Alan — he lives next town over. What has not been apparant from the news story is that when the mill closed he was one of 1400 people out of work — in a town of about 15,000. There were a couple other businesses closed down too — and of course the suppliers of the mill, the eateries, the stores — all dropped off in business because there was less demand. Ever try to find work in a small town when 1400 other people with the same kind of work experience are looking? These things don’t happen in isolation.
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Thank you, Blue Pilgrim. You are right, things don’t happen in isolation. It’s a small world and getting smaller. And there’s very little of “love your neighbor as yourself” around.
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Sherry has also received an Artist Enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women.
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