The middle-class unemployment blues
Posted by Mediascaper on May 5, 2009
Laid off in 2007. Relying on an early pension, unemployment benefits and occasional substitute teaching gigs to get by. Followed by a loss of benefits for a month because of an oversight by the county. Former Minnesota Star Tribune employee Delma J. Francis thought she would finally qualify for food stamps. She was wrong:
With that change in my circumstances, I went back to the county, sure that I would now qualify for EBT, formerly known as food stamps, or medical assistance. (Being on the far side of 40 with no health insurance is not a comfortable place to be.) But no. The $508 a month in early pension and what I had earned substitute teaching the previous pay period rendered me still ineligible for help.
“Wait a minute,” I said to the county worker. “Let me get this straight. Because I’m working when I can, trying to help myself — and by doing so, paying taxes to help all those people out in the waiting room feed their kids and keep themselves healthy — I can’t get any help?”
She just stared at me without an ounce of remorse for the news she’d just delivered.
Sheila Bishop said
While I sympathize with her situation, I was put off by her attitude about “all those people out there.”. She says, “all those people out their” as if she isn’t one of those people, as if most of them are lazy users that she is supporting, as if they are not busting tail to get by, many of them in similar situations as her, lacking health insurance, sometimes qualifying for aid and then penalized for any small windfall that comes their way because they are making just enough to be disqualified, or wanting to work but finding day care costs more than their paycheck. Welcome to the crap that the working poor deal with for years on end.
So you have a formerly middle class woman get angry about the system that she hopes to benefit from and actually has a better chance of benefiting from than many people much worse off than her because she have the literacy skills to navigate incredibly tedious and complicated bureaucratic systems designed to keep people off the rolls (apply for food stamps and see what I mean, folks with high literacy and computer skills have a distinct advantage). She could have identified with “all those people out there” with whom she has common cause, whether she’s on the getting or not getting benefits side of the working poor. Instead, it appears that she feels better than them, even though she has no idea how many of them out in that waiting room will hear a similar denial that day, because of the puny amount of taxes she pays each month.
virtualjournalist said
@Sheila,
You’ve not only articulately captured the contradictions within Francis’s post — the way she invites sympathy for her plight, but cannot afford the same to “all those people” who are also poor — but you bring up an excellent point about access to unemployment benefits. If Francis gets to Washington, D.C., perhaps she could speak on that issue as well.
Sheila Bishop said
All my ranting aside, the cold bureaucratic “It’s not my problem, deal with it” shrug is one of the more unpleasant things to deal with especially after a county oversight caused some of her problems, so I do feel for her and hope she gets the aid she needs and deserves because I don’t think anyone should be punished for trying to do for themselves. Obviously there needs to be a cut off, but it is too low and too rigid. Let’s hope your vision of folks like Francis going to Washington comes to pass.
I had been meaning to check out your blog for a while. I’m looking forward to reading more posts (though I seldom will get that riled and long winded if I comment).