by James T. Hammond

A friend of mine was hired last week by Trader Joe’s, the new food market that will open this month in the Woodruff Road commercial corridor. My friend had been without full-time work for three years.
Hopefully, the new job will lift a pale of uncertainty, and perhaps event despair, from my friend’s life.

The new business in town may be yet another sign that we in Upstate South Carolina are slowly clawing our way out of the hole of the Great Recession, which has swelled the ranks of America’s impoverished citizens to levels not seen since the Great Depression.

America’s working class has been hammered by high unemployment not seen since the bread lines of the 1930s. Our social fabric has frayed as never before. People who once viewed themselves as solid working-class, taxpaying citizens have come to question whether their country still holds out the so-called America Dream, and the promise that if a person is willing and able to work, there will always be a job for them somewhere.

Take a look at the numbers

People in poverty in 2009 comprised the largest number in the 51 years for which poverty estimates are available, the U.S. Census Bureau announced in September.
The nation’s official poverty rate in 2009 was 14.3%, up from 13.2% in 2008 — the second statistically significant annual increase in the poverty rate since 2004. There were 43.6 million people in poverty in 2009, up from 39.8 million in 2008 — the third consecutive annual increase.

Meanwhile, the number of people without health insurance coverage rose from 46.3 million in 2008 to 50.7 million in 2009, while the percentage increased from 15.4% to 16.7% over the same period.

The number of people with health insurance decreased from 255.1 million in 2008 to 253.6 million in 2009. Since 1987, the first year that comparable health insurance data were collected, this is the first year that the number of people with health insurance has decreased. These findings are contained in the report Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009.

Until the crash of 2008, there was a widespread attitude, particularly in the South, that anyone without a job was simply lazy and preferred a meager stipend from the government to the more rigorous task of finding a job, and working hard to keep it.

That attitude certainly was always unfair to some of the people caught in a cycle of poverty and unemployment, but willing to work nevertheless.

Today’s economic crisis has dramatically increased the number of people caught in this vicious cycle. Most people who have changed jobs will tell you it’s easier to get a new job when you already have a job. Even employers sometimes look askance at people who apply for work, but don’t currently have a job. It’s a dispiriting exercise to fill out myriad job applications, and spend hours waiting in line at the Employment and Workforce agency’s office to deal with an overwhelmed bureaucracy about unemployment compensation.

I have never been forced by circumstances to seek state financial assistance due to being without a job. The brief periods during which I was not working, I had enough personal resources to get by. But I claim no false pride because of that distinction. People among my own family and friends have claimed such benefits, and deservedly so in their times of need.

We live in a time of extraordinary distress for many among us. We must reach out to the less lucky among us. A civil society can and should be judged by how well it provides a hand up for those less fortunate.

Michelin North America has been engaged for about a year now in a project that has each of its work sites adopt a Title One elementary school, to help under-performing students in those concentrations of poverty to do better in school. They quickly discovered that children’s performance in school was negatively impacted when parents were unemployed.

Michelin turned on a dime, brought in their own work force counselors to help those parents apply for jobs. Within days they had helped place three parents in jobs.

It is just such entrepreneurial thinking that will help pull us all out of this economic funk.

James T. Hammond is Editor of GSA Business. Reach him at jhammond@scbiznews.com.