If there’s one thing I’ve heard from social services providers across the North Country since the Great Recession began, it’s this.<\/p>\n
They’re startled and overwhelmed by the number of first-time assistance seekers coming into their offices.\u00a0 Mid-career folks.\u00a0 People who have held jobs most of their adult lives.\u00a0 People who thought they’d be retired by now.<\/p>\n
Today we aired an interview with staff at the One Stop Career Center in Canton, where the mood is, quite frankly, pretty grim.<\/a> Counselor Klauss Proem told me stories about men and women who are 58, 59 years old, just a hair below 60, when you no longer have to take mandatory training classes if you receive temporary assistance.<\/p>\n So there they are sitting in their classroom desks with young people a third their age who have never held a job, learning the basics of writing a resume.\u00a0 Men and women who are used to waking up every morning, checking into work, and earning a paycheck.<\/p>\n They’re shocked to be jumping through the hoops of public assistance, their time no longer completely their own.\u00a0 “It can be an intrusive process,” Proem admits, “because the taxpayer wanted that accountability.”\u00a0 Disclosing everything you own, documenting hours spent job searching.<\/p>\n I wonder if this widespread, long-term disruption in the reality of work – chronic joblessness<\/a>, training for training’s sake<\/a> – will be what we remember most from the Great Recession.<\/p>\n Have a story to tell?\u00a0 We want to hear it.\u00a0 Comment below, or if you want to do it more quietly, e-mail me at <david-at-ncpr-dot-org>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If there’s one thing I’ve heard from social services providers across the North Country since […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}