There but for the grace of God go I!
On my way into Walmart, I found out that last night in my city, there was a family that slept in a car in the cold, because they couldn't afford shelter for the night.
I met a father of 4 who had lost his job to an H1B hire he was forced to train. To add insult to injury, the first H1B hire had suffered a heart attack after a month of hard fought training. Training that this man persisted in giving his replacement, despite language barriers and the general incompetence that occurs when people can fake degrees and knowledge to obtain a position they have not earned the right to hold.
So the father was called upon to come back and train the next guy. This meant he basically burnt through any severance he had otherwise earned. The company was not required to compensate him for time spent training his replacement. Yet he was still required to complete the process of training a replacement if he wanted to collect his severance. Collecting this severance blocked him from collecting unemployment since it was now considered "at will".
He is now unemployable in his field because his skills are out of date, being a specialist at his former company for close to 20 years. To make matters worse, he is now 40 and considered too old and too expensive to hire. He's wondering how his children will eat when he cannot provide. He has to compete not only with a younger generation of Americans, but also with people who were brought in legally for the explicit purpose of driving down wages.
This man was standing out in front Walmart with a sign. He wasn't begging, he was there offering to fix cellphones and computers for people that were about to walk in to buy a new one. He was willing to do this for tips, in hopes that someone would see his initiative and provide him with a long term job.
All isn't lost, the government will provide for his wife and kids, but only if he is no longer in the picture. You see, he earned too much last year to qualify for assistance this year. I know this, because I sat and talked to him for a bit before going in.
What options do you think that leaves him as a father and a husband?
By all the standards of our society, this man did everything right. He worked his way through college, waiting to marry until he was in a secure job at a stable company. He trusted in the company pension to be there for him like they promised. When the company was no longer offering a pension, he invested in a 401k, but it put him 15 years behind in retirement savings. He tapped that out while looking for new work. After continual unemployment he lost his home and now he's in front of a Walmart with a sign offering to repair things.
While I am immensely proud of this man, in a way it left me pissed off. It is this anger I wish to channel into something productive and try to change the world, because this... This just isn't right and we need to fix this.
To be continued....
I invite everyone's comments. But humor me by reading the whole way through before jumping to any conclusions. There are several of these coming in the next 24hrs.
update: Part 2 has been posted here...
@williambanks/towards-a-better-tomorrow-part-2-what-in-the-hell-happened-to-us