Snapshots from a boom economy
Depending on how you squint, the 2016 U.S. economy can look like two entirely different creatures. Part-time retail gigs with unstable hours have replaced good factory jobs, lots of people have given up on even looking for work, and more than half of Americans in one recent poll said things are “going badly.” But also, poverty is down, consumer confidence is up, and middle-class wages are on the rise.
The truth is, it’s entirely possible that we’re now at a kind of peak moment before the next slump, or even recession. And that’s especially true in New Hampshire, where I live, and where the unemployment rate now stands at a truly impressive 3 percent.
Between 2011 and 2012, when everyone agreed that the economy was pretty awful, I wrote a blog about how people in my mostly working-class Nashua neighborhood were getting by. This September, I went back out to ask people in the area how they’re doing now.
“Working, you’ve always got your mind on something”
Almost everyone I talked to agreed that the economy is doing well. Alissa Moore, a single mom of two who I met at a public housing complex near my house, said she moved back to New Hampshire from Ohio recently and, within three weeks, got a job at a 7-Eleven. Then, she quickly found a better-paying position as a waitress. She said if people can’t find work they just aren’t trying hard enough. “It takes effort.”
David Carrero, who had walked over to Moore’s apartment from another part of the project where he lives with his mom, didn’t disagree. But when I talked to him he was currently out of work.
Carrero said that when he was a kid he got government disability benefits. He had learning disabilities and a tendency to get hyper. When he turned 18 a couple of years ago, he called the government office and said he didn’t want the money anymore. Since then he’s worked winters shoveling snow for a landscaping company and done whatever jobs he can find for the rest of the year. Over the last few months, he’s found jobs through a temp agency, mostly shipping work at warehouses. But he keeps getting laid off, he said. In fact, that seems to happen to everyone who works through the agency. When he can’t find work, he mostly hangs out with a friend and watches movies. It’s not how he wants to be spending his time.
“Working’s so much better,” he said. “Because working, you’ve always got your mind on something.”
“I guess they look for the cream of the crop”
One of the few people I met who didn’t think the job market was so hot was Claudia Herring, an older woman who was waiting for a bus at the downtown station. She said she’s been out of work and on disability benefits for a long time, but she’s hoping she can find at least part-time work to get a little extra cash. She’s been working with an agency for older workers, applying for jobs as a receptionist, the job she did for most of her life. But she hasn’t gotten any calls.
“I guess they look for the cream of the crop,” she said. “Someone they can depend on all the time.”
Linda Nightingale was also waiting for a bus, and also in the middle of a job search. Right now, she’s working at a local soup kitchen, 19 hours a week for $7.25 an hour. That was fine before her husband of 25 years walked out on her. Now, she needs to make more money.
We talked for a while, and Nightingale heaped praise on almost everyone she mentioned: two friends who help her apply for jobs online since she doesn’t do computers, the apartment complex people who waits patiently for her rent checks and still fix anything that breaks right away, her fellow soup kitchen staff who have started sending her home with food and toiletries. She didn’t even have anything nasty to say about her husband — he’s a lot younger than her, so she probably should have seen it coming, she said.
She wasn’t angry about not getting call-backs for the applications she’s filled out either, but she said she had to be realistic about what’s happening. “I think my age has a lot do to with it.”
“I feel better for my soul just volunteering”
Also, though, even if Nightingale needs a different job, she doesn’t really want one. Back in 2012 she had taken a salary cut to work for the soup kitchen, quitting a $9.75 an hour selling pretzels at the mall. That was partly because she was annoyed with customers. One thing she remembers is the prejudiced stuff some of them said about people from the Middle East. “I couldn’t stand some of the people with money,” she said. “They’re just so rude.”
As it happened, I ran into another worker from the soup kitchen too, a middle-aged woman in office casual who didn’t want to give her name. She said she volunteered 15 hours a week there, and she’s not looking for paid work. She worked for years, she said — good jobs including one at an engineering firm. But she has lupus, and she doesn’t want to commit to a job and then have to ask for time off if she gets sick. She gets disability benefits, and her husband and an adult son who lives with them both work full time, so they get by OK.
“I’m grateful that I’m able to just volunteer,” she said. “I feel better for my soul just volunteering.”
“The jobs are always there for me”
To Angel Montanez, it’s clear the economy has improved drastically, though, as a diesel mechanic, he’s never had trouble finding work.
“The jobs are always there for me,” he said.
When I met him, Montanez was pushing his 10-month-old twins in a double stroller. He works nights, while his wife has a day-shift retail job. Since he switched from a local job to a higher-paying one in Boston, he has a long commute. He said he sleeps about five hours a day. It’s hard not seeing each other much, he said, and his wife would rather stay home with the kids, but this seems like the smartest way to arrange things for now.
“It’s tough,” he said. “The cost to live nowadays is pretty expensive.”
“It’s kind of hard to get yourself back out of that hole”
While Montanez and his wife bustle about their busy lives, Corey Posey said he looks for ways to fill his days. When I met him on a Saturday afternoon, he was hanging out with some friends on the side of the bike path near my house, drinking beers. The other guys were giving him a little shit for the fact that he still hadn’t replaced a broken string on his guitar. He’s 45, a country boy who started working when he was 10 or 12.
“My whole life it was easy to find a job,” Posey said. “The way I grew up, a job’s a job, and you work.”
That changed after 2008. It wasn’t just that he lost his job in the crash and couldn’t find a new one. He’d also burnt out his rotator cuff detailing cars. And then his manic depression and PTSD kicked in.
“Things fell apart with my family and all that,” he said.
For years, he said, he filled out online job applications but never heard back. He works odd jobs sometimes, plays guitar for donations, stays “here and there.”
In the winter he might go to the local shelter, or the mission, or maybe he’ll find a friend who’ll let him stay at their place for a few weeks. He’d like to find the kind of job he used to do, construction or anything automotive. Running a cash register’s tough, though. His PTSD gives him trouble when he’s around big crowds, and customer service is not his thing.
“I have very little patience for somebody that’s downright rude,” he said.
Posey said it’s tough to imagine how he’d go back to the kind of life he lived before the recession.
“If you spend too much time on the street, it’s kind of hard to get yourself back out of that hole,” he said.
But, nodding to his friends, he said there would have been a downside to keeping his job and staying off the streets.
“I’d probably never have met some of these good, or great, people,” he said.
