The Employment Dilemma

In today's news, Smurfit-Stone, one of the nation's largest supplier of cardboard boxes, has retained bankruptcy counsel.  Smurfit-Stone owns timberland, recycling centers, and paper mills through out the country.

Obviously their products are directly linked with consumer products.  Smurfit-Stone, like many American companies, borrowed heavily and is highly leveraged.  It borrowed money for, among other things, a merger and capital spending.  Yet, again, another manufacturing business in deep trouble and more than likely in it's last days.  Paper and cardboard, well, we can get 'em cheaper overseas.  No need to have it here.  I will say it again, I think this is wrong-headed.

So, here's the thing.  How are we going to create an economic recovery without being dependent upon consumer spending?  It seems to me that we may want to think all of this through before we go spending even more money.  Which isn't to say we shouldn't help people in foreclosures or unemployed, but we need some serious long term thinking here.

A wise woman friend started asking some questions the other day as we were walking.  She wondered what housing will look like as we re-adjust our economy.  Will people be building huge McMansions?  If so, who will live in them?  What will her daughter, in her late 20s, live in?  Will she ever be able to purchase a home?  What about people displaced because of the economy?  How are we going to provide basic services to them?

She also wondered whether people will study for jobs that may disappear?  Will young people go to college and bank on training when they begin to believe that the training may become obsolete?  Will there be such a thing as a career?

Last, she wondered whether our communities will pull together, demonstrating compassion or will we become a country of finger pointing and blame?

I thought, recently, about my parents generation.  Tom Brokaw's greatest generation  and how they rose out of the ashes of World War II, creating a nation of hope, a belief that if you worked hard and were committed, you had a career, a home, a neighborhood.  That the guy (or woman...eventually) next door could run for office, could find time to coach Little League, spend weekends with his family.  It all, in hindsight, seems to egalitarian.  Now you have to have been anointed by political elites to run for office,  you are glued to your Blackberry or laptop, too busy to even notice whether your child, who competes in everything in order to get into a "good school," scored a goal.  You're in the office on Saturday, working on Sunday, and maybe eat dinner one night a week with the family.  And chances are real good you'll be out of your job, laid off, within a year or two of starting.

It seems that the promises, the hopes of the greatest generation are dead.

But what if, what if, we began to think about those dreams again.  What if we demanded, from ourselves and policy makers, that we re-think the whole idea of work, community, family.  What if we begin conversations about finding long term employment, that is gratifying to the employees, produces quality goods, and mitigates harm to communities?  Why is that conversation so hard?