So real unemployment is probably at 20%.  You want a fast check on this?  Think of 10 people you know well.  Are two of them either not working or working at a part-time job (or not working very much as a self-employed person)?  See?  Yes, I do know that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”.  I also know that I know a lot more than 10 people, and that at least one of every 5 of them is out of work at this moment.  I would bet that is true for you as well.

What’s to be done?  Look, your resume is really not all that important in this kind of economy.  What has happened, effectively, is that we’ve been playing musical chairs, and the music has stopped.  Instead of there being 10 people and 9 chairs, there are 10 people and 8 chairs, or 7, or even 5 in some industries.  So people sit.  Now the music starts again, but the people in those chairs are not getting up.  No way.  Then the music stops again, and a fellow comes in and takes away another chair, even though someone is still sitting in it.

Arranged around these chairs are all the people that didn’t have a place to sit before, and still don’t have a place to sit.  True, once in a while, one of the chairs empties, because people do die or have to move to St. Louis to tend their ailing mother.  When that happens, a thousand people try to sit in the chair at once.  The problem then is not that your skills aren’t up to the task, it is that there simply aren’t enough chairs for people to sit in.  It’s not your fault you’re standing.  It’s not your fault there aren’t any chairs.  It is your fault if you don’t realize this, and start to think differently about what to do about it.

Mr. Cocky, you’re saying, it’s easy for you to say, being self-employed.  Nobody fired you.  Right, well, let’s talk about that.  First, I’m in the mortgage business. Raise your hand if you think that’s a boom industry.  Second, although it’s true that I still have work, it’s also true that most of what I do every day ANYONE can do without a lot of special training or finding someone to hire them to do it.  It can pay well or crappy, depending on how good you are at it, but no matter how good you are, nobody gives you a paycheck for showing up.  If I don’t produce funded and recorded loans, I make nothing, no matter how hard I work.

This is a good thing, at least for me.  I have never been confused about the source of my check.  In boom times, when everyone has a job, it’s easy to feel like the checks are just out there for you to pick up, and it’s simply a matter of figuring out what company name you want to be on the top of it.  In a recession, you realize that this isn’t so, that somewhere someone has to sell something or nobody gets paid, even the middle managers.  When that doesn’t happen, there are a whole lot of people that lose their jobs, most of whom didn’t really process their connection to the production-and-results people that brought the money in.

So yes, I’m fortunate.  I’ve been in a position where my health insurance lapses because I can’t pay it this month, and my office rent comes out of the same check my groceries do.  I’m well positioned to understand how to fight a recession because my job treats all economic conditions the same.  I’m always looking for work.  Always.  I don’t get laid off because I never get laid ON.  I’m especially well-positioned because the close relationship between business and personal income is obvious, and the tradeoff between doing the right thing and doing what looks like the profitable thing (often, not the same thing at all) stares me in the face every single day.

And now it’s there in front of you, too.  Even if you have a job, unless you’re one of a vanishing few, you know the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you wonder what’s going to happen next, and how you’ll feed your family if the next step takes you off a cliff.  And if you’re out of work, you’re falling already.  So now what?

I have a couple suggestions.  First, separate who you are from what you do for money.  The former is important and durable, the latter is not important and subject to change without notice.  This is especially hard to believe if you’ve been doing the same work for 20+ years, but it remains true.  You are not a computer guy, or a farmer, or the President of Spain.  You are much more than that.  That needs to be remembered.  You’re a son, a daughter, a brother, a mother, a father, a wife, a Cubs fan, a fisherman, a gardener, what have you.  What you do for a living is only one of the things you are, and not even the most important one.  When you lose your job, you’ve lost nothing - your job is what you do, not who you are.

Second, once you have #1 down, you’ll realize that you don’t have to go looking for a new job doing the same thing you were doing before.  In fact, the odds are overwhelming that you won’t be able to find a job doing that same thing.  You can put your resume out there in the usual places, and you should, but you ought to put it in other places, too.  Use who you are, not what you do (or did) to find work. This requires a bit of explanation, and a rejiggering of our usual thinking on the subject of employment.

We have to stop thinking about ourselves as consumers, with employers as producers of jobs that we will consume.  This sound silly?  It’s exactly how most people think about the job market (even I do it - the “job market”, like the supermarket).  Employers put jobs out there, and we select them like cold cuts.  When there are no jobs out in the display case, we get really annoyed.  But should we?  Whose jobs are they?  Do we have some natural right to have someone employ us?

I don’t think we do.

Macroeconomic Tangent: It is precisely this kind of thinking that leads to very silly “American jobs” rhetoric, as if the job belongs to America, and not to Intel.  Intel’s purpose as a company is to create the maximum value it can for the smallest possible cost.  That’s what businesses do.  There’s no good cursing them for finding that they can get good enough work somewhere else, where it costs a lot less.  Either we need to do better work, or we need to do it cheaper (or US tax policy needs fixing, so that US workers are not priced out of the market by Washington’s incomprehensible greed, but that’s another post).  END Macroeconomic Tangent.

You, yourself, are a producer.  You produce work.  You have wares to sell.  It is YOU that are the supermarket - or are you?  Perhaps you’re just a corner store.  Whatever.  Doesn’t matter.   Flip the concept on its head, and start thinking about what you can provide in terms of value. What work can you do that needs doing?

If you want, perhaps not the shortest, but the most satisfying, and ultimately the best course to employment, make yourself indispensable to someone. Go find a place to do some work.  Despite the downsizing going on, there’s a greater need for work to be done now than ever before.  Everywhere there are businesses struggling to stay afloat.  Why?  What do they need done?  Why couldn’t you do some of that?

I do very definitely realize that this is a different way to look at things.  I realize that I’m advocating doing work for people that have not agreed to pay you and perhaps cannot do so.  Yep.  You should.  I do it all the time, people.  When you come to me and we start working on a mortgage, you haven’t agreed to pay me, and you only will do so if the loan closes and funds.  I CONSTANTLY do work for people that haven’t agreed to pay me, just because the work needs to be done.  You can do this, too, without a mortgage license.  Offer something else besides mortgages.  Do you have management or accounting experience? Marketing skills?  A broom? EVERY business you can find needs your help, especially smaller businesses.

If you are successful, that business will likely survive, and that will reduce the competition out there for the jobs that are available, because those people will still have work.  If you are very successful, the business will grow, and will need more employees.  Who do you suppose they’ll be most likely to hire when that happens?

I currently employ an accountant.  She is my accountant because she followed this very course.  I was bellyaching about not having filed my taxes this year, and she said “Fine.  Give them to me.”  She worked on them a couple weeks, filed them, and now she comes to me and says “could I ask you to start paying me something?” and what can I say?  “Yeah, I guess I could, since you saved me $10k on my taxes without charging me a dime.”  And that is why Iron Pen Bookkeeping does my accounting.

I strongly believe that if you get a small group of people together that have time and skills and initiative, you will fairly shortly have viable business ideas, and more than you can possibly tackle.  I believe this because my office is a place where those people come, and shoot the bull, and businesses rise from the ashes of the discussion and take wing.

To return to the original analogy, what you’re going to have to do to find gainful employment in this economy is not hone your resume or find the right online job listings.  What you’re going to have to do is make chairs.  If you want to be sitting in a chair, you’re going to have to make one.  The era of free-range chairs is over.

In short, if you want to fight recession, start where you are.  You don’t need the GNP to rise.  You need the GLP (Gross Local Product) to rise.  More to the point, you need your GPP to rise.  Start improving your Gross Personal Product.  Make a chair.  Repeat as often as necessary.

If you want help, come see me.  I’ll make time.