A Question of Worth: Financial Circumstances, the Self, and Distress

Abstract

Downsizing’s most obvious consequence is financial. Whether job loss means financial inconvenience, struggle, hardship, or tragedy depends on the situation of the workforce as a whole and on individual workers’ personal and family resources. Shutdown of a plant means a loss of livelihood for some, a threat to a way of life for others. Chapter One presented a model often used by sociologists to conceptualize the stressful aspects of unemployment; at the same time, we tried to highlight the ways in which autowork—a stable, unionized, well-paying blue-collar job—might generate thoughts, feelings, and concerns different from those experienced by either middle-class workers or the working poor. We noted that blue-collar workers seem to respond mainly to the financial implications of a shutdown, whereas middle class workers may be more likely to focus on psychological wounds such as the threat to identity that job loss represents. In contrast to the working poor, these autoworkers had the financial blow of job loss to some extent cushioned by factors as diverse as the supplemental unemployment benefits (SUB-pay) in the UAW-GM contract, the availability of outplacement assistance and job retraining, and the possibility of recall to their GM jobs when good times return ( see discussion in Chapter Two). Potential job loss may have different meanings to blue-collar versus white-collar workers, to the unionized versus the nonunionized, and so forth. This chapter first examines one of the key ways in which unemployment appears to affect psychological well-being: the chapter explores how financial hardship affects mastery and self-esteem and how these in turn are linked to distress—especially depression. This is the natural order for these discussions because the stress model postulates that unemployment has effects both through hardship to distress, and through hardship to distress by way of the effects that financial hardship has on the psyche.