Name: How Unemployment Benefits Saved my Life, (with a bit of help from my friends) - Shadowproof
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How Unemployment Benefits Saved my Life, (with a bit of help from my friends) - Shadowproof

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/omarhabayeb/6123854759/As the vast majority of you know, I recently ended a long period of unemployment. My job got “consolidated” which was their euphemism for downsizing other locations to protect their own little corner. Who knew that cancer research was such a dog eat dog world? At first I wasn’t too worried, though I was very aware of the state of the economy, we had just elected a brand new President and we held a super majority in the Senate and almost had one in the House. Hopey – Changey™ and all that. I had unemployment insurance benefits coming in plus a bit of savings. Couple that with the fact that since age 15 I’ve never been unemployed longer than three months at a stretch and you can see why I may have been just a bit cavalier with my job searches. The benefit wasn’t much, it amounted to $392 a week but I had them take out for taxes so that brought it down to about $337. Though I had been making about $40,000 annually at my last job, my needs are simple. I own my car and only have myself and my cat to look after. It was an adjustment but I lowered my bills as much as I could and it was enough to get me by.I did some reading and writing and worked on some other projects that I hadn’t had time to tackle previously and though I did at least twice my weekly required job searches religiously, I was being far more selective than I would eventually become. The best I could find in my old field of medical research would have been a wonderful opportunity had they been offering more than 19 hours or fewer per week. Though I applied for it anyway as a stopgap measure, (hey, underemployed is usually better than unemployed), they wound up offering the position to somebody else. I didn’t fret though during that first tier of benefits. I felt like things were about to improve, though by the end of that first 26 weeks I’d lost most of my faith in our new President and his “majorities” in Congress.At the beginning of my second tier, I buckled down and began to be a bit less selective with my job searches. I was still optimistic. I have skills you see. In printing, in working as a technician, as a handy person, etc. I’m smart, I work and play well with others, I can do simple trigonometry in my head and I have very good hand skills. I even began squeeze money out of my UI benefits and savings to buy new tools so I could apply for technician jobs, (I had sold my tools when I got out of that line of work), and I built several resume’s, each focusing on a particular skill set. I was even searching for jobs in Houstopolis, (a place I’d sworn I’d never live again). I was becoming a little frustrated by then but I was still very hopeful that I would find work soon.The next tiers came and went and my benefits finally ran out about the same time that Obama, Pelosi and Reid were helping the teabag Republicans throw the long term unemployed under the bus in favor of extending rich peoples’ tax cuts in such an admirable,&nbsp; bipartisan way. By now I was up to over 700 job applications and I had to buy a new notebook to keep track of my job searches. Increasingly desperate, I’d had several interviews that I felt really good about but none of them had panned out. As a bit of background, I have very little family and most of them detest me so after my final unemployment “check” came in the first part of November, 2010, I was staring at homelessness in the very near future. Just as soon as my savings ran out, I was going to be out on the street with my cat.Enter at this time some very dear and wonderful Firepups, some of them known to me and others who chose to remain anonymous. Some of them drove for hours to meet me and help me out, others almost literally bent over backwards and went WAY above and beyond what any reasonable human being can expect, to cut through road blocks and get aid to me, (you know who you are). Some sent a few bucks, others sent more, most sent very nice, encouraging notes and I even got some really cool art work but all refused promises of repayment, asking only that I pay it forward, (something I’ve recently been able to begin to do). A humbling experience indeed. My FDL friends and others that I know outside this circle, kept me going from November until May.&nbsp; A few bucks here, an odd job there, a bag of groceries, a care package in the mail, even cat food for Neko, it was enough to stretch my dwindling resources. I was going to have to move before the end of June, (my friends having bought me three full months), when I ended up finding a job, making roughly half what I used to, on my birthday in May.The unemployment benefits that the teabag wearing Republican Party members insist were making me lazy are an INSURANCE POLICY that we PAY FOR, not charity. Without it, my 50 year old ass would have certainly been on the street or at best going from friend’s house to friend’s house till I wore out my welcome, making it even more difficult to find a job. I just don’t get the logic behind denying unemployed persons benefits, ensuring that they will become an enormous drain on society. (Think that allowing the poor to become homeless saves the taxpayers money? Think again.) Though reasonably healthy, there is no denying that I’m middle aged and I have some middle aged problems. Problems which would have made a repeat of my early twenties realistically life threatening.Though the TWC, (Texas Workforce Commission, which administers UI benefits in Texas), put hoops up that I had to jump through to remain eligible every now and then, (including “randomly” selecting me to fax or mail in my work search logs every week during the final tier of unemployment benefits), that safety net quite literally saved my life. It saved my apartment, my possessions, possibly my freedom, certainly my dignity and though she doesn’t know it, my Kuroneko. Even though they “lost” a computer with my personal information on it, they were for the most part professional, courteous and helpful at the workforce center, reliably depositing the money into my account every two weeks. The job search resources on their website were usually helpful and well arranged, all of which&nbsp; gave me the impression that the people administering the program genuinely cared.Prior to this period, I had only drawn unemployment once before in my life for two months between 2002 and 2003. I didn’t even apply when I got out of the service which is always automatically granted. But having that income didn’t “make me lazy”, or “remove my incentives to work”. Far from it. I defy anybody to be forced&nbsp; to rely on the Texas Workforce Commission for your maintenance and not want to find gainful employment just to get away from them! But I have to be grateful that they were there when I needed them.In conclusion, it turned out that I had two social safety nets; one governmental, (the Progressive model), and the other personal, (the Republican model), and I was glad indeed to have them! But though the help from my friends was unexpectedly generous and was certainly more than anybody has the right to expect, it wasn’t enough to keep me going like the unemployment insurance benefits could and did. Maybe Republican politicians have friends who have enough money to keep them afloat during tough times but I don’t. But that’s the social contract we have, right? During hard times, in times of disaster and need, we pull together to take care of the victims of those events. And when those people are better off and once again contributing members of society, we pay it forward in taxes and in charitable giving so that others in need can benefit from that contract too. That’s what America is and has always been about.Isn’t it?Shadowproof is a financially independent news organization. All of our funding comes from small donations made by readers like you.We use your donations to hire freelance writers and cover our operating costs. Monthly membership subscriptions give us the stability we need to make plans while ensuring our organization does not depend on grants or major funders. If you like what you read, support our writers with a donation today.&nbsp;

http://www.flickr.com/photos/omarhabayeb/6123854759/As the vast majority of you know, I recently ended a long period of unemployment. My job got “consolidated” which was their euphemism for downsizing other locations to protect their own little corner. Who knew that cancer research was such a dog eat dog world? At first I wasn’t too worried, though I was very aware of the state of the economy, we had just elected a brand new President and we held a super majority in the Senate and almost had one in the House. Hopey – Changey™ and all that. I had unemployment insurance benefits coming in...

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Margaret

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How Unemployment Benefits Saved my Life, (with a bit of help from my friends) - Shadowproof

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