Louis Uchitelle the Disposable American team Jahoda, Lazersfeld Ziesel Marienthal show extensive effects experience unemployment depriving individuals incomes, inevitable material hardships demands, practical coping strategies.
The sociological experience of unemployment:
Unemployment as a psychological state in Great Britain and America
In America, one's ability to be productive and to do work often becomes synonymous with one's identity: the value one commands in the labor market becomes analogous to the value one has as a human being. The emphasis in America upon productive employment as a definer of self-worth can be seen in the contrast between the British unemployment experience as detailed by Jahoda, Lazarsfeld and Ziesel (2002) and Uchitelle (2006). In the British community of Marienthal with high levels of unemployment, although the unemployed husband's wives are upset at the privation their households must undergo, many of the men seem unperturbed. They use up their spare time becoming involved with various political activities or hobbies (such as music) (Jahoda, Lazarsfeld & Ziesel 49-50). Some of the households are able to survive relatively comfortably on the produce raised from their gardens and keeping rabbits; although the wives are upset that the family must make a sacrifice such as selling a radio to buy clothing for the children, the situation in all instances is not necessarily seen as untenable. However, both the British men and the American men experience a sense of 'learned helplessness' regarding seeking employment; the breakdown of conventional gender roles in their marriages; and also a loss of the social connections provided by steady work.
Interestingly enough, the anecdote in Uchitelle of a more affluent family in which the husband has been laid off from United Airways seems more dire, psychologically...
Unlike many of the women in the British example, the wife has a well-paying corporate job. However, she is worried what unemployment will do to her husband psychologically. "I think the layoff destroyed his self-esteem," she says (Uchitelle 179). The family was affluent enough for the wife to even purchase a 'fixer upper' house for her husband, mainly to amuse himself and bolster his self-confidence. Uchitelle notes that quite often people 'get comfortable' (emotionally not necessarily economically) with unemployment to isolate themselves from the judgments of the workplace, not wanting to be rejected again. The job search process is just as eviscerating as the process of being laid off -- it is not uncommon for candidates to become even more depressed if they perceive certain people getting jobs they believe they are qualified to hold, as in the case of the United Airways mechanic and one British man who had applied for 130 jobs and then became too depressed to get out of bed.
In both the British and American contexts, conventional gender roles can be upset if the husband is the one laid off while the wife becomes the primary breadwinner. In the case of the couple discussed by Uchitelle, the wife had wanted to quit her demanding job and remain home with her small children but was unable to do so because of her husband's unemployed status. Many of the wives of the unemployed men in the British study complained that they did not do enough to help our around the house, despite the fact that the men had more time on their hands and the women had more to clean up, given that they were also picking up after their husbands. The working class husbands did not want to seem to lose their 'male privilege' by doing women's work.
But even the British men exhibited an attitude which is…
