Behind the Numbers

It was a brief item in the newspaper, no more than 100 words. Morgan Stanley is planning 1,600 layoffs.

I’m not sure if I hadn’t been laid off myself, I would have even noticed the headline. But having been of one of those numbers personally, I look at such news items much differently.

I don’t just see the numbers. I see a middle manager who has to go home and tell his wife and children he longer has a job and they aren’t going to buy as much as they did before; a single middle-aged cancer survivor worries about how she will pay for health insurance; a 20-something in an entry level job has to move back home and put his adult life on hold.

Just this week, our company cut two product lines and terminated nine people. This recession is far from over. More layoffs are coming and I don’t see an end to it as long as corporations want profits more than want to employ people.

You see, there are real people, with real lives, behind those numbers. But how often are they given a voice, how often are their stories told? No, it’s usually just a number (and a rather shockingly large one) and some corporate spin about cutting expenses to please shareholders and Wall Street analysts, as if those are the only people that matter.

To be fair, the mainstream media has written about the human cost of layoffs, if only occasionally. Scott Pelley of CBS News has done some fantastic stories for 60 Minutes. One focused on a single father with two kids living in his van; another was on a family living in a motel room in Florida. He did another feature on a southern town devastated by the economic downturn and how it was slowly coming back to life.

Not too long ago, HBO aired a documentary on how layoffs devastated a group of people on Long Island. One man who had lost his job contracted a virus and died.

However sad, it’s good to see these stories of the long-term unemployed being told. Good to see us portrayed not as freeloading losers, but educated, hard-working people who just got caught in an economic malaise that rendered us useless to your former employers.

My only quibble with these stories is that they focus near exclusively on white, middle-class Americans. Surely people of color have been hit even harder by the lingering recession. Let’s tell their stories as well.

Considering how many people have lost their jobs since 2009, there is no shortage of stories. Whenever there is a natural disaster, like a hurricane or tornado, the media always focuses on the people who lost their homes. But when there is an economic calamity, precious little is said about the impact on those who have lost their livelihood, even though those people could lose their homes just as surely as someone hit by a flood or tornado.

Perhaps it’s because Corporate America doesn’t want the focus on the harsh human cost of their layoffs: the home foreclosures, the lack of health care, the families that are sinking lower and lower on the economic scale, busted retirement savings, and so much more.

No, we mustn’t think about them, not when there are corporate profits to be made.