In Middlemarch, Edward Casaubon spends his life searching for the Key to all Mythologies. Another great work of literature, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, concerns the quest for the Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Key? Meaning? Are you kidding me with this stuff?
The market or the packing crate?
Mine was a middle-class American family. In the 1950s, rich people had portfolios, middle-class people had Social Security and pensions, and poor people had poverty until they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. No one could find the bootstraps so hardly anyone made it out of poverty.
But then companies started cutting back on pensions and working people were told that if we don’t want to spend our sunset years in a packing crate, we’d better get into the stock market.
Could this have anything to do with the fact that Wall Street loves investors who don’t know what the hell what they’re doing?
In which I do the responsible thing
I began to consider investing in the early 1990s. I was a freelance technical writer, i.e., not rich. To be able to lend anything to Wall Street, I needed to earn more. But Alan Greenspan said that if I pressed for higher wages, I’d create “inflationary tensions.” I knew all about inflationary tensions. I felt them every time I tried to get into my size-6 jeans.
We’ll Take All Street
The market thrives, Mr. Greenspan explained, when there are so many people out of work that employees are too worried about losing their jobs to ask for more money. The market, in other words, wants some people jobless and the rest of us scared.
I didn’t want to give my money to an institution like that, but I wasn’t getting any younger and the packing crate loomed. So I drove an old car, wore cheap clothes, and put the money I saved into the stock market.
And in 2000, when a friend at Hewlett-Packard called and urged me to come work for him, I agreed, reluctantly, to give up my freelance status. It was the responsible thing to do.
In which a CEO doesn’t
After six months on the job I got a glowing performance review. Okay, you couldn’t see it in the dark, but phrases like “excellent editor” and “self-directed” were bandied about pretty freely.
To market, to market…
Three months later, I was laid off from the job that I’d been begged to take. It wasn’t personal. Under then-CEO Carly Fiorina, a company that had never gone in for lay-offs cost 30,000 people their jobs. Meanwhile, Fiorina’s pay rose by 231%. That was her reward for changing the admired HP Way of founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard to “my way and the highway.”
In 2002, the U.S. chief executives who got the biggest pay raises were the ones who did the best job of laying off people, cutting pensions, and moving operations offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.
In which I’m out of work for quite a while
Though chastened to learn that I wasn’t indispensable, I wasn’t worried. Several HP managers called to say that they wanted to hire me back as a contractor.
And then they started getting laid off.
It took me 3 ½ years to find another job, and I applied for hundreds. The stock market fell and took my savings with it. Many people who’d given their lives to Hewlett-Packard lost everything. They had a lot to say last year when Fiorina ran for the U.S. Senate. (She lost.)
But if I hadn’t joined HP, if I’d stayed freelance, I would probably have been out of work anyway, without the severance package and the unemployment benefit that kept me afloat for the first year.
A few dollars but no sense
So I lost my job but was comparatively lucky. And if you’re a CEO who shafts both the U.S. government and your employees, you’ll earn big bucks. And if you’ve got money in the stock market — and once again, I do — you’ll want the market to go up, which means that a lot of people have to be jobless.
The part of me that wants a better deal for people less fortunate than I am is in conflict with the part of me that wants to stay fortunate, or at least to avoid the packing crate.
And if any of that makes sense, if there’s any key or meaning to all this, then maybe I can still fit into those size-6 jeans?
For sale, cheap: one pair of size-6 jeans, slightly torn at the seams.
