Memories of a Recession Past; M. Kline

I drag in the last two acronyms because my job depended on them. We were "intermittent intake interviewers" (Ill's) whose salaries were paid by Uncle Sam. The goal or standard for Ill's was to pay a cer tain level of initial claims for extended unemploy ment benefits, so we paid them. In fact, we had a lively competition to do so. Our office paid benefits to, and examined the claims of, residents of the other 49 states who filed claims against Pennsylvania companies. To keep Mr. Kline is an associate editor at the National Journal ism Center in Washington, D.C. straight who was working on which state's claims, the office was divided by state signs that made it look like a political convention. Every Friday, in convention-like fashion, our supervisor announced which section paid the most initial claims. The New Jersey section, very hospitable to initial claims, usually won. Like many anti-recession programs, the extend ed unemployment benefits of 1983took effect just as the economy was turning up. Although we were nominally "temporary" employees, hired to han dle a heavy claims load in a recession, many stayed on long after the recovery began, since extended benefits remained in place.

The claims load lightened considerably when extended benefits ended and still more when unemployment benefits became fully taxable, thus creating an interesting set of incentives. "Since the availability of UI [unemployment insurance] benefits may create a disincentive to search for and accept re-employment, the VI sys tem encourages recipients to seek work by impos ing various administrative requirements," the U.S. Department of Labor told us. "All recipients are required to be able and avail able for work; in most states, recipients who are not job-attached are expected to look actively for work, and they are often required to list job-search contacts when claiming VI benefits." * Few caseworkers followed up on these "listed job-search contacts." If they did, they would dis cover, as I did much later, such phenomena as race horses with "Inc." added to their names. Salesmen working on commission frequently collected benefits. In taprooms and other meeting places, steelworkers spoke of unemployment compensation as "a paid vacation to go deer hunting." Claims and demands for benefits were the norm and occupied most of our time.

The exception was the Asian immigrant who mailed us a thank-you note for the two weeks of unemployment compensation she received before landing another job. She just didn't understand the system. More predictable was the applicant who called to complain that he had to wait three hours at an unemployment office to file a claim for his weekly check and then wait another week to get it. "You poor stiff," his less-than-understanding caseworker told him, "I've got to work 40 hours a week to collect my check!" The addictive nature of unemployment benefits came home to me when I followed up on a letter we received. A man who worked in the print shop at The Philadelphia Bulletin before that newspa per folded ran out of unemployment benefits and decided to enter a seminary. At the time, the unemployed could continue Self-Help 275 receiving benefits if they were retraining for a new position. The budding seminarian told me, "Well, you can collect benefits if you're retraining for a new position, and I figure that's what I'm doing."

We denied that claim. In Pennsylvania, every state agency is a union shop. Arrivals after 7:30 AM were frowned upon, but so were departures after 4:30 PM, since over time had to be approved. Two 15-minute breaks supplemented the mandatory one-hour noon lunch. The morning break came at 9:45,the afternoon break at 2:45. One morning at 9:40, I eyed a letter requesting a telephone response. I was about to dial when I noticed the time, then said aloud, "Aw, the hell with him; it's five minutes till break." An office veteran at the next desk said: "I'm proud of you, Malki. You're starting to think like a state employee." That's when I had to leave. 0 *A Studyof UnemploymentRecipientsand Exhaustees:Findings from a NationalSurvey(U.S. Departmentof Labor,1990),p. 114. IDEAS ON LIBERTY I t may be of comparatively little consequence how a man is governed from without, whilst every thing depends upon how he governs himself from within. The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice. Nations who are thus enslaved at heart can not be freed by any mere changes of masters or of institutions; and so long as the fatal delusion prevails, that liberty solely depends upon and consists in government, so long will such changes, no matter at what cost they may be effected, have as little practical and lasting result as the shifting of the figures in a phantasmagoria. The solid foundations of liberty must rest upon individual character; which is also the only sure guaranty for social security and national progress. John Stuart Mill truly observes that "even despotism does not produce its worst effects so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despo tism, by whatever name it be called."

- SAMUEL SMILES From the book Self-Help, published in 1859.