‘I Didn’t See These Times Coming’: The Economic Despair Behind the Rise in Blue-Collar Deaths
I suspect that this isn't happening to blacks and Latinos as much because none of this is new to them.
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18668/blue-collar-and-factory-workers-driven-to-suicide-by-lean-times
As unions have disappeared, so have the pension plans that once gave workers security. And so have job safety protections, as workers hustle to get even dangerous jobs that come with no oversight by a union or anyone else.
Marriages have collapsed, and others have been put off or cancelled. Lonely jobless men rush to the oil fields, or wherever there’s work, to labor in isolation with their lives in deep freeze.
Lower pay and fewer jobs have meant an eagerness to grab as much income as possible while they are employed. That is what motivated a middle-aged miner from southern Illinois whom I talked with recently as I was looking into the growing nationwide effort to trim workers’ compensation.
Until not long ago, he would put in seven days a week on the job, even though the decades of hard work had taken a toll on his body. The damage finally caught up with him, however. Virtually paralyzed in both arms by the years of repetitive stress, he lives alone, his marriage shattered and his savings gone. He is getting by today on a meager workers’ compensation check—won after a long legal battle—that’s a slim fraction of what he once earned.
Maybe you can’t measure this number, but the collective heartbreak suffered largely by blue-workers seems to me to surely have been a killer, taking lives before their time.
I know because I’ve watched it grab hold of workers, who have drifted off into silence, depression or alcoholism because of their despair. I was struck by the pain of wives of striking workers in a small Illinois town in the 1990s, who had come together to talk and bond because their husbands wouldn’t, and because some of the men were drinking themselves numb.
After their middle-class career dreams have shriveled up and their marriages, and communities evaporated, these are likely to be the men who succumb to depression, alcohol or drug addictions. This is the flesh-and-blood line-up of the statistical trend the economists discovered.
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..... during bill Clintons eight-year presidency I was laid off one time. That was for 2 weeks. After Bill Clinton left office it was downhill after that. During Bush's administration up until I retired, I was laid off between two and four times a year, usually stretching to at least a month or more each time. Thanks Bill for 8 years of steady employment.
