ARGENTINA-LABOUR: Unemployed More Than Being Jobless

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Oct 30 1996 (IPS) - Unemployment is creating more than just economic problems in Argentina, where 17 percent of the working population is without a job, and the social and psychological damage can be be disasterous.

Economists Nestor Lopez and Luis Beccaria, editors of a new UNICEF publication “Out of Work,” say that unemployment has become the a “social phenomenon” in Argentina. The increase in uncertainty among the unemployed, precariousness of jobs, and fulfulling taks which people are overqualified plus the erosion of family and social links, are some of the consequences of being unemployed, they say.

“The effects of the deterioration of the job market are amplified, if one considers that work is one of the activities which strongly organizes the daily lives of people and their families, besides providing them with a world of personal relations and values,” says Beccaria.

The economist argues that in Argentina, the labor market is not working well as an instrument of social cohesion.

The outlook suggests a “gradual increase in the most vulnerable and unprotected sectors,” which implies, in his view, increased social inequality.

“Employment is one of the pillars upon which working people construct their identities,” says Lopez in the book where sociologists and psychologists analyze the effects of unemployment on the mental health of individuals and their families, on the basis of numerous personal testimonies.

“Lack of work makes you lose your dignity as a person,” testifies one woman interviewed in the book. “I have become skeptical, bitter; I think that there is no tomorrow, no present and there is no past – I never did anything, I don’t have anything.”

Sociologist Gabriel Kessler explains that a few years ago, a man who lost his job and had to take on the role of housekeeper while the woman worked outside the house, suffered a great sense of failure and unworthiness. At the time it was believed that unemployed women were better at enduring the return to the home but that view has now changed.

Kessler says there have been many cases of women who also express feelings offailure and confinement when they lose their jobs.

Other studies in the book note that “working and earning money” is still, in any case, more of a cultural goal for men than it is for women, “to the point where the man feels that his identity and power are at stake in keeping a job and a family.”

“Ever since I stopped bringing in money, I have been nothing in my house. Soon, my wife will not want to have sex with me. My children do not respect me because I can’t help them with their expenses,” says one middle-class man.

Experts divide children into those who have “adapted,” and express a comprehensive attitude toward the situation faced by their parents, and “rebels,” who blame parents for their apparent “failure” and for not finding work.

The latter usually abandon their studies and drift toward borderline occupations or crime – where money is obtained easily.

“Children see that their parents, who are professionals, are unemployed, and they say ‘why should I study if drugs gives you more money?’,” says another man interviewed in the book.

According to the experts, when children drop out of school, 58 percent of parents agree because they need the children to work. People without a job feel isolated, says “Out of Work.”

“The sadness over the loss of something that they loved, like a job, implies physical decline, decrease in self-esteem, mental suffering, loss of interest and irritation,” say social psychologists Vicente Galli and Ricardo Malfe. “The massive unemployment of these last several years constitutes the latest cataclysm that affects our population.”

Acute depression, psychosomatic disorders, and even suicide, are all linked to the loss of employment.

The psychologists note that, in the past few years, a context has emerged in which “social conflict tends to become privatized,” so that unemployment is often experienced as a personal failure, for not having studied, or for having “followed the wrong career.”

The major “psychological catastrophe” for Malfe is the one produced in the minds of public employees in Argentina who have been laid off in recent years and number some 500,000. These people, who were previously protected by the State, suddenly find themselves thrown into a competitive market for which they are unprepared.

“Helplessness, a sense of being an orphan, panic” are some of the symptoms manifested among former public employees – which often translate into domestic violence, “an ephemeral alternative to self-punishment.”

Actors, musicians, writers and painters are also vulnerable to feelings of failure.

“These feelings of inferiority lead to a state of paralysis characterized by the inability to imagine, and the inhibition of creativity,” says Galli.

Malfe points out that under those conditions, solidarity disappears among the unemployed and those precariously employed. It is as if they were in the same boat after being shipwrecked, where the predominant feeling is to “save one’s own skin.”