It might seem like a stupid question, but what do people miss most when they’ve no job?
The obvious answer is money. The average annual wage in Ireland is €32,000 before tax. After tax that gives a take home pay of about €480 a week. The dole on the other hand is €204. Losing your job therefore costs the average single man or woman about €276 each week. That’s means they are €14,352 worse off in a full year. That’s a considerable sum of money by anyone’s standards. It certainly puts a dent in holiday plans, socialising, and buying things like cars, furniture and so on.
The minimum wage in Ireland is currently €8.65 an hour. After tax that works out at about €7.40 for a single worker. Based on a 39 hour week, the dole works out at €5.23 an hour. A single unemployed person is therefore €2.17 an hour worse off than if he or she was working for the minimum wage. So if you’re single and unemployed, you’re €85 worse off each week compared to what you would be if you were working for the minimum wage.
Put another way around, the minimum wager’s real pay for getting up every morning and going to work is €2.17 an hour. At the end of a hard week’s work, he or she prospers to the tune of just €84 compared to staying at home and watching TV. Not much of an incentive really is it?
Of course, for higher earners things are very different. Life on the dole can represent a dramatic, and traumatic, decline in living standards. People may be forced to move house, sell the car, take the children out of school or college, or downsize in whatever way they see fit.
Apart from money, what else do the unemployed most miss? Company is the obvious answer. You’re at work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. If you stop to think about it, you probably spend more time with your work mates than you do with your family. It’s a big wrench to suddenly find yourself home on your own.
Being unemployed can be a lonely and boring experience. Having time on your hands is all very well if you’ve lots of things to do and people to share it with. But what if you’ve neither? What do you do all day if your partner’s at work, if the kids are at school, if most of your friends are working? What about all the unemployed people who are living alone, or those living in rural areas? What do they do? No wonder depression is such a common problem amongst the jobless.
The winters are harder, of course. Cold, wet, miserable days are ten times worse when you’re on your own. Keeping warm is also expensive. Life on the dole is definitely far better in the summer; there’s a million more things to do when the sun shines.
It’s also often said that being without a job isn’t half so bad at weekends when most people are at home, as it is during the week. It’s during the week days that are worse. It’s as though your psyche doesn’t expect you to be at work on a Saturday or Sunday; but it’s really hard Monday to Friday. It’s when everyone else is at work that you really miss it.
There are other things too that you miss about not being at work. Depending on the type of job you had, people claim to miss mental stimulation, challenge, travel, even physical activity. We might moan about our jobs when we have them, but job interest really is a big positive feature in most of our lives. It’s certainly something we miss when it’s taken away from us.
A sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth are the other things most commonly missed. For most of us, our job defines who we are. One of the first questions we ask when we meet somebody new is, ‘What do you do?’ To some extent the answer dictates our standing in society. “I’m a pilot, a teacher, a nurse, a banker, a bookkeeper, a lorry driver, a chef or a builder seems so much better than “I’m unemployed”. Being without work has traditionally cast us as a second class citizen. It’s a stigma that still associated with being unemployed.
What else do you miss about having no job? The company car, access to the internet, the odd free phone call, the office canteen, flirting with the opposite sex, Friday night in the pub, the craic, the gossip, the jokes, the Christmas party?
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but it certainly was true once that most romances began at work. Certainly a lot of illicit affairs also happen between work colleagues. What’s going to happen now more and more of us are on the dole queue? Somehow I don’t see us meeting our future partner across a crowded Social Welfare or FAS office, but maybe I’m wrong.
Apart from money, socialising and self esteem are the big losers if you’re unlucky enough to become unemployed. I don’t think TV and radio programmers have yet realised there’s a new breed of unemployed people now staying at home. The new unemployed want a different sort of progamme to the traditional nonsense that fills the schedules from 9am to 5pm. Maybe that’s why the internet is taking over more and more of our leisure time?
That’s certainly food for thought for daytime TV and radio producers. They’d better wise up fast before they, like the rest of us, join the ever lengthening dole queues.
Copyright © David Jones 2009
