FEATURING RACHEL MEADE SMITH - While the federal government’s latest jobs report concludes that 4.3% of the workforce is unemployed, the official statistics hide the fact that millions of Americans are struggling.
According to a report earlier this year from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), more than a quarter of the nation’s workforce is “functionally unemployed.” In other words, they are either unemployed, trying to find employment, or are earning poverty wages.
Job seeking has become a full time job for many. And in an age where predatory capitalism continues to make billionaires richer while the rest of us struggle on the margins, the work of seeking work becomes a dystopian in-between place.
That existence, all-too-commonplace now, is captured in a fascinating new book called Search Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt, edited by Rachel Meade Smith, a writer, editor, and civic design worker focused on information access and the world of work. Since 2016, she’s authored Words of Mouth, a free newsletter sharing opportunities for good work and creative expansion, reaching tens of thousands of readers across the globe. She spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about her book.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: I first found out about you watching a podcast that you did with OR Books, your publisher, and it was kind of terrifying how much I could relate to the conversations you were happening. I had been full-time employed until last year when the media outlet I worked for went out of business, just couldn't make ends meet, and I joined the ranks of the self-employed, the hustlers, the freelancers, cobbling together a living wage, barely, and constantly on the edge of security, worrying that one of my gigs will fall through.
And I realized that I am not alone, that there are so many others like me. And let me begin by asking you about your own situation. It sounds like, from reading your background, you too were in this place where you couldn't really find a satisfying job, and you sort of created your own work by writing this newsletter that luckily has become very well-received. Give us a little background of how you came to this.
Rachel Meade Smith: Sure. So, I started sending my newsletter when I actually was fully employed but really hating my job because I was looking for work so much. So I was finding all of these roles, and I wanted to send them out to all of the people in my life who were also looking for work. And then that just kind of continued even as I found jobs and lost jobs and looked for new jobs. I was always doing this newsletter kind of in the background. And around end of 2019, I decided to leave a job that I was very unhappy in, and move into a freelance career. Although I didn't call it a career at the time because career sounded too permanent for what I was doing, which was really just taking a leap of faith and getting out of a situation I didn't want to be in anymore.
