Episode 986 of Planet Money : American Unemployed (1)

https://www.npr.org/2020/03/27/822944544/episode-986-america-unemployed

Episode 986: America Unemployed

 

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

 

ROBERT SMITH, HOST: 

Here at PLANET MONEY, we've been hearing from a lot of our listeners about how their lives have been turned upside down.

 

CHELSEA SPRING: My name is Chelsea Spring (ph). I live in Long Island City, N.Y.

 

LORI WINSLOW: My name's Lori Winslow (ph), and I live in Louisville, Colo.

 

KATY SCOGGIN: My name is Katy Scoggin (ph). I've lived in New York City for the last 13 years.

 

DAVID ROOT: My name is David Root (ph), and I live in Cincinnati.

 

WINSLOW: I am a gourmet ice cream producer.

 

ROOT: Basically, I'm a symphony musician.

 

SPRING: Managing director of a skin care facility.

 

SCOGGIN: I am a documentary filmmaker.

 

KAREN DUFFIN, HOST: 

They were like all of us a few weeks ago, watching the country slowly shut down. And then, all at once, they were no longer just spectators.

 

ROOT: In a period of about 24 to 48 hours, literally every gig that I had on my calendar was wiped out.

 

+ gig : 공연, 일

+ wipe out : 넘어지다(나자빠지다). 녹초로 만들다, 파괴하다(없애버리다)

 

WINSLOW: Wednesday, we were told our distributor is not picking up their last order and that they're not placing any more orders until further notice.

 

SCOGGIN: It became very clear that there was no other job that I could go out there to get.

 

SPRING: And then Wednesday, I was informed that Thursday would be my last day on payroll.

 

+ payroll : 급여 대상자 명단, 급여 지불 총액 <-> paycheck : 급여

 

DUFFIN: All of them suddenly without work, along with more than 3 million other people in America.

 

SMITH: On Thursday morning, the Department of Labor released its weekly unemployment claims. Now, this never makes the news. Usually, just a few hundred thousand people sign up, and nobody talks about it. But at 8:30 a.m. on Thursday, they announced 3,283,000 people filed new claims for unemployment in a week - the worst spike in unemployment the country has ever seen.

 

+ file : 보관하다, 제출하다, 발송하다

+ spike : 못, 뾰족한 것 

 

DUFFIN: More than 3 million people asking, what's next?

 

SCOGGIN: So I did something the other day that I never thought I would do. I stopped autopay on my rent.

 

+ autopay : 자동이체

 

DUFFIN: How long do you think your rainy day fund will take you?

 

+ rainy day fund : 불황대비 펀드(자금)

 

ROOT: I mean, I could probably manage a couple months.

 

WINSLOW: If it's two months, it's going to be a little more uncomfortable. And if it goes more than that, that's when I feel like I'm playing with fire.

 

+ play with fire : 불장난(위험한 짓을)하다 -> 여기서는 위험한 상황임과 더불어 좋지 않은 결과를 초래할 것을 의미

 

 

SPRING: So I pulled up the Department of Labor website, and it says, file now.

 

+ pull up : 비난하다, 올리다, 뽑다 -> 여기서는 open up의 의미로, 웹 사이트를 열었음을 의미 

+ file : 여기서는 reporting과 같은 의미

 

DUFFIN: OK.

 

SPRING: I'm going to just refresh this because - oh, yeah. Now I'm getting an error message. So it says, we're sorry. We are unable to serve you at this time due to technical difficulties or scheduled downtime for internal processing.

 

+ downtime : 작동하지 않는 시간, 휴식 시간 

 

WINSLOW: Do I pay my health insurance premium, which is $1,300 with a $20,000 deductible? Do I take that out of my savings to pay the rent when somebody in my house might get sick?

 

+ deductible : (세금)공제 가능한 

 

DUFFIN: Is it still giving you the error?

 

SPRING: Yes. I just reloaded the page. And, yeah - unemployment services are currently unavailable. But what does that even mean? Like, why can't you even select the button?

 

SMITH: Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY. I'm Robert Smith.

 

DUFFIN: And I'm Karen Duffin.

 

SMITH: Today on the show, what it means to lose a job right now. In normal times, it is a gut punch. But there are systems like unemployment insurance to help you along, to get you back on your feet and hopefully send you out to apply for new jobs.

 

+ gut punch : 말 그대로 '복부 강타'

 

DUFFIN: But right now, the mandate for most of us is stay home. Do not go to work. Like, the health of our country depends on people not working right now. And the unemployment insurance system is overwhelmed and unprepared for this record number of people with no job and nowhere to look for one.

 

+ mandate : 권위있는 명령 (ex : 국가의 명령)

 

SMITH: Today, we will look at the unemployment system - the one that exists, the one we dream of and the one that's being built on the fly right now.

 

+ on the fly : 대충 그때그때 봐 가며 (~을 하다)

 

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

 

SMITH: All righty. Today, we are going to tell you about how unemployment insurance works. It is a janky system. No one is really sure if it's up to the task. First, though, we go to the story of one woman - one woman who's trying to navigate this system.

 

+ janky : 질이 좋지 않은

+ if it's up to the task : 그 업무가 (성공적으로) 가능한지

+ nevigate : 다루다(처리하다)

 

DUFFIN: Hey, this is Karen Duffin from NPR.

 

KRISTIN CLARK: Hi. How are you?

 

DUFFIN: Good. How are you?

 

CLARK: All right.

 

DUFFIN: It just is such a bad question right now. We've got to figure out a different way to greet each other (laughter).

 

CLARK: I know. I know. It's, how are you? How are things? Well, they all pretty much suck (laughter).

 

DUFFIN: Kristin Clark (ph) lives in Baltimore. And about seven years ago, a friend of hers said, hey, there's a part-time job opening at my office. Are you interested? She'd been a stay-at-home mom for a while and was looking for some extra income, so she said, sure.

 

SMITH: The company provides short-term rentals of office equipment. Anywhere there's a pop-up need for a temporary office, Kristin is there.

 

+ pop up : 임시매장의 

 

CLARK: We did a lot of stuff for the fires in California. We'd do stuff at the Kennedy Center, conventions, law board (ph) rooms...

 

DUFFIN: The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, political conventions...

 

CLARK: Sporting events.

 

SMITH: It's a pretty small company, tight-knit. But they've been growing really quickly.

 

CLARK: We were busy - crazy busy, insanely busy. The first Friday in March, we were, like, high-fiving each other because we had record-setting sales for February.

 

DUFFIN: This was just about the time that news about the virus was starting to get more urgent. But then at the beginning of March...

 

CLARK: My day started to consist of email after email saying, you know, this order canceled, this order canceled. It was only, like, a week and a half, two weeks, everything that was on the schedule to go out completely canceled. And it happened so fast, it was almost - it was like I was in shock. It was unbelievable. I could just see my boss was getting just a little more distraught. We - our business operates - like, it's on - like, we have to have cash flow.

 

+ distraught : 완전히 제정신이 아닌

 

DUFFIN: On Thursday, March 12, about six of them were still in the office. It was late afternoon, early evening...

 

CLARK: And we were all kind of leaving staggered, and he just stopped us all individually and, you know, asked us to come into his office and said we're going to have to, you know, furlough you. This is the only way that he could foresee saving the company

 

+ furlough : 일시해고

 

DUFFIN: Furloughed usually means that you're sent home without pay, but you still have a job. But it soon became clear that, no, it was more like she was getting actually fired.

 

CLARK: I don't - I'm not getting anything. Like, no, you can - here's the rest of your vacation pay. Like, you're going to have to take two weeks off. It was like I have no idea how this is going to shake out. It's - I don't even know how to describe it. I mean, it was - like, I was on a fast track for success and then went straight to poverty in a split second. I don't think anything could have prepared anybody for this.

 

+ split second : (1초의 몇 분의 1에 해당 될 정도로) 매우 짧은 순간, 찰나, 순식간

 

DUFFIN: She did file for unemployment, which will help but just barely.

 

+ just barely : 간신히. 즉, 숨을 연명할 만큼 겨우 도와줌을 의미 

 

CLARK: We might be able to cover our rent with unemployment, and that's probably about it.

 

DUFFIN: So Kristin is in this weird situation. She's in an unemployment system that was created for a very different scenario, a system to just tide you over or incentivize you to get back on your feet.

 

+ tide over : 극복하다 

+ incentivize : (인센티브를 주어) 장려하다 

 

CLARK: I mean, because unemployment, their whole thing is about trying to find you another job.

 

DUFFIN: Yeah.

 

CLARK: Well, how can you find another job if you can't leave your house...

 

DUFFIN: Yeah.

 

CLARK: ...And if nothing is open to go apply for a job?

 

SMITH: And she's right. The unemployment system was never created to handle something like this crisis. And, in fact, in some ways, you cannot imagine a worse system for dealing with a simultaneous nationwide shutdown.

 

DUFFIN: Which is what has not just Kristin but the economists freaking out. The crisis is moving so fast that, just last week, labor economist Heidi Shierholz with the Economic Policy Institute sent out a tweet in all caps with this prediction - the coronavirus shock will likely claim - all caps - 3 million jobs by summer. It was so shocking that she repeated it three times.

 

SMITH: That was last week's worst-case scenario, 3 million by June, which of course we've already passed this week in March.

 

HEIDI SHIERHOLZ: We've never seen anything like what's happening now. There's no - there's not capital letters big enough to sort of underscore what is going on now. The conditions have deteriorated so dramatically, we would be lucky if we saw only 3 million jobs lost by summer. It would be more like 14 or 15 million jobs lost by summer.

 

+ underscore : 밑줄긋다, 강조하다 (=underline)

+ sort of (sorta) : 어느정도, 뭐랄까 (할 말이 생각나지 않을 때)

 

SMITH: Fourteen or 15 million jobs lost by summer, by June - that's worse than during the financial crisis a decade ago. And everybody just take a deep breath because that is the conservative mainstream estimate. It does get worse. The head of the St. Louis Fed said this week that unemployment could be worse than in the Great Depression. He was predicting up to 30% of American workers out of a job.

 

+ conservative : kən-ˈsər-və-tiv (ser에서 강조 주의)

 

DUFFIN: And to handle all of that, we need an unemployment support system that is fast, comprehensive and has almost unlimited amounts of money, which I don't think is the system we have right now.

 

SMITH: True, but we're going to try and fix it after the break.

 

(SOUNDBITE OF SAM VELVETINE'S "AT THE CROSSROADS")

 

SMITH: Unemployment insurance as we know it was conceived in the early 1900s in Britain, not to save the economy or even really as a gift to workers. It was put in place to stop the growing threat of British communists. It was a way of saying, oh, workers, workers, capitalists are still going to fire you and replace you with machines, but the government will take care of you just a little bit. So please do not start a revolution.

 

+ put in place : 준비하다, 마련하다, 설치하다 

 

DUFFIN: Unemployment insurance then caught on in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. It was eventually mandated nationwide during the New Deal, but it was never supposed to replace your lost income - just provide a fraction of your paycheck while you looked for a new job.

 

SMITH: And if you've ever filed for unemployment, you know it still feels as slow and bureaucratic as something that was designed in the 1930s to fight communism. There are 50 separate unemployment systems for the 50 different states, and each and every state provides a different amount of money for different amounts of time and under different rules. Some states are clearly on top of it; some states suck. It is not exactly what you want during a nationwide crisis where unemployment is all happening at the same time.

 

+ bureaucratic : 관료주의적인 [byu̇r-ə-ˈkra-tik : 뷰얼크레디ㅋ : bu·​reau·​crat·​ic ]

 

DUFFIN: And more than that, unemployment insurance is, at its core, just a form of insurance like car insurance or home insurance. The assumption is always that only a few people will need it at any one time. That's the only way insurance works, really. So during good economic years, employers pay taxes for each worker that state governments then sock away into trust funds, and during recessions the states can pull money out of those trust funds slowly and bureaucratically.

 

+ sock away : 모으다

+ at any one time : anytime

 

SMITH: And listen, this works well if the unemployment rate goes up to 5 or 6 or 7%. But at the scale we're looking at today, there is simply not enough money socked away in those state accounts. And even if there were, the system to distribute it can be incredibly slow. Our labor economist Heidi Shierholz says it's too late. You go into the recession with the safety net you have, not the safety net you want.

 

SHIERHOLZ: In order to get things to people, there has to be some way to do that. There has to be some system in place to actually make that happen. And so we are absolutely going to be depending on the systems that are already there.

 

+ get A to B 구조

 

DUFFIN: OK. So here's how the unemployment system is set up right now in most states.

 

SMITH: How it worked pre-coronavirus.