On the other side of the story

Chip Jones, who was a business reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch from 1993 to 2007, writes for the paper about what is was like to see the unemployment story from the other side — as someone in the unemployment line.

Jones writes, “During more than two decades as a newspaper reporter, I interviewed dozens of workers at Fortune 500-sized companies from Roanoke to Richmond who lost their jobs during earlier corporate downsizings.

“Meeting factory workers and managers at Philip Morris, DuPont, AlliedSignal, Reynolds, and countless other bottom-line driven companies, I always felt sorry for them. Typically, these manufacturing workers with vast amounts of experience expressed mixed emotions about accepting buyouts that promised short-term liberation from the workplace. But when they opened up a bit, they also admitted they felt a bit lost about what they would do with the rest of their lives.

“Even when we’re unhappy with our jobs, it’s never easy to have someone say, albeit in the sterile, legally scrubbed terms of the modern workplace: ‘You’re not needed here anymore.’

“Still, I maintained a certain degree of journalistic detachment and I can see now that my empathy only went so far. Deep down, I never expected to cross the line from observer to participant — that is, I never expected to face the same economic uncertainty as those good people I used to cover from a safe distance.”

Read more here.