For Labor Day Weekend, When Unemployment Happens To You

Politics / US Politics
Sep 03, 2010 - 04:08 AM

By: Danny_Schechter

When your life and your work is as entwined as mine has been—fusing the personal and the political over all these years, it may be stretching things to consider yourself unemployed but that’s what I am as Labor Day approaches.

Most of the media focuses on the big companies that have slashed their work forces (even as they hoard cash.) But small companies are also suffering, cutting back, and closing. They don’t get the subsidies or bailouts or the attention.

Companies like ours!

Last May, we decided to close our Globalvision office when the lease was up. Our costs remained too high while revenues had dropped. We realized that we ourselves had become victims of the economic calamity that I had been warning about, and urging who ever would listen to respond to. It was, suddenly, not about someone else’s problems. They had literally come home.

There was no escaping it: after nearly 24 years in a business that sometime seemed more like a crusade, the handwriting was on the wall as the coffers shrank and threatened to become a coffin.

Like most of our countrymen and women, we had lost confidence in the economy. Taking on a new lease would have meant personally guaranteeing it. That seemed like a road to bankruptcy.

Our option: go virtual with a post office box (POB 677, New York l0035) while revamping the Globalvision.org website.

It took us a month to pack up our lives, our gear, edit rooms, tapes and archive. There were also our awards and memorabilia, and other artifacts of a video production company that was always churning new videos and films. The market for what we had always done seemed to have vanished; the foundations that sometimes bankrolled our work had lost millions in the markets and had turned to new flavors of the week.

Our story was considered old. We may have been the last believers.

The busyness of wrapping it all up was exhausting over the course of a month. A patrimony which we always believed had value was moved into boxes, and then into storage, packed away in large warehouse structures, crammed behind steel doors with only a number on the door. It had the feel of a prison.

We moved back into to apartments we had for years left early in the morning and returned to late at night. Sometimes they didn’t feel much like homes because to keep a small, undercapitalized company alive for decades demanded long hours on a treadmill with no margins for failure.

I remembered a summer cab ride years ago when we drove through Central Park on the way to the airport. The place was packed with people having fun. It was a shock to be confronted with how much we were missing while staring into TV screens in dark edit rooms.

Soon, I was setting up a home office, but why-was I doing it? Could it be I just I didn’t know what else to do? I put in a new phone only to watch it not ring. It was the hottest summer in recent times and at points I felt like I was working in an oven. I became addicted to club soda, cases of the stuff.

We were media independents in a world where everyone is forced to be dependent—on jobs, clients and grants. By necessity, we had to become hustlers, doing more for less, undercutting competitors and working our asses off. The joys of being entrepreneurs became playing at capitalism without capital. It left us little time for development or to cultivate funders and even, at times, sustain friendships.

We may have been well-known in the “businessâ€