For the month of May, the unemployment rate clocked in at 9.4%, the highest level since the early 1980s. It felt like old times.

I grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, a town on the Pennsylvania border that used to be the home of some of the world’s largest steel makers. My mother’s father was an organizer for the United Steelworkers and eventually was promoted into a sales job: hence, management. My father had wanted to go to college, but his family could not afford it. A white guy with an Irish name, he did the next-best thing and joined the plumbing apprenticeship program, and then became involved in union politics. He lost an election and took a job representing commercial construction companies in political and labor negotiations. Although he took an enormous pay cut when I was in high school, he not only had a job, but it was a one where he wore a coat and tie and had the use of a late-model Oldsmobile.

When I was a senior in high school, the unemployment rate in Youngstown was over 20%. Not everyone in my class had a father who dropped them off on his way to work in his spiffy company car. In Youngstown in 1982, my family was elite. Well, okay, I wasn’t the child of a doctor or a Mafioso (in which case, I would have had my own Camaro to drive to school), but I was better off than so many of my classmates. I showed up at Northwestern thinking that I was a rich kid and was stunned to find out that rich kids do not have student loans and work-study jobs. (more…)