Why can't you just get a dang JOB?

“Every morning about this time She gets me out of my bed a-crying Get a job After breakfast every day She throws the want ads right my way And never fails to say Get a job…” – The Silhouettes “Get A Job” 1957

A young probation officer stood on the front porch of the halfway house the other day, talking about one of the new men he had just dropped off from prison a few days before. “Is he doing okay?” he asked. “Is he out looking for work ?"

“He seems to be settling in okay,” I said. “Today he’s at outpatient counseling. He's put in some applications. He hasn't found anything yet.”

“He ought to get busy and go to work.”

“Well,“ I said, “Even if he really wants a job, sometimes being an ex-offender can hold a man back from getting one.”

“Bull!” was the quick and authoritative reply from the community corrections officer. “Anyone can find a job if they want to. He can find something.”

I didn't feel like arguing, so I kept my peace. But that’s the attitude I’ve run up against many times over the last twenty years. A lot of people don’t see addicts and alcoholics as sick people struggling with a fatal disease - they see them as fundamentally lazy people who, if they just got off their duffs and worked harder, then their disease wouldn't bother them so much.

My response to that, is, to quote my young friend from the probation office – “Bull!”

Addicts and alcoholics are some of the hardest working people on earth. You have to work hard to keep a severe addiction going. Think about it, an addict has to get up every day and achieve his goal of using in spite of every obstacle thrown in his way. It's a wrong, unhealthy goal to be sure, but it still requires skill, adaptability, and resourcefulness to achieve it. 

But just because you have the ability to achieve something, it doesn't mean that circumstances are going to allow you to achieve it. The two counties our halfway house serves have carried one of the highest unemployment rates in the state for the last four years.  Historically an agricultural based economy, our area has seen the collapse of the tobacco industry that once was the backbone of its prosperity.  A lot of the manufacturing jobs we did have were interrupted by a devastating flood in 1999, and never came back.

Circumstances like that make finding a good job very difficult, even for the best qualified applicants.  And men at a halfway house are not always the best qualified: they have spotty employment histories, a lot of them have criminal records, and many of them have interrupted educations. When the job market gets really tight, availability shifts upward to the more qualified and the economic “bottom feeders” get dropped entirely off the list. That’s why you have a lot of over qualified people in our area who are under-employed. They have to take what they can get.

And if you think that criminal convictions are no bar to employment, then I suggest you try an experiment. Go out and put in a few job applications yourself and be sure to list that you have a felony record. See how many call backs you get. That probation officer I was talking to would have never been hired with one.

Getting and keeping a good job is important, but it’s not the whole solution to long lasting recovery either.  When the office phone rang this morning, I talked with a young professional woman whose father is an addict who had been a resident at the halfway house a little while back.  Her father had been working hard, had two jobs, had been putting in 16 hour days,  had his own place, things had been going well. Then a bad relapse, very serious legal charges, he was in jail, he was back to square one, with no place to go.  She was frantic and didn't know what to do.  The bitter truth is that employment alone won’t keep you clean and sober.

Abstinence, spiritual development, work, personal responsibility – these are the primary tools that men at our halfway house are supposed to use to get closer to a good life in recovery. And even if they haven't found a paying job yet, they still work, every man in our house works. They work at keeping up the house and grounds.  They work as volunteers for any number of service projects that we do. They work as individual volunteers for other non-profits in our town. They work as volunteers in the churches they attend. They work when they take whatever cash paying side jobs they can get. And above all, they work the difficult daily task of staying clean and sober.

There are men, of course, who have no intention of going to work, men who will always just look for a free ride and the easy way out. Of such men, my ex-boss used to wryly observe: “Ex-Lax wouldn't work that guy.”

But there are men who truly want to work and get frustrated at the way the deck seems to be stacked against them.  I tried to comfort one such resident the other day; he’d been turned down, -yet again - for a job he had applied for. He was so sure he had aced the interview, they had invited him back for another meeting, he really liked the company, all was on go, he thought.  Then came the background check and the dreaded turn down.

In a perfect world, where everyone who wanted a job could get and keep a good one, that probation officer might have been right. The way it is around here however, the true measure of a man's worth can't be heavily based just on whether he's employed or not.