Financial Times No easy way to put a face on the stay-at-home recession
By John Lloyd
Published: April 3 2009 19:12 | Last updated: April 3 2009 19:12
It is what the “phoney war” of 1939 in western Europe must have been like: warnings of terrible events to come but nothing much changed. When will the crisis become visible? How will it be represented to us and to future generations?
We are familiar with images of the last time, the depressed and hungry 1920s and 1930s. They tell a story of working-class misery – men hanging about at corners, queuing in bread lines, riding in boxcars, marching in protest from Jarrow in the north of England to London, a vivid but futile month-long pilgrimage of the unemployed.
Women, grim-faced, with hungry and ragged children; farmers, dispossessed, driving overloaded jalopies to search for work or sitting on sagging wooden porches, staring stonily at the camera. The more sinister of the old photographs from Europe show men not just hopeless but also marching, organised in proto-military columns by the mushrooming parties of the extreme right and (less successfully) the extreme left.
It is almost unimaginable that any of that will come back in these shapes. Not many till the soil now, and they will not be the worst hit. The industrial working class still exists and it is now seeing jobs disappear; but it is much less numerous. The dispossessed working and middle classes are not setting up tent cities in parks.
In pictures that The New York Times invited readers to send in to illustrate the current crisis, no strong image arrests the attention. A young couple in Detroit, without jobs, sit amid piles of beer cans, litter and audio equipment in an untidy apartment: it looks like many youthful homes. In Chicago, two young men fix cars in an “informal” repair shop on the street: they cannot afford a garage, but what is new for young men starting out? In Barcelona, an Indian immigrant holds up a sign demanding €135,000 he claims from a construction company: the image is puzzling rather than pathetic. Every one of these pictures may contain desperation: it just does not look like it, the way it did.
Life and work today is more privatised and individualised. More people live alone, work alone, eat alone. Look for the number of men and women of all ages eating alone in cheap restaurants as a sign of the hardening times – though a half-hour with a Big Mac and a Sprite is hardly misery incarnate. The rich – once-rich? – countries have safety nets thicker than at any time in the past, and though these vary greatly in generosity, even in western Europe, they allow people to scrape by with help from their friends or, more often, family.
Indeed, we may see a reversal of the individualised life: an acceleration of the already observably growing habit of the young staying on with their parents, an “Italianisation” of young man- and womanhood, with a family extended into old age and young middle age gathered round the kitchen table, each with their slice of takeaway pizza and glass of Valpolicella.
A television, of course, will stand in the corner. We have become media-saturated societies since the last depression. Almost everyone in the developed world has a television or a large share in one; increasing numbers have vast choice. We have subscribed to packages of programmes and, where unavoidable, paid a licence fee to the public broadcaster: these will be among the last things to be cut.
We can watch the news and current affairs programmes, which spare no effort to tell us how bad things are and how much worse they will get. More likely, we will search for entertainment, fantasy, sex and “reality” of a quite different kind from what we may be experiencing. Picture a couple, of working age, searching the channels for something diverting at four in the afternoon: there’s desperation for you.
Will there be protests? Certainly – but judged by recent experience, these will be more outré, probably more violent, than the march from Jarrow to London. Sir Fred Goodwin, former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland and for a time chief British hate figure of the crisis, had his windows and Mercedes smashed last week. The bosses of the US insurance company AIG have been tailed – including to their homes – by protesters holding signs accusing them of destroying savings and jobs.
We have seen anarchists avid to confront bankers in the City of London midweek, and able to meet only the police. Workers in Grenoble took their executives hostage and held them for 24 hours while torturing their ears with rock music in protest at a closure of the Caterpillar plant there. In Paris, François-Henri Pinault, head of the PPR luxury group, was trapped in his car for an hour by workers in his Conforama furniture subsidiary, also protesting against layoffs. “It’s the nature of social dialogue in our country,” Olivier Labarre, a human resources executive, was quoted as saying: it may be exportable.
Perhaps with such thoughts in mind, executives are seeking the kind of help they might once have scorned. Jane Haynes, a psychotherapist who has just published a memoir of the couch – Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am? – told an interviewer this past week: “The credit crunch has made so many people flee to me.” That might be the image of our present bad times: a tearful corporate boss, clad in Gucci (one of M. Pinault’s brands) lying on a couch, a box of Kleenex at his side.