Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,48
would retrain for more fulfilling, advanced jobs.
But with ill-designed training for displaced Americans based on a lumbering federal program created in the 1960s, the second part of that equation very rarely came to pass. Only a third of workers who qualified for Trade Adjustment Assistance even went back to school, and the majority of those who did found themselves with new certifications and associate’s degrees yet earning much less than they had in the factories, if they were working at all. The ones I met who were coping the best worked part-time at Walmart, supplementing their pay with food stamps, food pantry donations, and small vegetable gardens.
Consumers all got cheaper jeans, yes, but what did that matter to the people who had once stitched them if they were now out of work and couldn’t afford new clothes? The global economy created winners and losers, Bassett Furniture CEO Rob Spilman told me, explaining the dismissal of some eight thousand furniture workers from his payroll. “It was that or perish,” he said. “At the end of the day, we are not a social experiment.”
In rural counties decimated by globalization, automation, and the decline of coal, the invisible hand manifested in soaring crime, food insecurity, and disability claims. In Martinsville and surrounding Henry County, unemployment rates rose to above 20 percent, food stamp claims more than tripled, and disability rates went up 60.4 percent.
What those numbers looked like on the ground, as I began reporting on the recession in 2008 for the Roanoke Times and later for my first book, Factory Man (published in 2014), could be distilled in two images I observed but did not fully, at the time, comprehend:
The first was of adults—black and white, old and young—arriving at area food pantries two hours before the doors opened, the older among them clutching canes or leaning on walkers. The second was the smoldering remains of an abandoned furniture factory in the town of Bassett, near Martinsville. An unemployed thirty-four-year-old was attempting to rip out copper electrical wires to resell on the black market when he inadvertently sparked a fire that burned the shuttered factory down. In his police mug shot, you could see the burns on his face.
It was easy to understand the connection between joblessness and hunger, to get that hunger fueled some of the crime. It was growing clearer, too, that the federal disability program was becoming a de facto safety net for the formerly employed, a well-intentioned but ultimately disastrous way of incentivizing poor people to stay sick, with mental illness and chronic pain—conditions that are hard to prove and frequently associated with mental health and substance use disorders—prompting the majority of disability awards.
That same pattern was playing out in the Lee County coalfields, where some parents coaxed their children’s doctors toward ADHD diagnoses, knowing that such behavioral problems could help make them eligible for Social Security disability when they became adults. “Ritalin is a pipeline to disability here,” one Lee County health care manager told me, describing the federal program as a coping mechanism for poverty and workplace uncertainties.
A hospital administrator I know from nearby eastern Kentucky recalled a Drug Abuse Resistance Education officer asking her high school classmates what they wanted to be when they grew up.
“A drawer,” one young man said.
“You mean an artist?”
“No, a draw-er.”
Someone who draws disability checks. It was the only avenue he could imagine for himself, the only way to get himself and his family fed. Well over half of Lee County’s working-age men—a staggering 57.26 percent—didn’t work. (The trend line was somewhat better among women, around 44 percent.)
If OxyContin was the new moonshine in rural America, disability was the new factory work. By 2016, for every unemployed American man between the ages of twenty-two and fifty-five, an additional three were neither working nor looking for work. Having dropped out of the workforce entirely, they had numerically vanished from the kind of monthly jobs reports touted by politicians and reporters.
Many turned up instead in disability statistics, which were largely ignored in headline-grabbing economic reports. Disability claims nearly doubled from 1996 to 2015. The federal government spent an estimated $192 billion on disability payments in 2017 alone, more than the combined total for food stamps, welfare, housing subsidies, and unemployment assistance.
For people who have not ventured recently into rural America, the jaw-dropping and visible decline of work comes as a shocker, an outgrowth of the nation’s widening political and cultural divide. Before the 2016 election of Donald Trump, that disconnect was maintained