Indiana’s Brain Drain—the problem that won’t go away

This is a reposting of the very first article I wrote for Examiner.com back in September 2009, and my direct honesty in writing about Indiana's still-continuing Brain Drain raised a slight maelstrom of concern, lest I be seen as tarnishing "images."  But I write it as I see it, no ifs, ands, or buts, the way an honest reporter should.  Slightly edited to bring it up-to-date--GF

According to the Indianapolis Star, the leading newspaper for the State of Indiana, 46.6% of Indiana’s recent college graduates leave the state annually, while the largest influx of in-migration to Indiana consists of those with less than a 10^th grade education.  Already, in a state with an economy that is still nearly 17% dominated by manufacturing, where layoffs are a major occurrence, only a third of Indiana’s workers have a high school diploma of the equivalent, and only 28% of Indiana’s workers in the prime age work group of 25-34 have college degrees.  This compares to 39% nationally.  Yet by 2025 60% of Indiana’s workforce will have to hold college degrees for the Indiana economy to stay productive. (Again from the Indianapolis Star.)

 

But right now a college graduate in Indiana is more likely to be told that she or he is “overqualified and underexperienced” and not hired, rather than hired.

 

I know that personally—for I am one of those “overqualified and underexperienced” college grads, are many of my friends and associates.  And like many of them, I work at CTB/McGraw-Hill in Indianapolis through the temp agencies Kelly Services or Dployit working the regular but strictly seasonal job of scoring the state school system standardized tests that have become de rigueur for the schools since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act.  During the peak of the season, over 1,000 college grads are so employed—at a job which, while it requires a college degree, only pays as much as a security guard, with no benefits, and is essentially a niche job with few transferable skills.  (What we do is most akin to what is only part of a teacher’s job—grading tests and papers.)  Yet, for many of us, this is the most substantial employment we have all year round.

 

Jim Weddle, then General Manager for Kelly Services at CTB/McGraw-Hill, keenly aware of this pool of intellectual talent he had out there, has tried to shop around the list of Kelly employees scoring tests to other employers—to no avail.  Just not interested.

 

The recession has made things even worse, of course.  For example, during the 2009 test-scoring season at CTB/McGraw-Hill, from mid-March to mid-June, I saw returning to work many colleagues I hadn’t seen out there for the couple of years.  Their reason for coming back was all the same: laid off from the jobs they’d held previously, often with little prospect of being called back.

 

One such person in this situation is Jerry Hall, a lawyer eligible in Indiana to practice law, but unable to financially afford to do so.  For the last two years he’d had a steady but low-paying warehouse job that enabled him to get by, but he was laid off from that.  He was grateful that there was at least the test scoring to come back to, but had no idea of what he’d do for work when the season ended.  “I hope I can find a warehouse job that will pay me $8.00 an hour,” he said.  Right now he’s diligently looking for warehouse and other unskilled and semi-skilled work to tide him through—but Indiana had 10.7% unemployment in June 2009, considerably higher than the national average of 9.5%, so he was not optimistic.  More pointedly, even if he did have a client who would pay him for legal representation, he couldn’t afford to spend the time it takes to be an effective attorney, for his days have to be spent looking for work, and the regular 2010 test-scoring season won’t resume until mid-March, with little hope for windfall projects being available before then.

 

Ironically, Indiana employers have been importing college graduates from elsewhere to fill the few high-tech jobs available, while Indiana’s college graduates go underemployed and unemployed for “not having the right degree.”  Which defeats the very purpose of the stated official goal of educationally upgrading Indiana’s work force.  Because, for one thing, a college education goes far beyond vocational training, no matter how specialized and technical the profession one’s trained for; a real college education enhances one’s ability to think, to assess critically, to research, to expand one’s intellectual outlook, and to appreciate the arts and culture.  So, while Indianapolis, typical of other Hoosier cities in this regard, has a plethora of shopping malls and upscale restaurants, its dearth of artistic and cultural amenities is not something the truly educated person is going to find attractive.  He or she simply wants more than just shopping malls.

 

Perhaps no where is this better seen than is the latest boosterist fad being promoted to solve Indiana’s economic dilemma: replacing declining manufacturing jobs with new, highly-skilled jobs in biotech.  But Guidant, a biotech pioneer formerly in Indianapolis, left the state when it was bought by pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, and the state has not been able to attract significant biotech investment and venture capital since that departure.  Yet, what’s increasingly become a will o’ the wisp for the quintessentially Rust Belt Indiana economy is still touted widely by Indiana’s politicians and business leaders.  This despite that biotech is fast becoming just another economic development illusion that joins those other economic development illusions promoted in the past—such as Indianapolis becoming the amateur sports capital of the nation, or a major convention and tourism site. 

 

Recently, the Indianapolis Star touted the job-creating possibilities of biotech by pointing to the alleged job opportunities created by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly & Co., and prosthetics manufacturer Cook Instruments, both of which had been in Indiana for quite some time—they had provided 7,200 jobs.  This in a state that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had lost 156,000 jobs from May 2008 to May 2009!  Showing that Indiana’s weak economy hurts its workforce across the board, more than just the college-educated.

 

 

Indiana’s educational limitations, thus, are not constraints that confine just the college-educated, although that they certainly do that—Indiana’s lack of jobs and the substantial lack of education among its workers and potential workers cut everywhere.  Consider that Indianapolis Public Schools, IPS, the public school corporation for much of metropolitan Indianapolis, including its inner city, has an overall high school graduation rate of only 47%, as stated in the Indianapolis Star.  In some of the inner-city schools the rate is only 30%.  And of those who do graduate, half or more do not go on to higher education.  “We’re stuck,” said Philip Powell, Associate Professor of Business at Indiana University-Bloomington, in the Indianapolis Star.   “We’re stuck because we don’t have the knowledge base we need in the labor force.  A lot of that is because of our really mediocre primary and secondary educational system.”

 

 

              

                  

Dispatch from the work shift from hell

 

Also originally published on Examiner.com--GF

 

The job I lost June 20, 2014, which I’m about to detail below, was truly like herpes, a “gift that keeps on giving.”  For five weeks now after the loss of that job I still continue to have the leg pains that job engendered, requiring me to take 1600 mg. of ibuprofen daily just to be able to walk and stand without pain; but as of now the only thing that’s substantially changed is that while the pain has attenuated, it only reduced my need for ibuprofen from 1600 mg. daily to a “mere” 800!  Ah, such a lasting “gift” from a job that was a lived descent into the lower rungs of Dante’s hell!

 

As was typical of the “employment opportunities” in Central Indiana, the job I worked was yet another unskilled warehouse temp job through a temp agency, another in a seemingly endless cycle of only temporary employment—where, as usual, the “opportunity” of “temp to hire,” i.e., the job turning into a permanent, full-time position as, if one’s considered “good” enough, the company hiring one through the temp agency will take the temp on as one of its own.  But reality is, though the dangling of “temp to hire” is ubiquitous, it actually occurs only 27% of the time, according to statistics.  It’s bait dangled, and as such, is a lot like bait-and-switch, where, at the end of the assignment, one still lacks permanent, reliable employment and must instead scrounge around for more strictly temporary “temp work opportunities” through the various temp agencies.

 

Yet I was grateful for this job when it first occurred, coming as it did after a month unemployed and not qualifying for unemployment compensation. That followed my loss of employment at the Amazon.com warehouse in Whitestown on April 5 where I had been for nearly six months—which was long as such jobs usually go.  The new job was at another warehouse run by a major national corporation, this one the book publisher and distributor RR Donnelley in Plainfield, another significant commute from my residence in Indianapolis.  Both jobs shared the trait that they were physically demanding; and I’ve written notably before on examiner.com on just how difficult work is at Amazon. (See “Amazon.com’s Whitestown, Indiana warehouse is a hell of a place to work,” January 20, 2013, and “Work, fatigue, frustration, and—finally!—creativity again,” May 28, 2014, which will subsequently be re-posted on this blog.)  However, while Amazon is a horrendously demanding place to work, at least it pays a fairly decent wage as far as temp warehouse employment in Central Indiana goes, $11.50 an hour for the day shift, and $12.50 an hour for the night shift.  Further, the temp agency that hires for Amazon, Integrity Staffing Solutions, has perks available for its employees at Amazon that are unheard-of with other temp agencies, perks such as the ability to acquire penalty-free time off work. 

 

 

The temp agency that employed me at RR Donnelley, Employment Plus, provided no perks; instead it had, and enforced, a penalty point system for being absent or late for one’s work shift no matter what the reason. In fact, I had been burned twice by Employment Plus before, in late 2011 and late 2012, but had no place else to go when it offered me employment again in May 2014.  Employment Plus does like to brag on its website, http://www.employmentplus.com, how well it services its industry clients and how many awards it’s received from employer organizations, but that’s because it’s quite willing to cater to whatever the employer demands, even (or especially?) at the expense of the employees it provides!  But I don’t write this out of any invidious desire to single out Employment Plus: as a temp employee ever since September 2001 who’s worked for several temp agencies, I can honestly say that there are no “good” temp agencies to work for, only a Hobson’s choice between more tolerable and less tolerable, which is either exacerbated or mitigated by the type of work actually available at any given time.   Or in other words, only what amounts to a practical choice between what’s bad and what’s worse!

 

I worked at RR Donnelley from May 7 until about an hour-and-a-half before my shift was scheduled to end on June 20, being summarily fired and escorted from the building by the officious manager who, due to his goatee and shaved head, reminded me of a bearded version of Saturday Night Live’s Coneheads in appearance, and Godzilla in temperament. 

 

 

Central Indiana warehouses tend to be rather badly managed, and in this RR Donnelley was the worst I’ve encountered.  A morass of dysfunction, equipment malfunctions and breakdowns, a conveyer belt system for feeding products that was frequently overloaded with more product pulled and ready to ship than it could handle, and a management that, when it was on the floor and not in the office, simply strutted around and barked orders, despite not having any real idea of what was going on—but lack of knowledge was never allowed to interfere with barking orders and rendering summary judgment, no matter what!  Such was integral to my being summarily fired for being upset and having shouted out my anger and frustration at almost having my fingers crushed due to an equipment malfunction that was a regular occurrence on the particular task I worked, but of which the big boss, the Conehead, was previously oblivious.  So, yes, I was partially responsible for blurting out an angry obscenity, but who wouldn’t do such under such conditions?  I was in an edgy and vulnerable emotional state of exhaustion at having worked over six hours virtually without respite, handling a nearly-impossible shift dealing with an extremely overloaded conveyor belt system.  Just this hapless worker trying desperately to keep pace with a tyrannous ever-flowing conveyor belt!  Then the taping machine, which taped the boxes in which I packed stuffing so that they were ready to ship, developed the regularly-recurring malfunction that prevented it from taping, and though I had never repaired the malfunction before, I did know what to do, having watched others do it repeatedly.  And so I fixed the malfunction, no help whatsoever from my more experienced co-worker, who stood there staring at me, dumb and silent as a rock.  But the machine started before I had expected it to, and only my quick reflexes prevented my fingers from being caught between two pieces of metal moving together to make a vise for holding the box—while my co-worker, who had contributed to the problem, stood there Sphinx-like; staring at me absolutely wordlessly as though she didn’t know how to talk or react!  And so I blurted out an epithet that my immediate supervisor saw as “upsetting” to the other employees, and she escorted me to Mr. Conehead, who couldn’t have cared less about what I was upset about, and cared even less that I’d almost crushed the fingers of my left hand.  All he knew was I was upset, and so he blurted out demands that I cease being upset.  And when I couldn’t, the combination of ruefulness, anger at both my co-worker and at my near miss, plus extreme fatigue for being terribly overworked for a measly $9.50 an hour, $2.00 an hour less than what I’d received at Amazon despite actually working harder,  he escorted me out the building; but before he completed the task of escorting, he reprimanded me once more as I stopped to put on my watch (we weren’t allowed to wear watches while on the job, as they were considered hazardous,  something that could get caught in the rollers of the conveyor).  One simple solution to my anguish does come to mind, and I’m sure the reader catches it—just let me sit down and become calm again after my trauma.  Ah, but such is not allowed in the workplace of today.  No, you aren’t allowed to simply sit down when the unexpected happens, you must either be working when it’s not scheduled break time, or be out of the building.  No rest for the “wicked,” which means us, the very employees who make the business operate in the first place!

 

Truth is, up until that incident, my immediate supervisor had regarded me as an able employee, someone who actually did my job better than my two regular co-workers.  But “upsetting the work environment” for any reason whatsoever, even a good one, is simply a Big No-No which is to be dealt with harshly.  Production must flow, even in the case of a conveyor system that itself was inadequate to handle the volume placed on it, which was constantly breaking down, and where the ancillary equipment frequently malfunctioned—but with no actually certified maintenance person on duty to fix it, just supervisors who jerry-rigged as best they could, even when they didn’t really know what they were doing.  Another reason why RR Donnelley gets an F for its management.

 

While I was rueful over having the paychecks stop so abruptly, I also regarded this loss as a mixed blessing.  I had felt terribly used on this job, working my butt off for $9.50 an hour; and the day I was fired, Friday, was also a payday with my quarterly auto insurance bill due, leaving me essentially with nothing.  $9.50 an hour is actually poverty wage, no way around it—a far cry from economic sustainability, which my job at Amazon had at least provided.

 

I’d been walking or standing on hard concrete since November 2013, something quite hard on one’s legs, especially for an older worker like me—one past his mid-sixties but with no choice but to work anyway.  My legs had been consistently sore for a good half-year, and the leg cramping had actually been exacerbated by the statin for cholesterol my doctor had put me on at the end of May.  But even when off the job for the next month, and also having been taken off the statin, which can cause muscle aches, the leg pain had only subsided, not disappeared; and I still needed ibuprofen to make it through.  But on July 22 I started a new job with a different temp agency, one in which I get to sit down while working, and in which I am not subjected to the tyranny either of a computer-monitored quota system or the speed of a conveyor belt.  So I actually have a job now I like, where the work pace is not ruthlessly demanding, and where I feel comfortable.  And though I didn’t qualify for unemployment compensation this last time I was off, the combination of paychecks once again flowing and working at a job I actually like makes me optimistic for at least the near future; this even though my new job pays only the poverty-level $9.50 an hour, but which is supplemented by a monthly Social Security check.  And my total time unemployed in 2014 has only been 65 days, so I’ve had it much worse.  Simply put, I finally lucked out and am living a Life of Riley, with the proviso that my Riley has only modest expectations needing fulfillment.

 

But in the workplace of today, employees are regarded as expendable inputs and not persons; the notion of workers’ rights is nonexistent and considered a quaint throwback to an earlier time; and managerial fascism is the norm, not the exception.  A far cry for the work environment I knew in the 1960s and 1970s.  But that was back in a time when unions were strong, active, and even tolerated by management; so even if one worked in a non-union workplace, the norms of the union workplace still set the general work norm.  No more.  In our “leaner and meaner” business environment, work norms harkening back to the 19^th Century have become the rule now in the 21^st.  Older workers like myself can still remember when it wasn’t this way, but virtually any worker under the age of 40 only knows workplaces in which managerial fascism is the norm, and is not only ubiquitous but seemingly unchangeable.  Managerial fascism and low pay is now the new “normal,” and while some places can be far worse than others, there is now virtually no “good” job any more than there is a really “good” temp agency.  Of course there is at least a theoretical solution to this problem, and it’s spelled U-N-I-O-N, but in this age of a much diminished union movement and the widespread use of temps instead of regular workers, more a theoretical than a practical solution for most workers, unfortunately.  And that is why for so many of us the best that can come our way is a move from the lowest rungs of Dante’s hell to higher, less oppressive and onerous, rungs.  We’ve lost the capacity to attain the good, and most of us can only hope to attain a lesser evil we can at least live with.