In a column today entitled “Anxiety Works Overtime,” Commercial Appeal editor Chris Peck remembers a blissful time when “Labor Day was about grilling steaks and not about sweating over your job.”
Peck goes on to suggest that if you’re employed by, say, Pinnacle Airlines or Accredo Health Group or FedEx, “you may be worrying this weekend.”
Or, I might add (since Peck didn’t mention it), if you are employed by the Commercial Appeal, which quietly laid off 17 more people on August 27th, five days before Peck published this oh-so-sympatico ode to the perils of unemployment.
From the Memphis Newspaper Guild website (complete with two typos): “Reduction in Force: Due to a Scripps company-wide action, The Commercial Appeal inacted a reduction in force on Monday, August 27. The company elimiated 17 guild-covered jobs.”
Back to Mr. Peck, who continues: “Half the people on Earth who are looking for a real job can’t find one. Against that backdrop, we’re not as bad off in the United States, or in Memphis.
“But the anxiety over finding and keeping a job is no less real for us. The ill winds of too few jobs and too much underemployment are felt even in the heat of early September.”
Or late August, for that matter.
