Monday, November 24, 2008
He regaled me with his miseries for half the journey, did the taxi man.
He was having to work longer and longer hours to achieve the same living. The Regulator was making him install a meter, at enormous cost, that was going to force him to charge customers more for their journeys. That, in turn, would cause many customers to take the bus instead. Which would make worse the situation caused by those Progressive Democrats who put any eejit who wanted to drive a taxi on the road, including Michael O’Leary, who’s not an eejit, but what kind of de-regulation lets a guy like him drive a taxi just to get into the bus lane? Thanks to that Mary Harney and her PDs, Dublin has more taxis at the moment than does Melbourne. So it does.
"At least they’re wound up, now, the PDs," he added. "Pity the media wouldn’t wind up, too. Particularly George Glee. Not jokin’ you, I’ve given up listening to the radio. It’s all moaning from morning to night. This recession is just a short term thing. It’d be over already if George Glee and his pals weren’t making money out of it. That’s the real cause. Once they get shut up, wait’n you see, everything’ll snap back and we won’t have any more moaning."
Distracted by his renaming of RTÉ’s serious economics correspondent, it struck me only later that the people who, thus far, are only marginally affected by the recession are the ones a) most likely to talk about their miseries, and b) most likely to believe it will be over soon. This particular man is convinced that once we splurge on Christmas, jobs will manifest themselves, debts evaporate, negative equity go positive and taxes reduce.
Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we buy.
I wish. You wish. We all wish. Those doing the strongest wishing are the people who, for the first time in their lives, are filling in Lottery tickets, as they can see no other way out of the morass they’re in.
While The National Lottery’s delightful Paula McEvoy resolutely uses the word "play" about buying lottery tickets, this new wave of solid middle class lottery ticket purchasers don’t think they’re playing. Not playing but drowning… They’re not the ones who couldn’t get themselves to work without their hand clasped around a Venti skinny latte. They’re the kind of people who went to work before many of the coffee shops even opened.
They’re not the ones who bought designer handbags and designer jeans and designer in-your-face cars. Not the ones who described twenty thousand Euro as "walking around money."
They took pride in paying off their mortgage, the older ones, and then got expert advice that suggested they re-mortgage and buy a second property. Now, when they go to meetings in the bank, the officials demand bigger, faster repayments out of money they no longer have. Because more and more of them have been made redundant. A word unthinkable, inapplicable to them, all their lives.
Who ever heard of an architect, a surveyor, a solicitor or an accountant being made redundant in their middle years by companies that have no problem with their performance? The ones who are left to rattle around in offices, that are three times too big for purpose, suffer survivor’s guilt mingled with fear. They can’t move from the oversized offices because they’re locked into a contract with the landlord, who won’t hear of a rent reduction, and they can’t stiff him without declaring bankruptcy.
"No job too small," they say wryly, in ironic reference to the marvellous scale of the projects they worked on just a year ago. "No job too small."
At the younger end of the disaster is a generation of bright young things who never needed to join a trade union, because they were part of a fast-growing business recently created by people who, in age and attitude and expectation, were just like themselves. Who needed a union? Who needed to know employment rights, when bonuses came thick and fast each year?
Now, some of those younger people are being fired and have no clue about the order in which it is possible to make someone redundant or the compensation an employer must pay. One young client of mine was told his salary would drop from €100,000 a year to 40. It was not a consultation and he had no idea if he could refuse without being canned.
Arguably the worst off are the bankers. No, not the guys at the top, although some of them are grievously wounded in the pocket, too. But at the middle ranks, among the branch managers and assistant branch managers who spend their days reluctantly hounding home owners and small business people for money, is a level of quiet desperation, generated by the financial commonsense of another time and loyalty to their own organisation.
They took their bonuses and their pension funds and invested them in bank shares. Now, they’re work a tenth of what they were worth. Or a twentieth. Or worse. The word is that the bulk of bad debts or sour loans on the books of several banks have the names of bank employees against them.
They’re keeping their mouths shut because there’s limited satisfaction in venting it. But it shows. Oh, Lord, it shows. Each and every one of them could be the crushed businessman described by Ed Mc Bain: "He looked as if he had wilted and didn’t know how the hell to unwilt."
The worst aspect of it all is the sense of personal failure. The unwillingness to tell teenage sons and daughters that Daddy and Mammy are currently so hard-pressed that they would sell the car and buy a smaller one, except that they’re now doing sums on the back of an envelope and none of the sums are coming out right.
The beamer they bought because beamers, like mercs, always hold their re-sale value, has broken the rule. So selling it might not produce the price of a smaller car, although the smaller car would use less fuel.
On the other hand, with garages like that one in Birr selling petrol for less than a euro a litre, maybe it would make more sense to hang on to the bigger car for the moment… Coping best are the craftsmen with the bit of redundancy money to tide them over the Christmas. Plus, they’ve signed on, despite which action, they’re planning a few small jobs for January.
Because the black economy is roaring back to life, and with all this talk of cutbacks in the public service, are the Revenue Commissioners going to be able to put spies out on the street, checking up on every plumber who fixes an S bend for cash? They don’t think so and they’re willing to risk it.
Misery may love company, but in this instance, the suffering and fear is cellular and separate.
We may all be in this together, but there’s no togetherness about it.
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