A shared universe › Blog › When you’re looking for work and it doesn’t come · Español
In November 1931, a team of researchers from Vienna began studying a village where almost nobody had a job. What they saw there over several months still helps us understand why unemployment weighs so heavily, beyond the money, and what can make it weigh a little less.
Marienthal lay some 25 kilometres south-east of Vienna and lived off its textile factories. Between July 1929 and February 1930 they all closed, and unemployment hit three in every four families. Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazarsfeld and Hans Zeisel wanted to know what long-term unemployment does to people. They talked to the families, asked them to note down how they spent their days, and counted, measured and observed.
Their book, “Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal” (published in English as “Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community”), came out in 1933 and was one of the first to look at unemployment up close, house by house.
Some people thought unemployment would lead to rebellion, and others that it would force people to pull themselves together. What they found was weariness. The authors themselves spoke of a weary community, one that had grown used to having less, doing less and expecting less.
Time lost its shape. They counted how often people stopped as they walked three hundred metres of the main street: of 68 men, 39 stopped three times or more; of 32 women, only 3. The women carried on with the housework and the children; for the men, the authors wrote, dividing the day into hours had stopped making sense. Out of every hundred men, 88 no longer wore a watch.
They had more free time than ever and yet read less. At the village library, loans fell from more than three books per reader in 1929 to 1.6 in 1931.
When the families were classed by their attitude, a little under one in four was still holding together, with plans and looking for work. A few were desperate or had let themselves go. The great majority were resigned: they looked after the house and the children, made do with the bare minimum and had stopped making plans.
Fifty years later, by then a professor in England, Jahoda summed up what she had learned in a book from 1982, “Employment and Unemployment”. A job has one function we all see, the wage, and five others that we barely notice until they are missing:
That is why unemployment hurts even when there is a benefit: it takes all of that away too. A review of 104 studies, published in 2005 by Frances McKee-Ryan, Connie Wanberg and two colleagues, confirmed that unemployed people have worse mental and physical health than those in work, and that the size of the benefit did not change this relationship. Among those looking for work, the support they had, the structure of their days and the way they interpreted what was happening to them weighed more on their mood than age or education.
If work gave those five things, they can be found by other routes while the next job comes along:
In 1989, a team from the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan published the results of a programme for people who had just lost their jobs. They tested it with 928 adults assigned at random: some took the programme and others did not. They practised job hunting as one solves a problem, with the support of the group, and prepared in advance for the rejections that were bound to come.
Those who took part found better jobs, in both pay and satisfaction, and those who were still unemployed kept more of their desire to keep looking. A later version, with more than 1,800 people, also reduced symptoms of depression, especially in those at greatest risk. Part of what protected them was precisely that: being prepared for a setback.
The idea we can take from this is simple. The noes are part of the road and are not a judgement on you. It can help to expect them before they arrive and to have someone to talk them over with when they do.
Between 2020 and 2024, the public employment service of Lower Austria offered a job to every resident of the municipality where Marienthal is located who had been unemployed for nine months or more. The economists Maximilian Kasy and Lukas Lehner, of the University of Oxford, evaluated it. They found improvements in wellbeing and also in what Jahoda had described: the timetable, the activity, contact with others, the feeling of being useful and recognition.
Reviews of the studies on unemployment agree that it doesn’t only cause worry: it worsens health, mental health included. If you have gone weeks without sleeping well, with no interest in anything or thinking you’re worthless, talk to your GP. Asking for help is not giving up. And if you feel you can’t go on, tell someone today. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free and answered 24 hours a day. If you are in another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
An email that never comes, an interview that doesn’t work out: some days weigh more than others. You can write it on a star with “What weighs on me”, or light one with “What I hope for” the night before an interview. Someone will stop by and leave you a line of encouragement.