Philadelphia Weekly

“Where I am right now is at the end of a pretty long period of uncertainty, and sometimes poverty and desperation,” says 25-year-old Toby David. The Swarthmore graduate and Fulbright scholar’s first job in Philly was at an after-school program, where he worked for the 2007-08 school year. It wasn’t much pay, but he “lived with four guys in West Philly so I was able to live within my means at a very minimal income.”

To get by, the roommates simply didn’t pay certain bills. Things were OK, for a while. Then David left for the summer to work on a friend’s movie. When he returned, the house in West Philly was no longer viable. David moved into a friend’s Center City apartment. It was $600 a month, but, he thought, “there’s a job waiting.”

The rent was higher, but the place was close to the school. “I also thought I would get a raise, so I could squeak by,” says David. But when he called the school in September, they said the program wouldn’t start for another few weeks.

When they were still saying the same thing weeks later, David knew he was in trouble. “Obviously, I started to look for other work,” he says. In the meantime he began hosting an event called the Weekly Revue, an evening of music, literature, live art and lectures punctuated by his hilarious and often shockingly ribald banter.

For a while, the small donations he received served as food money. Two months later, he snagged a job tutoring in a program funded by No Child Left Behind. He tutored three kids at three different public libraries in different areas of Philadelphia, but kids didn’t show up, and he didn’t get paid.

“I would be traveling all over the place without getting billable hours,” he says. And when he did finally get to work, his paychecks arrived a month or two late—putting his solvency in peril. He was no longer able to afford health insurance.

With funds dwindling and no steady paycheck, David had to move out. “I thought I was going to be able to afford it,” he says, with a laugh. “That turned out not to be the case.”

He moved into a big, unheated loft in South Kensington with two friends who were evicted from their South Philly apartment after their landlord lost the house to foreclosure. Sitting in a massive but freezing living room, he scoured Craigslist. He went through a few more barely-making-it months, babysitting and eating a diet limited to the cheapest stuff possible—rice, beans, eggs and pancakes—all of which David affectionately dubs “belly cement,” before discovering the medical experiments industry.

“I started doing MRIs for neuroscience grad students,” he says. He would play video game-type things, or just sit there, while people looked at his brain. “I’m going in and lying in this screaming tube, trying to stay awake.”

He also did a drug study, which he wasn’t comfortable discussing. But it all paid relatively well. And in January, he broke into the industry’s upper crust, landing work as a standardized patient for medical students: “I pretend to be a person that needs to see a doctor and the med students pretend to be doctors.” Securing another job as a guide at Eastern State Penitentiary, his period of recession madness appeared to have finally come to a close.

Until now.

“Starting in December my hours are getting cut back at the penitentiary, so I’ll probably be back in the tube soon. Shit.” 

Twenty- and 30-somethings are heading back to the basement in droves. According to a recent AFL-CIO report, about one in three workers under the age of 35 has been forced to move back in with their parents. Wall Street boosters and politicians may herald an economic recovery (despite the unemployment rate creeping past 10 percent or 17.5 percent if you include the underemployed and those who just gave up looking for work), but it’s more than clear that the so-called comeback has not trickled down to young people, who are more unemployed than at any time since the government started to keep track in 1948.

While people of color and the less educated are getting hit the hardest— 17.1 percent of black males are unemployed—things are quickly deteriorating for the college-educated work force. Experts say that one in five college graduates say they’re overqualified for their current jobs. It’s no surprise that I myself haven’t had the easiest time cobbling together a paycheck given that I’m somewhat blithely walking into a collapsing news industry. Many of my friends, however, young people with bachelors and graduate degrees and more reasonable goals, are struggling, too. Here in Philly, where the unemployment rate is just above the national average (11 percent in September), many of my peers—knocked way off their career paths—are joining countless others working in so-called survival jobs.

Jonah EtShalom, a 26-year old native Philadelphian, thought nursing school would be a good bet career-wise, a recession-proof industry. Indeed, with more and more people getting sick, people have been panicking over an impending nursing shortage. But to the chagrin of new nurses like EtShalom, the economic crisis has forced many older nurses to postpone retirement.

“It’s quite difficult to have trained for something and be so excited and eager to continue learning and then not be able to work in my chosen field,” she says.

Last May, EtShalom graduated from Jefferson School of Nursing. The following month she passed the NCLEX-RN (National Council Licensure Examination) and became an officially licensed registered nurse. Despite all the rumors of a chilling market, she ventured out on her job search with measured confidence.

“I figured it was just the beginning. I thought that I might be looking for a month or two,” she says, eyes widening. That month or two is now almost half a year. EtShalom wouldn’t accept defeat, showing up at a job fair sporting a name tag that read: “Jonah EtShalom, RN—Hire Me.”

EtShalom scored one interview for a job at an ER—her “dream job.” But they ended up directing her to a Web page explaining their currently pressing financial limitations.