When I met my now-wife, my father in law, one of the hardest workers and friendliest people I ever met, was unemployed. He had been in sales for a company whose name we would all recognize. When she was younger, the family got to go on company trips because of his high sales performance, and at one point he was awarded a watch for being the top salesperson in the country. My girl explained that he had been fired for bogus reasons just a couple years shy of earning his pension, along with several other older employees.
I later learned through talking to him that he had been the local union rep, often fighting successfully to keep his coworkers employed, so the employer had extra reason to dislike him. They loaded him up with bad accounts and then fired him for underperformance, which was in violation of the terms of his contract.
As a result, after a protracted legal battle that burned through much of his savings, he ended up losing the house in 2016. I went over one day to take my girl to the gym (she was in college and still lived at home) and saw the eviction notice on the door, 24 hours to get out. I helped them frantically pack. That was a rough year. Homelessness is not easy. They eventually found an apartment. Money was especially tight after that.
It was five years before he got into the final stages of his arbitration hearing. Most of the others who had been fired had long ago accepted ~$10K settlement checks. He refused. In December of 2020 he had his final hearing and in January he heard that he won. In February he passed away from COVID complications. His widow, my mother in law, has his pension, $250K, though last I heard they are dragging their feet on the $500K+ in back pay he is owed.
Even in death, his persistence in the face of over five years of hardship is providing for his family. I’m still angry it took so long, that they lost the house, that a Black man who grew up poor in the Jim Crow South and worked his ass off providing for his family, spent his last years in entirely unnecessary struggle. In my mind his story highlights everything wrong with this country.
(Reposted because originally I don’t think I had enough karma)