The unemployed, an "employee" without remuneration The current analysis is an attempt to describe the mechanism once a person is jobless,

and accordingly he is no longer part of the production scheme. To rejoin the labor market, he is involved and engaged in training programs, vocational counseling and recruitment which all produce money. However, the unemployed, by being present in all of these activities as if when having an employee status, while he is generating financial resources, he is not paid. We are dealing here with a transgression of the concept of surplus value, through which a person regarded as a consumer of financial resources, or an anti-production agent, but in reality he is geared in a mechanism of economic production. The only viable solutions for the unemployed person would be to either get a job or to open his own business, so to trim the situation into a report of power with himself, thus representing the mechanism of power and absolute control. In none of the above situations it is not a matter of living, destiny, hope, but of the production flow and the capture of the individual in this feed. Key concepts: production scheme, anti-production agent, gear mechanism of economic production, transgression of the concept of surplus value, production flow. Bolonyi Mihai, Sociologist, Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Brasov The economic slump has meant for many individuals leaving the field of production and this way their involvement in the machinery of unemployment. Once they are out of the economic market mechanism, what are chances of the unemployed to reintegrate, given the fact that job demand exceeds by far the job vacancies? How is he perceived in relation to those whose status is employed? How is he defined by the institutions that he will interact with? These are just some of the questions that I will try to answer in the present analysis. In terms of legislation two aspects stand out in practice with regards to the status of the unemployed: 1. the way the term unemployed is defined under the Law 76/2002 compared to the term of jobseeker in the unemployment insurance system and employment stimulation scheme; 2. the perceptions on the motivation of the unemployed. 1. Both unemployed people and jobseekers are governed by the law 76/2002 once they have been registered by the Employment Agency or any other employment service provider. If for the latter category it is enough to be registered, for the first one the unemployed person must also meet the following criteria in addition to not having a job, to be declared fit for work both medically and psychologically, to be seeking for a job anytime between the time he turned 16 and until he meets the criteria for retirement, he has no income and can start work in the near future should they be offered a job. By definition, the representations of the two categories are different, because a person seeking employment may be at the same time an employee, resulting thus the image of an individual centered on personal and professional development and with a proactive attitude on the labor market. The unemployed person is perceived from the start as an individual without a job, so inactive. He will have the jobseeker status once he will be out of the REAC (Regional Employment Agency Center/ AJOFM) list. Redefining the status of the unemployed with the one of jobseeker represents a positive aspect, even if the person is still without a job. For this reason, it is important to refer with the term unemployed within the framework of programs for vocational counseling, labor mediation and vocational training courses, without considering this status as a stigma, but a condition generated by the economic context. 2. The unemployed is concerned with his physiological and safety needs, but he is required to comply with the ones for membership, self-esteem and fulfillment. His main problem is survival, fear, uncertainty, but must act during interviews as if they did not exist. He cannot go
1

to an interview and show all of these uncertainties, as he would seem impossible to rely on, unprofessional. By being concerned about how you dress, how you behave, the way you are perceived in society, it means you are motivated by factors like self-esteem and fulfillment, while an unemployed person is centered on motivational factors related to survival. We have here a lack of concordance between the languages used by the employer and the unemployed, involved in a relationship of the type victim and executioner, as used by Deleuze, namely: "only the victims can describe tortures, their executioners use the hypocritical language of order and power." 1 It is preferably for this reason that in employment interviews not to resort to the "mercy" of the recruiter, i.e. to take the position of the victim and to expose the need of the job in terms of survival. In addition to being unemployed he will not be perceived as he should since he uses no power language and thus can be "read" as a person without a will, ambition, dynamism, strength etcThe unemployed person must do the impossible, and use the "dictionary" of power, to look like the other in front of him, from the starting point of the individual that has no resources and he is not part of this field. All of the above shows that suffering is experienced in the language of power. If a person took the decision to resign or was forced to do so he will not receive unemployment allowance, and therefore he has no income. If he was fired or made redundant, he can benefit from this allowance but it would be an amount too small compared to the costs of living of the individual, forcing him this way to try to find a job in a relatively short time. Once registered with the Employment Agency, if offered a job, the unemployed, theoretically, cannot refuse. One can do so but with the risk of losing his unemployment allowance, the latter aspect being a decisive factor in his choice. Although it could be a win win situation for all parties involved in this process should the unemployed get a job, in reality, this never happens. The unemployed will start his new job, but if this job does not meet his expectations he will put his efforts into being rejected by the employer, at the same time justifying his efforts in the process of getting a job. That means that if he does not have the ability to choose his desired workplace he would rather stay unemployed since he is not encouraged to define the objectives, priorities in order to grow and to become competitive on the labor market. By excluding all wishes and expectations of the unemployed he is being emptied of his subjectivity, making him to rather accept the status of unemployed, but not that the one that he lacks desire. On the other hand, the report between the disproportionately high demand of jobs compared to the offer, gives the employer a privileged position compared to the unemployed. Thus, we can see a balance of power and not a negotiation between two partners. The employer can make demands, but is at liberty to decline the ones of a perspective employee with the reasoning that he is sure to find the person not to refuse these conditions from the large number of jobseekers existing on the labor market. In this logic, it seems as if the parties involved in the issue of unemployment would have more to gain from maintaining the status of the unemployed person rather than helping him find a suitable job. Since the unemployed is no longer part of the production mechanism, he becomes the nomad of the economical market, thus having the possibility to reinvent himself, but despite this he is captured in a disciplinary mechanism of power in which the stake is his reintegration on the economic market. From this point of view, he is made to believe he is to blame for the inability to overcome the unemployed status. He is sent to counseling programs and work mediation or enrolled in courses for further training. We have to deal here with what the sociologist Ulrich Beck stated with regard to system crises, namely a tendency to give solutions to problems arising from the biographical level. 2
1

Deleuze, G., Presentation of Sacher-Masoch, in Sacher-Masoch, Ed. Polirom, Iai, 1999, p. 299

...the way of life of a person becomes a biographical solution for the systemic contradictions. Risks and contradictions are still happening on a social level; only debt and the need to face things is individualized , Ulrich Beck, quoted by Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid modernity, Ed. Antet, 2000 Prahova, p.35

In this context, the problem does not arise in terms of development, but in terms of rescue. In addition, being without a job, the feeling of hopelessness of the unemployed is stepping up with the increasing period of time since he no longer has the employee status, reaching a position to put into question his value. The need to work can be read as a neurotic symptom. It is a crutch. It is an attempt to make someone feel valued even if there is no particular need for his skills.3 The unemployment, the unemployed person, the job, the sense of value. Going from one machinery to another, in neither of them we can find the concept of utility. We are dealing at the least with a subjective sense of utility. To "save" yourself from the first machinery, of the unemployment, and to integrate in the second, of the production, it is perceived as gaining back the feeling of usefulness, but not necessarily of sense of value. I speak here of the matter of survival, which is found mostly in a common phrase among unemployed I need to find a job, no matter what, as long as I have a salary in order to be able to survive they have a chance to get a job but not to their desires, expectations or skill level. In this context the sense of utility is given by the possibility to survive expulsion from the production machinery. Here, utility and value are not defined in terms of production and development, but in terms of social (family, children, friends, etc..). With reference to Deleuze-Guattari we will say, along with them that things work everywhere, when uninterrupted, when discontinued. () Something will be produced: domino effect, not metaphors4 From this perspective we wonder what the input of the unemployed to society is? What does he produce? Or better said what can bring someone who is not in the field of production anymore? Hypothesis: considered an anti-production agent, in reality, the unemployed person folds into the gear unit of economic output. The unemployed status does not actually imply to leave the production machinery. The person remains in contact with it creating thus a different type of machinery. What does it mean? The ambiguous difference, reported above, between unemployment status and the person seeking employment is maintained in practice. The unemployed person is perceived as being inactive and in this regard he is involved in a mechanism that means training, vocational counseling, recruitment, etc in order to integrate again into the production field. Ironically, he becomes himself a resource for all of the institutions that comes into contact. Thus, an unemployed person can be defined as the body without organs, a person that does not have a job, but produces financial resources and becomes the target for all actions and resources of the production agents. Consider the institutions that are running programs under the Regional Intermediary Organism for the Operational Program for the Development of Human Resources. I do not tend to criticize these types of financing, which ultimately are beneficial to each of those involved in such projects; I am just trying to show the operating mechanism and the functioning philosophy at a practical level. By joining these programs the unemployed person is expecting to find a job, while the philosophy of these programs is to create preconditions for facilitating employment. In other words, the unemployed reaches to confirm the definition as an agent of anti-production. In this context, if we consider the notion of disciplinary power, the unemployed person becomes abnormal, savage, and even infantile and needs to be helped to reintegrate into the economical market and to get a job, in other words there is the issue of his productivity: " the disciplinary power has the dual property, namely to disrupt, to always remove a number of individuals, in order to make the anomy appear, and to always be normalized, to always invent new systems and to always restore the rule. The disciplinary system is characterized by the perpetual existence of the normal into the anomy. "5 Here we must take into account that some of the unemployed have contributed and still contribute to this representation. When they enter into the vocational programs the unemployed
3
4

C.B. Chishol, quoted by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization, Ed. Trei, Bucharest, 1996, p. 206 Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus, Ed. Paralela 45, Piteti, 2008, p. 5 5 Foucault, M., Psychiatric power, Ed. Idea Design & Print, Cluj, 2006, p.57

people do not have elementary knowledge of what a resume means, as they do not take into consideration the personal professional history. Thus, hardly any of them can imagine a possible meeting with an employer. Unfortunately, their definition of this situation is affecting all unemployed. From this point of view, the unemployed person is defined as a piece that was cut off from an assembly and in order to get back in action he needs to be advised, counseled, taught, or processed, polished. It's like he knew nothing of interviews, creating a CV, as if this person would have never got the employed status. He comes to be defined as incapable, helpless, ignorant, in other words he is defined by his gaps in knowledge. It is what Deleuze and Guattari were calling the art of the ruling class this practice of void as market economy: organizing the lack in the abundance of production, makes the whole desire to tilt in great fear of failure, to make the object depend of the actual production which is assumed to be outside desire (the requirements of rationality), while the production of desire becomes fantasy (remains pure fantasy)."6 Through all these programs he is taught how to write his perfect CV, how to write a cover letter, how to present and what to say and what not to say in employment interviews. Unfortunately, every councilor has his own rules and procedures. The tendency to give a scientific form to a field in which uncertainty and probability of success with a certain procedure are not guaranteed, they represent very clearly the way the disciplinary power mechanism works. Moreover, it is by excellence the way in which the individual is captured, placed in a gear. According to the notion of disciplinary power, the goal is to make the individual productive, useful to society. In this case, the unemployed person is just the opposite of this mechanism, making the intervention upon him to be personalized in relation to the employer, who is active in the labor market. From the perspective of this notion, the unemployed person has a problem that is believed he cannot solve by himself, his individualization becomes a form of justification, legitimating an intervention on him: "In a system of discipline, the child is more individualized than adults, more than the healthy person, the crazy and delinquent more than normal person and the honest man. However, in our civilization we are directing towards the first one, all individual mechanisms, and when the individualizing aims the healthy, normal adult, we try to find the child elements that he is hiding, to detect the secret dementia present in him, the fundamental crime he wanted to commit. "7 In this mechanism, an important and neglected factor is represented by the success stories. When speaking about the issue of unemployment, and more, we could say that there are success stories, but it is not the perfect recipe for success. I refer to writing the perfect resume, the perfect interview, and the success of some unemployed persons in similar circumstances. All of these stories are said to make visible the so-called expertise, skills that a counselor possesses, and thus a form of advertising and competition between different agents of production in human resources, "recipes for a better life and related devices have a period of "timeout", but most of them will be out of use long before that time, minimized, devalued and stripped of charm because of offers from the competition "new and improved." 8 Consequently success stories represent a gear to capture a large number of unemployed. Success stories are always told by others but they all belong to others. They are sources of mobilization and incitement of ambition, but not necessarily ensure success. In this model, responsibility is excluded, and the fault is considered to belong only to the one who has not succeeded where others were able to achieve its objectives. In the title we set the terms of wage and "employee" without remuneration. In their center lays the concept of compensation that needs to be read from the religious perspective, but not to forget what today means, i.e. a form of payment. The interpretation that Derrida gives to this notion means "... the process of compensation and restitution, sometimes sacrifices the
6 7 8

Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus, Ed. Paralela 45, Piteti, 2008, p. 39 Foucault, M., Discipline and punish, Ed. Paralela 45, Piteti, 2005, p. 245 Bauman, Z., Liquid modernity, Ed. Antet, 2000 Prahova, p. 69

untouched purity, the safe and sound integrity, a property not injured." 9 From the perspective of an unemployed person he is submitted to a sacrificial mechanism. He is offered payment, an allowance to (re) become sound, pure, holy, in this case to become committed to a job. In this logic the allowance is a form of circumventing all liability: since he is doing the sacrifice is it still necessary to realize something else? I do not sacrifice just a third party - divine - to save the unemployed? If we follow Derrida's argument further he says that "without being arbitrary, we can read, select, connect, in the genealogy of what is semantically sound -" holy, sacred, safe and sound, Heilig, Holz "- all that means force, life force, fertility, growth, enlargement, swelling especially in spontaneous erections or pregnancy. " 10 The unemployed person is the impotent that needs to show their virility. A dead man that needs to give life In this interpretation it is minimized the likelihood of protest, because they involve the term of "caring", but also a form of calculating, of economic exchange. You can not criticize a mechanism where you get without giving anything in return. It is a scheme that redefines the meaning of the concept of surplus value: a circumvention of the suffering and frustration and inducing the feeling of guilt. On the one hand, the unemployed, in addition to compensation, receives an allowance for participating in activities such as vocational training, counseling, recruitment, etc.., here I am speaking mostly with regards to projects involving European funds and on the other hand he is blamed that he is unemployed and cannot get out of this situation. What are the solutions of the unemployed? Can he save himself (another religious concept)? He actually has two choices: 1. Changing his location and moving away, by (re)employment. The first model belongs to the disciplinary power through which the unemployed gets to the employed status and it is perceived as a result of the learning programs, as if he successfully passed an exam and now he receives a reward. The model is limited because it cannot justify failure once the person had passed the "exam", i.e. when the unemployed goes through all program activities, but fails to get a job. 2. The second model is given by the possibility of the person to be starting his own business. This leads the individual to perceive himself as an enterprise that must operate in view of economic rationality and to go into competitive relations with other individuals on a market. Therefore there should be a differentiation and a warning at the same time between having control over their own lives and becoming an enterprise, machinery. In the first instance, the business is a form of selfreinvention and control of the newly acquired power. In the second case, we risk entering in an obligation-reward mechanism "of this system of debt-work-pleasure. And this is the exact relationship status with ourselves that is necessary to get rid of." 11 It is a mechanism that excludes the human itself, the living. To avoid the above mechanisms in relation to the unemployed, by looking from the perspective of a vocational counselor, I believe that it is important to keep in mind two perspectives: 1. One that belongs to Afred Adler, which expresses the idea that if any of the three essential pillars to a humans life (love, the social and his work) is affected, then, by default, the others will suffer damage. Thus, when he comes in counseling sessions we must see the unemployed with all the aspects surrounding him like: destiny, life and his hopes and to remember that they are all to be fed, in order for him to regain confidence in himself. In this scheme we can avoid the economic exchange model, of power, through which the counselor gives advice and the unemployed receives all information. By doing this I am not ruling out the fact that the unemployed person actually needs information about the implementation of a curriculum vitae, or advice
9 10 11

Derrida, J., Faith and knowledge, Ed. Paralela 45, Piteti, 2004, p.34 Derrida, J., idem, p.68 Foucault, M., Hermeneutics of the subject, Ed. Polirom, Iai, 2004, p. 26

on how an interview should be conducted, etc.., but we must bear in mind that these facts must not prevail in professional counseling. In this context I think we could mention the examples where personality beats experience, when an unemployed person is a good craftsman, but will not know to show it properly in a resume or during an interview. 2. The second perspective, which is closely related to the first one, belongs to Michel Foucault and it is called getting out of the minority translated by getting out from a state of our will that makes us accept someone elses authority to guide us into the areas where we could use our own reasoning 12 In this pattern, the counselor is seen as support, maybe a guide, but one that will always be behind and not in front of the unemployed person.

12

Foucault, M., What is an author, Ed. Idea Design & Print, Cluj, 2004, p. 67