Few novels written in the U.S. are more penetrating and riveting than John Steinbeck’s 1939 blockbuster The Grapes of Wrath. Winning both the 1940 Pulitzer Prize and The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, it recounts the fictional odyssey of the Joad family as they are dispossessed from their homestead in the dustbowl of Oklahoma and set off in search of the promised land of California.

As the protagonist of the story, Tom Joad represents the idealism in the first half of the twentieth century played out against the backdrop of the shortcomings of the U.S. social and economic system. The Great Depression looms in the background as the Joads face seemingly insurmountable obstacles, including the discomforting knowledge that the jobs they seek as pickers in California’s produce industry may be illusory. The 5-cent guarantee per load of peaches quickly diminishes to the 2½ cents that a story character warns them is awaiting if they cross the picket line outside the gates of a peach orchard.

Fast-forward to the economy of the contemporary U.S. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released unemployment figures for October 2009. The figure stood at 10.2 percent nationwide. State by state statistics show widely divergent figures with states like Michigan, Rhode Island, California, and Florida suffering more than the average nation-wide figures indicate. With the cost of the federal bailout of banks and other businesses deemed “too large to fail” amounting to trillions of dollars, President Obama announced a jobs summit at the White House in December 2009 in an attempt to address both the issue of unemployment and the Labor Department job report “that showed one out of every six workers—17.5 percent—were unemployed or underemployed in October” (Jeff Zeleny. “Obama Announces Jobs Summit,” The New York Times, November 12, 2009).

These are the highest figures for both of these categories since December 1982. In planning for the summit the president says, “This is one of the great challenges that remains in our economy, a challenge that my administration is absolutely determined to meet” (The New York Times, November 12, 2009).

Many critics of the economic bailout, which rescued those who “mattered,” were accurate in their predictions that the so-called trickle down effects of an economic rebound will make little or no difference for the unemployed, and have no effect on the continued foreclosure crisis, as those both unemployed and underemployed lose their homes. With a globalized economy, and major producers like China showing the first signs of an economic rebound, the effects of pouring trillions into huge U.S. conglomerates may never impact business on Main Street or homes just off of Main Street. To date, the Congress has enacted no meaningful legislation to address the roots of the global and national economic meltdown that led to the current economic recession.

I recently responded to a job offer in a local newspaper for part-time work to supplement my employment as a reading and writing tutor at a local community college. The area where I work, Western Massachusetts, is not as well off as the rest of the state with a per capita income of $38,774 (2006). The area is a major tourist destination in the U.S. with a large number of cultural venues. Typically, such economies appear much like a pyramid with a few well-paid employees at the top and a large base of lower-middle class and working-class employees in the middle and at the bottom.

The employment agency I traveled to is situated in the downtown area in a city that has long suffered from the economic vagaries of a less than vibrant economic base. Many storefronts are dark and empty. A major employer in the area, General Electric, left years ago, depositing dangerous levels of PCBs into the environment. A cleanup has been underway to address some of the PCB pollution.

The job description distributed at the beginning of the informational session for work as a driver’s helper on one of the two largest delivery services in the U.S. was at odds with the job offering in the newspaper. While the jobs advertised were supposed to last an entire workday, a representative from the company stated that a worker could expect to work as little as 3 hours a day. Workers would be “on call,” which meant that the company could either call them or not call them, depending on the daily workload on a particular delivery route. There were all kinds of prohibitions for the job. Long hair and beards were not allowed. The threat of legal action was clearly stated as a warning to applicants who filled out their applications fraudulently. When I mentioned to the interviewer that I had just passed a background check (for a substitute teaching position), she snapped back, “Well, you’ll have a new one done for this job!” The online job application, that had to be completed before reporting to the informational session, was a highly invasive document that seemed to be asking the same questions repeatedly in an attempt to “trap” the applicant into disclosing sensitive information to the prospective employer. The same question was asked more than once in different contexts in different parts of the application.

What amazed me was the large number of people who showed up for this mass orientation and interview. The person who sat next to me in the conference room where the orientation took place noted that similar orientations had been conducted several times earlier in the month, so the employer had a huge worker base from which to draw, much as growers had during the Great Depression. I thought of The Grapes of Wrath again when a character in the migrant worker camp informs others that the offer for thousands of workers to pick produce in California is, in reality, a ploy to drive already meager wages down.

Since there would be down time before we were called to the brief interviews being held in another room in the employment agency, I struck up a conversation with the person I had been sitting next to. He talked about the difficulty he experienced finding jobs since he was illiterate, a disclosure I thought was fairly brave since I had never seen him before the morning of the interview. The irony that I had been a reading specialist for 25 years in public schools was not lost to me as we spoke. He talked about the kinds of low-paying jobs he had worked over the years and complained that a worker “had to know someone” to get reliable work in the local economy. It occurred to me that knowing someone in an economy with a vanished manufacturing base is little solace.

New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Hebert compares the “financial elites” to “ordinary Americans” in “A Recovery For Some,” (November 14, 2009). He states that “financial elites have flourished in recent decades to a great extent because they have had government on their side . . . For ordinary Americans, it has been a different story, with jobs shipped overseas by the millions and wages remaining stagnant . . .”

The Great Depression of the 1930s and The Great Recession at the end of the first decade of the twenty first century have many parallels. Much misery has been created by a global economy that has left many at the bottom of the economy in dire straits. The race to the bottom for wages and job benefits in the U.S. is nearly complete, as was obvious in the large number of people showing up to be interviewed for this very part-time employment. Employers -- at least those still hiring -- have huge slush piles of resumes of well-qualified workers who, like members of the fictional Joad family, are willing to do any kind of work to fulfill their basic needs, unmet by a society they believed would at least offer them the opportunity to work.