It has been a half year without a job for Emil. Living with his family in a New York apartment has been tough. The room is crowded and he and his wife share the bathroom with the people in the next room. Emil used to have a job, but as with many Americans, now he is unemployed. Now he and his wife rely totally on what she earns, working as a cleaning lady for rich people.

Emil lives in a tenement in a spanish ghetto, populated largely by illegal immigrants looking for work. Emil is one of these people. He is only one of the stories to be told in this building. For most of the people in this building life is pretty tough, and doesn�t seem to be getting better.

We�ve all heard this story before. They came to America hoping for prosperity and a good quality of life. After four years in the country, they are disappointed. Though the conditions are better than where they came from, this is the case for too many of the people living here. This is the unfortunate state of affairs for many Americans nowadays, a cramped apartment, with barely any services, and nowhere else to go. There won�t be jobs anywhere else and the government sure won�t be any better.

There are millions of Americans without jobs and completely without help. Government benefit programs have been so severely cut back that they are almost non-existent. This has put Emil and his family in a bad position. She is pregnant and will have to stop working briefly, but with another mouth to feed who knows what will happen. Emil says that the only work he can do is menial and even then he can�t find a job, but when they have the baby he�ll have to get a job so that his wife can take care of the baby. Either that or one of them has to take the baby to work.

This lack of benefit programs has had an overall detrimental effect on the standard of living for most Americans. People who are laid off are forced to take on any job they can find even if it is a much worse paying job. In the past unemployment programs worked for everybody, even the middle class person who was laid off. Now though it is very hard for people to live without a job. This has made for stiff competition in the labor force.

For Emil stiff competition means a very low paying job, with no benefits. With a new baby on the way it is hard to imagine what will happen if it gets sick. Stiff competition among workers has led to lowering of wages in already low paying jobs, and even fewer benefits to those workers. Unions seldom exist in these types of jobs, and strikes are totally ineffective. The potential for advancement for Emil is very low, and the chance that his family will advance is also very low.

The problem with our government today is that it has removed many of the safety nets it once provided. The ironic part is that these safety nets probably would prevent a real depression but there is no way to reinstate them because it would be even worse to borrow more money. So the only thing that people like Emil and his wife can do is hope and work hard, otherwise there is no help for them. The federal government should do many things but at the moment it seems focused on other things, to the distress of the nation.