In a recent commentary for Project Syndicate, New York University economics professor Nouriel Roubini tells workers what they can expect from the labor market as economies throughout the developed world shed jobs at about the same rate that my compulsive over-eater of a cat sheds his fur — which is to say, exceedingly fast.

Popularly known as “Dr. Doom,” Roubini isn’t one to sugarcoat the bitter and difficult-to-swallow pills he dispenses in liberal doses. He has more or less maintained his grim outlook throughout the recession, delivering oracles in prose that, like the martinis so loved by the monied classes, is invariably dry and stiff. “Recent data suggest that job market conditions are not improving in the United States and other advanced economies,” Roubini writes:

In the US, the unemployment rate, currently at 9.5%, is poised to rise above 10% by the fall. It should peak at 11% some time in 2010 and remain well above 10% for a long time. The unemployment rate will peak above 10% in most other advanced economies, too.

Lest his readers be lulled into thinking things could be worse, Roubini hastens to add that these numbers actually downplay the real situation:

These raw figures on job losses, bad as they are, actually understate the weakness in world labor markets. If you include partially employed workers and discouraged workers who left the US labor force, for example, the unemployment rate is already 16.5%. Monetary and fiscal stimulus in most countries has done little to slow down the rate of job losses. As a result, total labor income — the product of jobs times hours worked times average hourly wages — has fallen dramatically.

If these raw figures actually understate the real labor-market situation, American workers can expect that when the official unemployment peaks, as Roubini predicts, at 11 percent, this will mean nearly 20 percent unemployment in real terms. 20-percent unemployment will put the year 2010 right up there with 1933, when unemployment reached 24.3 percent, the highest rate of the entire Great Depression.

One should bear in mind, however, that the entire US population in 1933 was 125 million souls, of which 11.4  million comprised the eligible workforce. So, even at the point when the vicissitudes and dislocations of the Great Depression had reach gale force, they tossed only some 2.8 million people out of work, a number that today, with the US population at 305 million and with many more women in the workforce, hovers well within the bounds of what labor statisticians consider virtually full employment.

The brand’s identity depends on its ability to bottle the volatile spirits of affluence.

Bludgeoning readers with numbers isn’t terribly attention-economical, I know. But these numbers do paint a picture stark enough to where one isn’t liable to mistake green shits of inanition for the green shoots of regeneration. What, after all, does 20-percent unemployment look like, not in the ether of statistics, but at street-level? Well, according to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum’s website, this is what 24.3 percent unemployment looked like in 1933:

The displacement of the American work force and farming communities caused families to split up or to migrate from their homes in search of work. “Hoovervilles,” or shantytowns built of packing crates, abandoned cars, and other scraps, sprung up across the nation. Residents of the Great Plains area, where the effects of the Depression were intensified by drought and dust storms, simply abandoned their farms and headed for California in hopes of finding a true “land of milk and honey.” Gangs of unemployed youth, whose families could no longer support them, rode the rails as hobos in search of work. America’s unemployed citizens were on the move, but there was no place to go that offered relief from the Great Depression.

My vision of what 20-percent unemployment in 2009, which in terms of real numbers involves vastly more people than 24.3-percent unemployment did in 1933, resembles the Tucson, Arizona that I experienced throughout the 1990s and half of the first decade of the 21st century. For me, Tucson will forever stand as a cesspool where the outcast, outlawed, defeated and damaged can settle in order to pursue a curious liberty all too familiar to those who have ever lived in the American West: the exchange of one’s dignity, and perhaps one’s hygiene, for a dusty freehold on which to park a trailer, a grim aluminum asylum where one can sift at her leisure the shards of her broken dreams.

Often, enough trailers and trailer denizens accumulate in one area to form a “wildcat” development: an ad-hoc community, a confederacy of the impoverished, the drug-addled, the defiantly desperate, mixing promiscuously through lurid liaisons, sub-rosa intrigues and manufactured drama intended to bring intensity to their lives of sun-scorched, pinchpenny monotony. Diets of affordable, heavily marketed processed foods betray their bodies into obesity; their arms become flabby flippers, their legs unsightly topographies of dimples, bulges and blemishes. Immorality and schemes abound in this city where parasites’ parasites play silly confidence games for pathetic stakes in an eternal bellum omnium contra omnes.

Now, imagine these conditions applied to an entire nation. This, I think, fairly captures a situation in which one in five eligible workers can’t find work.

Or perhaps the irrepressible Carles’s vision comes closest to what the future of work holds for American workers. In his latest post at Hipster Runoff, Carles adopts the persona of freshly graduated coed confronting for the first time the harsh realities of securing work. Finding herself stymied by the contradictions of job-hunting in her “industry,” Carles’s fictional coed decides to play it as it lays, opting “to start ‘from the ground up’ within [the] corporate hierarchy” of Chili’s Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Brinker International.

With hotness now the cardinal American virtue, job fairs will no doubt become beauty pageants.

Carles’s coed settles on an entry-level position as hostess “at an upscale Chili’s brand which they are beta testing in several U.S. markets.” Advantageously situated in Scottsdale, one of the selected test-markets, Carles’s coed describes how this new restaurant will distinguish it’s brand, and how it will market the experience associated with this brand:

Being a hostess here is amazing … even the uniform is a little bit stylish. I have met tons of amazing people. This Chili’s is great because we don’t serve food to the poors. We are looking to be a place where business men can wine and dine their mistresses, and seem ‘rich’ while still eating variations of our original Chili’s menu.

The brand’s identity depends, in other words, on its ability to bottle the volatile spirits of affluence; the upscale Scottsdale Chili’s preserves something of the form of conspicuous consumption, if very little of the substance. Creating a space where people can continue to “seem ‘rich’” while dining on nouvelle nuke-n’-serve will perhaps come to represent the best possible kind of brand magic.

Strike a pose: service proles recast in sexy roles.

And crucial to capturing this brand magic is a staff capable of weaving s its spell — a staff of spirited hotties like Carles’s coed, who “pre-party while [they] work, then go out and get mad crunk afterwards,” and whose greatest single achievement is “becoming an ambassador of the Chili’s brand.”

Carles’s vision indeed seems to augur what is to come. With an already tight job market getting even tighter in 2010, competition for just about any position is sure to be fierce. Roubini himself remarks on the various ways companies are cutting pay without necessarily cutting jobs:

[M]any employers, seeking to share the pain of recession and slow down layoffs, are now asking workers to accept cuts in both hours and hourly wages. British Airways, for example, has asked workers to work for an entire month without pay. Thus, the total effect of the recession on labor income of jobs, hours and wage reductions is much larger.

Imagine, then, with so many workers out there laboring for free just to hang onto benefits and to keep downtime off their résumés, how attractive a job offering a wage — any wage — would appear to the many lean and hungry-eyed strivers forced into indigence by the violent economic churn now upon them. And with hotness now the cardinal American virtue, job fairs will no doubt become beauty pageants. The future, as Carles suggests, is one where people with Alpha-Plus bodies perform Gamma and Epsilon jobs, while the hordes of those arranged elsewhere on the Greek alphabet sit and suck stones.

Anton would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at generationbubble [at] gmail [dot] com.