In the old days, a pink slip wouldn’t have been such a big deal for white-collar workers, many of whom have undergraduate and graduate degrees in technical areas. But with whole industries shrinking in a declining economy, even highly skilled professionals are likely to find that there are no new jobs in their field. They may spend months looking for work and then have to settle for something far below their previous jobs. Many of the victims of this recession are middle managers, often people in their 30s and early 40s. This was supposed to be the prime of their lives, their peak earning years. Instead, they find themselves weighted down by mortgages, young families, big bills and an increasingly uncertain future. Dan Lacey, editor of the newsletter Workplace Trends, estimates that 70 percent of this year’s newly jobless will be white-collar workers. “It totals up to nearly 250,000 families who used to believe in lifetime job security,” says Lacey. “These are the economic icon jobs. They are the Ozzie-and-Harriet jobs, the jobs that gave us the ability to buy a house in a nice neighborhood and drive two cars. They are the jobs that have made the American lifestyle possible.” When that dream dies, everyone grieves. Myles O’Dwyer, a 38-year-old former chief financial officer of a Los Angeles-area manufacturing company, lost his job last May when his firm went on a cost-cutting campaign. Six months later he’s still out of work. “It’s a terrible blow to your self-confidence,” O’Dwyer says. “You feel worth less.” With a wife and two young daughters to support, he’s willing to look et positions that are a step down on the career ladder. His wife has suffered, too, he says. “When my wife has been on a high, I have been on a low and when she’s been low, I’ve been feeling good. Each of us has had severe emotional depths to wade through.” His daughters don’t understand why Daddy doesn’t go to the office anymore. “We went to Disneyland a few weeks ago and there was a wishing well that we threw our pennies into,” he recalls. “My wife asked me what I wished for and I said, ‘A new job,’ and my daughter said, ‘You can’t do that, Daddy. That was my wish for you’.”
Blue collar workers are more used to weathering such storms. In many industries, such as automobiles or steel, layoffs have come to be a part of the economic cycle. “That’s the bump and grind of their life,” says Margaret Morley, executive director of the Beacon Therapeutic Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Chicago. “The white-collar worker doesn’t expect the bump and grind. It’s an unusual assault.” Professionals and managers also tend to have more of their identity tied up in the work. “If you ask somebody in a blue-collar job what he does, he’ll say, ‘I work at the plant or the factory’,” says Neil P. Lewis, a management psychologist in Atlanta who counsels businesses. “But if you ask a white-collar person, he’ll say, ‘I’m an accountant or a marketing person or a journalist.’ When there’s a layoff, it’s not just losing a paycheck, but losing a bit of your self-concept.” Linda Rie, a New York banker, has two master’s degrees and is fluent in Russian. She thinks she would be a great asset to any company planning to expand into Eastern Europe. But after nearly a year of joblessness, she’s deeply discouraged. “I know the homeless have it worse than we do,” she says. “The people with AIDS have it worse than we do. But what am I supposed to do? I’m 40 years old. Am I supposed to retire for the next 40 years?”
Bleak letter: Although some people see the warning signs, many are stunned to find themselves suddenly among the ranks of the jobless. Rich Briede worked for Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Inc. at the Midwest Stock Exchange in Chicago until last week. He found out he had lost his job when he received a certified letter on a Saturday informing him that his company was dropping his insurance coverage. The pink slip seems particularly unreal to employees who have felt successful and appreciated at work. Rani Verma, 29, lost her job as a marketing manager at Sara Lee Bakery in Deerfield, Ill., on Oct. 4 when the company eliminated her department. Three weeks earlier she had had her annual review and received the highest possible raise in her level. When the boss called her in and told her she was losing her job, she started laughing. “I thought he was joking,” she says. He wasn’t. “My boss said, ‘Please. Stop laughing’.”
Verma isn’t laughing anymore. Like many of the newly unemployed, she went through a series of emotional stages that resemble common reactions to death and divorce–the two traumas psychologists say most closely resemble firing. After shock comes anger and grief and then finally an acceptance of the inevitable. “Some people go through it all in two days,” says Lewis, the Atlanta psychologist. “Others take weeks and months. I think six to 12 hours of self-pity is OK, but after that you need to get on with it.”
Moral support: In recent months there has been a surge in membership of groups catering to dismissed workers. Forty Plus, a nationwide organization that specializes in job hunters 40 years of age and older, features a “job jury,” where job hunters have their resume critiqued by their peers. Church groups around the country have taken on the unemployed as a new ministry, offering emotional support, job-hunting assistance and personal-finance tips. Even state governments are getting into the act. California’s Employment Development Department has a special program for white-collar managers and projects aimed at two major industries: aerospace and electronics. The programs offer moral support as well as practical advice.
As time passes and the severance pay runs out, families are forced to make drastic revisions in long-held life plans. David Johnson, 30, earned more than $100,000 as a Wall Street mutual-fund manager. When he was fired in late January, his wife, Cindy, 30, was on maternity leave from her job as a buyer at Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan. Their son, Zachary, was just 2 months old and Cindy had been hoping to put off her return to full-time work to be home more with the baby. Instead, David has found himself playing Mr. Mom while Cindy has gone back to work full time at a Bloomingdale’s branch near their New Jersey home. David has had a number of promising interviews, but he’s given up speculating about how long his search will take. Instead, he tries to concentrate on the positive: time with his son. “It’s probably what has kept my spirits up,” he says. “I see it as an opportunity to get to know him.” They’re living on savings; Cindy’s salary covers no more than half of their monthly expenses, David says. Cindy sees their life as being in a kind of “holding pattern” and concedes that there have been moments of tension between them. “It’s what we don’t say to each other” in an effort to minimize strain, she says. “It’s very stressful.”
Long-term unemployment forces a major readjustment of a family’s emotional balance. Although some couples, like the Johnsons, say they are stronger for the experience, others find the mental strain is even worse than the financial strain. People who have lost jobs may be more susceptible to alcohol and drug abuse, says Stephen Pilster-Pearson, director of employee assistance at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Feelings of anger and betrayal may lead to family violence or divorce. “Those feelings have to go somewhere,” says Pilster-Pearson, “and one of those places, of course, is home.” Couples may find themselves fighting over seemingly small issues and saying more than they mean to. Comments like “My mother said I should never have married you and she was right” represent deep frustration over a situation that seems out of control. “All those unresolved issues that have been sort of pushed aside get let loose because there’s nothing co hold them back anymore,” Pilster-Pearson says.
Even those still on the job are not immune to anxiety and stress. A recent study by Brooks International, a management consulting firm, found that fewer than 24 percent of 11,000 workers surveyed expressed confidence in the long-term future of their jobs Employee paranoia is sometimes carried to extremes. Some middle managers at one particularly beleaguered Wall Street brokerage firm are so fearful of losing their jobs that they arrange to be out of the office on Friday, the day on which they believe they are most likely to get the ax. “They think that if they aren’t around, they might be able to dodge the pink slip for a while.” says one consultant. Other anxious executives try to seek out advance warning. William Morin, chairman of Drake Beam Morin, an outplacement firm, says he gets as many as 10 calls a week from friends who want to know if they have been singled out to be canned. “They constantly ask, ‘Am I on the list, Bill?’ I’ve never seen anything like it during all the years I’ve been in business.”
Fear isn’t the only emotion stalking the office. Survivors of mass layoffs often feel guilty receiving a paycheck while their friends and ex-colleagues are down at the unemployment office. There’s a feeling of “Why them and not me?” They also probably have to work even harder now that there are fewer people to share the load. All these issues demand special sensitivity from top management, says Joel Brockner of Columbia University’s graduate school of business Brockner, who has studied survivors’ reactions, says managers should be careful to explain the economic reasons behind the layoffs. “We can accept things better when we understand why they occurred,” he says. They should make sure that dismissals are handled “with dignity” and not callously. After the layoffs, they should emphasize the positive aspects of a newly streamlined organization: more opportunity for those still on board, new career paths, less bureaucracy and greater efficiency. It’s also important for managers to “play it straight,” Brockner says. If an employee asks about the possibility of future layoffs, “you can say, ‘None are planned. However, we can’t say for sure. It depends on how things go’.”
Even with the best of management, there’s no easy way to bridge the gap left by breaking a crucial clause in the unspoken contract between employee and employer. If loyalty and hard work no longer guarantee the payback of security, why should workers put the company’s interests before their own? John Fetcho was let go with one day’s notice last March after working more than a decade at a Chicago-area insurance brokerage firm. Although he managed to find another job in only three months, Fetcho, 33, learned an important lesson: never count on an employer. “I make a point of interviewing every couple of months, " he says, “more to keep my hand in it so it pushes me to keep a resume updated and my interview skills.” He has gained a new understanding of economic realities. “Unless you work for yourself, you’re always subject to the whims of the people who employ you,” he says. “If it’s a publicly held company, then it’s the bottom line” that counts, not years of dedicated service.
This newfound wisdom is one unanticipated benefit of joblessness; another plus is an unexpected opportunity to re-evaluate. Some white-collar workers may view joblessness as an opportunity to change professions and start over in a new direction at midlife. “People don’t look at alternatives until they are forced to,” says Laura Wada who was fired in June from her $30,000-a year administrative job after 11 years at GTE in Mountain View, Calif. “There is no time to re-evaluate your life when you’re on the treadmill.” At 40, she is planning to switch careers and is looking for a Job in human resources after taking courses in the subject. “In the ’90s,” she says, “people have to learn to be more flexible.”
As in most economic upheavals, there’s always someone who profits. In this case, it’s the outplacement firms hired to help laid-off professionals in their job search. The industry has grown by roughly a quarter in the past year, revenues are expected to hit $600 million, up from $400 million in 1989. “We may be turning out corporate America’s lights,” said William Morin. But even he strikes a cautionary note. “If we can’t find people jobs, we could be the last ones out the door.” No one is safe anymore.
Lynne Scanton, the head of two advertising publications, got the word from her boss to beef up her staff. She did. A few weeks later the publications had folded and both she and the staff were gone.
Michael Przekaza will soon be laid off his job as a supervisor for Crosfield Electronics in Manchester, NH. The bad news came only a few months after his wife, Catherine, also lost her job.
Rani Verma, 29, lost her job as a marketing manager at Sara Lee Bakery in Deerfield, Ill., when the company eliminated her department. When the boss told her, she thought he was joking.
Along with an overall slump in your industry or region, here are some other indications your job may be in danger. ..CN.-Your company has high debt, but low cash flow. Management has already tried an early-retirement buyout and a hiring freeze. You notice fewer ads for your company’s products. Your firm merges with another that duplicates your work. Your boss has gotten the ax, or your boss’s boss.
During the last recession in the early ’80s, Chicago bureau chief John McCormick talked to dozens of laid-off blue-collar workers for the 1983 cover story “Left Out.” Last week he asked several of those workers what advice they have for today’s jobless:
You might not think that Dominick Tardio, pourer of molten steel, would take pity on laid-off lawyers. But he does. “I know what it’s like when your supposedly secure industry falls apart,” he says. “We’re still digging ourselves out of the hole.” In the depths of a two-year layoff, Tardio gave his house back to the bank and moved his family in with his mother. Today Big Steel’s leaner wage scale keeps his pay near $30,000–about what it was a decade ago. His main advice for the new unemployed: don’t choke. “Job or no job, you won’t dry up and blow away. I honestly had to learn that we weren’t all going to die.”
Many victims of the rustbelt recession had to find entirely new careers. Kelli Schneiker of South Milwaukee, Wis., once stood in line with 20,000 other applicants for 200 advertised factory jobs at the A.O. Smith Corp. Today, after years of retraining, he’s a well-paid electrician at a utility company. “I tell my kids that college degrees alone won’t be enough,” he says. “When times turn tough you need marketable skills.” Others found the courage to go into business for themselves. Ted Hosea of Flint, Mich., sold two boats and spent his $37,000 buyout from General Motors to open Hit-N-run Billiards. “I made $27,000 last year, which is about what I earned at GM,” Hosea says. “The difference is that now I’ve got a business worth $150,000.”
Lean times: Years of scarcity have convinced many that in today’s economy, no job is secure forever. Don Brooks is i back at work on the Mesabi Iron Range of northern Minnesota after four years of intermittent layoffs. During the lean times, Brooks kept food on his family’s table by driving long distances for construction work. “You can’t outlive the threat that your industry may nose-dive,” he says. “That door can close any day.”
The mood on the factory floor is hardly smug: even in this recession, the least educated workers are likely to suffer most. University of Massachusetts economist Michael Podgursky says that in the early 1980s, the average white-collar victim went jobless for only 16 weeks, and went back to work at 92 percent of his old pay. For bluecollar workers, it was 30 weeks and 86 percent of the old paycheck. “Five years from now most of today’s white-collar jobless will be back on their feet with similar incomes,” Podgursky says. go-go fields such as real estate or investment may be an exception. “It’s important for them not to fixate on their go-go years,” he says. “Everyone knew those salaries couldn’t be sustained.”
Though painful, layoffs can sometimes bring welcome epiphanies. Seven years ago Jimmy Thomas of Rockford, Ill., was so broke he had his youthful-looking wife, Donna, tell bill collectors that, sorry, her parents weren’t home. Economic strains grew so great that the Thomases divorced. In time, though, they reunited. Today they juggle four jobs and earn $23,000 a year, less than the $28,000 Jimmy once earned at a warehouse. Their five children, says Donna, are richer for the struggle: “Without the problems they’d have been better off in a material way. But they’d have missed the pitfalls that teach you how to live.” After years of internal anguish, Jimmy Thomas has learned the most valuable lesson of all. “People crash when they can’t maintain the lifestyle they think they want,” he says. “You only need to worry about food and shelter. The rest is truly irrelevant. "
As the economy worsens, workers who get laid off are finding that it takes more and more to find another job.
Last month it took an average of 12 weeks for a jobless worker to get new employment–almost a full-week longer than it took at the same time last year.
But managerial and professional workers tend to be out of work even longer–by two or more weeks.
SOURCE: BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS
