On a morning when most of his neighbors were at work, Dan Skowron gazed down the length of a pool cue, aligning it with the 6-ball and the corner pocket.
His wife, Deb, was upstairs, getting ready for work. She had been putting in extra hours recently, every additional dollar forming a paper-thin barrier against the threat they might lose the house.
Dan was not sleeping well, and he had put on 10 pounds since losing his job several months earlier.
Lately, this dim basement rec room had become his refuge. Along one wall stood symbols of the good times-the awards from his years at Sears and the bowling trophies. Along another sat the embodiment of the present-the home computer that spat out resume after resume, cover letter after cover letter in his fruitless search for a job.
Skowron deftly nailed the 6-ball into the corner pocket. “A great way to relieve stress,” he said.
But the stress, of course, was still there.
Ten months earlier, on Jan. 25, 1993, the layoff juggernaut reached the unremarkable cubicle where Dan Skowron worked as an assistant buyer for Sears, Roebuck and Co.
On that day, Sears killed its legendary catalog and announced the closing of 230 stores, eliminating 50,000 jobs.
50,000 jobs.
The number was at once staggering and familiar, even expected. This was, after all, the age of “corporate downsizing,” a time to retool the American machinery for the global economy and the next century. And that meant firing thousands of workers who, through no fault of their own, had become excess baggage.
Sears’ stock went up nearly $2 on the dayof its announcement. That, however, offered little consolation to Dan Skowron.
Since that day a year ago, Skowron has been included in other dire numbers that tell something about the costs of this retooling.
He was one of 30,000 Sears workers to be laid off or bought out, with another 20,000 vacant jobs eliminated.
He helped set a record for layoffs-620,000 U.S. workers in 1993, by a conservative estimate.
He was a member of the burgeoning population of unemployed white-collar workers.
And in the fall, he became one of the 1.75 million Americans out of work six months or more-a number that was 50 percent higher than it had been at the depths of the recession in 1991.
Dan Skowron, after 18 years at Sears, was exiled to his basement rec room by an economy that sustained him for nearly two decades, then suddenly cut him loose.
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Most of those affected by the Sears restructuring were, like Skowron, decades-long Sears employees let go by a new management team pruning unprofitable parts of the company, the divisions that in 1992 led Sears to post its first loss since the Depression.
But others who worked for companies that did business with Sears bled, too, when the cuts were made.
They were witnesses to sweeping changes in the American workplace, which fed and fattened expectations in the decades after World War II, then grew meaner as its rewards thinned.
As one printer who lost his job because of the Sears restructuring put it: “The future isn’t what it used to be.”
Like the others at Sears, Kathy Millspaugh began her journey through the American job marketplace on that morning of Jan. 25.
As she hurried through the narrow corridors of the catalog headquarters in Skokie at 8:15 a.m., she saw knots of employees gathered, their bodies and faces tense.
She knew something was wrong.
Millspaugh had started at Sears in 1975, when a women’s polyester pants suit cost $36 in the Sears Christmas catalog.
Fresh out of high school, she took a job in the employee cafeteria, and, over the years, the company helped her work her way up to data-entry clerk. On that job, she supported herself and her teenage daughter.
Sears treated her so well for so long, in fact, that one would never think she had worked for the company only when it was in steady decline.
When she got to the home fashions department that morning, her boss was reading the layoff announcement.
“What’s going on?” she asked a colleague. At first, she didn’t believe the answer. Then she saw the tears and knew it was true.
“Overall, I feel positive about the things we’re announcing,” Sears Merchandise Group chief executive Arthur C. Martinez said in a video being shown to the employees, “because I believe they’re absolutely necessary to be put in place so we can become the kind of company we know we can be-strong, successful, a fierce competitor, nimble, profitable and, most important . . . a great place to work.”
Trouble was, very few of the people in Millspaugh’s building would be around to enjoy it.
When she left work that day, Millspaugh paused to give an interview to a television news crew. She was one of the few employees to break the Sears culture’s implicit code of silence.
“Everybody’s devastated,” she said.
Sears had been the epitome of the paternalistic corporation. It was a world unto itself, with an old, tradition-bound culture.
Employees’ homes were dutifully filled with Sears house brands such as Kenmore and Craftsman. Their conversations were so thick with Searspeak that the company once issued a phrase book to new employees.
None was surprised that Sears imported an outsider-Martinez, hired from Saks Fifth Avenue-to wield the ax. One of their own never could have done it.
Some accepted the layoffs as necessary. Others would resent them more and more in coming months, even as the balance sheet improved and newspapers and magazines called Martinez “the savior at Sears.”
For Millspaugh, the devastation of that first morning slowly eased. In recent years, she had dreamed of running her own business. A sunny and gregarious 34-year-old, she thought she could start a company that arranged parties for people too busy to do it themselves.
A few months after that January day, Sears offered to rehire Millspaugh. Exhilarated by her liberation, she turned down the job.
“Sears did me a favor,” said Millspaugh. “I want to do something else. It’s good this happened.”
She was going to be one of the winners, an entrepreneur bold enough to reach for the brass ring.
But nearly a year after she was let go, Millspaugh asked Sears for another job, even if it meant one that paid far less than she earned before.
She finally realized just how tough things were.
As a result of corporate downsizing, layoffs reached 1,500 per business day in 1992. A year later, the clip accelerated to 2,370.
A conservative body count for 1993: 102,288 aerospace jobs, 94,831 computer industry jobs, 82,514 retail jobs, 48,621 communications jobs, 29,992 transportation jobs, 25,953 health-care jobs.
“Many people working today should consider themselves employed on a short-term basis,” warned James E. Challenger, president of a Chicago-based outplacement consulting company, Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Numerous studies suggest that sweeping layoffs hurt morale and fail to bring the productivity benefits managers hoped for.
Yet the slashing continues. The American Management Association estimates that 40 percent of companies will cut jobs in 1994.
At the little Sears store in Fox Lake, the job cuts the company announced in January went into effect on a foggy March night.
The last customer to shop there strolled out of the tool department, put a discounted rabbet plane on the checkout counter and handed his Discover Card to Delores Smak, a 63-year-old cashier wearing a sad smile.
“I used to work here,” the customer, Gene Holland, told her as she ran his card.
“Eighteen-and-a-half years,” said Smak, trumping him.
“It’s a shame,” Holland told her as he picked up his bag. “It really bothers me. It was a landmark. I came on my honeymoon to Fox Lake. My wife and I looked in the Sears window and looked at the stuff, because we didn’t have any money then.”
Smak nodded.
After Holland left the store, Smak cleared out her register and slid the drawer closed for the last time. “Goodbye, cash register,” she said.
In the office, a computer screen asked auto department manager Tom MacKenzie a question: “Will the store be open tomorrow?”
For years, whenever he closed he punched “y” for “yes,” because the Fox Lake Sears store was open seven days a week. He didn’t know what would happen if he punched “n” for no.
So he punched “y” anyway, even though his was one of 230 Sears stores that would never open their doors to the public again.
When Tom MacKenzie turned on the alarm and stepped outside that night, he left behind a world that was secure and stable, but as outdated as the 1960s architecture of the store.
Tom MacKenzie-tall, fit and always one of the smartest people in the room-had lived his entire life on a Sears paycheck.
His father had worked 31 years for Sears, only to die of a heart attack two weeks after he retired. Tom had started working for his dad at a Sears in Rockford when he was a teenager, carrying lawn mowers from customers’ cars to the service department.
The company’s payroll had supplied him from childhood into adulthood, and now, into fatherhood, with the homes he had lived in, the used cars he had bought, the meals he had eaten.
By the time he was 33, Tom MacKenzie had put in 16 years at Sears. By then, he recognized he was working for an anachronism-his wife had applied to Wal-Mart a while back and was offered a manager’s job near minimum wage, about one-fourth what he was making.
“The problem with Sears Roebuck is that they have taken care of their people, and that has affected their bottom line,” he said. “Retail is becoming an industry where you can make a wage, not a living.”
And he needed a good-paying job.
His wife wasn’t making much in her fledgling real estate career. They had a 7-month-old son, and they had a $980 monthly mortgage payment on their 45-acre hobby farm near Harvard, just south of the Wisconsin border.
Tom MacKenzie’s greatest problem, though, was that when he stepped out of his Sears uniform that night, he had no idea what kind of uniform he wanted to replace it with. “I don’t know what I want to do,” he said.
MacKenzie found himself looking for a new job at a time when good jobs were becoming scarce.
In 1973, economist Martin Feldstein described the job market in the 1960s and early ’70s as one “in which almost everyone who is out of work can find his usual type of work in a relatively short time.”
At that time, Sears was an unassailable retail giant with sales equaling about 1 percent of gross national product. Twenty years later, the jobs economy and the company were both anemic.
The number of jobs offering pensions and health benefits plunged in the 1980s. Even wages were falling-11 percent from 1979 to 1991, according to studies by Harvard economist James Medoff.
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute found:
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– White-collar wages fell more than 5 percent from 1979 to 1992.
– Entry-level college graduates’ wages had fallen 3 percent since 1987.
– Wages for new high school graduates fell 26 percent for men and 15 percent for women from 1979 to 1991.
How have Americans compensated for slipping wages?
Many have found that two incomes are needed to keep a household running. And many are putting in more time at work.
The trouble is, mass layoffs such as Sears’ make finding even one reliable income more difficult. Not only do they directly eliminate jobs; but, like other economic phenomena, the effects “trickle down.”
Eighty percent of the curtains made in Kellwood Corp.’s factory in Lewisburg, W.Va., were sold through the Sears catalog. When Sears killed the catalog, Kellwood shut the plant.
In April, 168 Kellwood employees were pitched into a local economy where the unemployment rate was nearly 2 1/2 times the national average and 30 percent of local workers were considered “underemployed”-part-time workers who want full-time jobs.
The plant, built by the county 20 years ago to help attract jobs, now stands empty.
“There is a desperation for jobs out there,” said Lewisburg Mayor Phil Gainer, noting that when Kmart opened a store nearby, 1,300 people applied for 150 jobs.
In March, a Fortune 500 clothing manufacturer, Oxford Industries, told 70 of its workers in Alma, Ga., that their plant was closing. The reason: The company lost a $13 million account when Sears left the catalog business.
“When you talk about 70 jobs in this town, that’s a lot of jobs,” said Freddy Gardner, publisher of the Alma Times-Statesman, a weekly newspaper. “There’s been a terrible influx of women coming in here, looking for a job.”
Nanette Bellefleur was an account executive with Oxford Industries in its Chicago office. At 32, she handled the Sears catalog account, and she managed the office of 14 employees.
Her work was important and filled up her life. But the instant she heard that Sears was closing its catalog, she knew her job was in danger. When accounts disappear, account executives usually follow.
By summer, Oxford was trying to sublet its office space on Jackson Boulevard after cutting its Chicago staff to three. Bellefleur was not one of the three.
At first, the idea of being jobless was shocking to Nanette Bellefleur, but she quickly got used to it. She even figured she knew how to make it work in her favor.
All confidence, she went to London and took a patternmaking class. It helped broaden her knowledge of the clothing industry and added a nice line to her already impressive resume.
She decided to get a new job no later than August.
Come November, though, she was still unemployed and had spun into a self-described panic. Her savings were almost gone, and there was no job in sight.
“The same thing has been happening to all my friends in middle management,” she said.
In the last decade, the big companies that had been virtual breeding farms for middle managers began slaughtering their offspring.
Middle managers make up 5 to 8 percent of the work force but account for 19 percent of the layoffs since 1988, a 1993 survey by the American Management Association found.
The broader effects of Sears’ cuts were not limited to Fortune 500 companies, nor to middle managers.
“Who would have ever thought that Sears’ (cuts) would affect me?” asked Dick Bagdon, a 54-year-old photographer laid off from Licata Associates, a Chicago studio that relied on the Sears catalog for about one-quarter of its business.
And the trickle-down gets even finer than that. Lunch-counter business, for example, dropped dramatically at the Fox Lake Woolworth’s store after the Sears store next door closed.
Nowhere, however, were the ripple effects of the Sears restructuring felt more profoundly than at R.R. Donnelley & Sons, the world’s largest commercial printer, with $4.2 billion in sales in 1992.
On a day the company happened to release record earnings, Donnelley announced it would close its oldest plant, the Lakeside Press on Chicago’s Near South Side, where the Sears catalog had been printed.
In a single blow, 660 high-paying jobs were targeted for elimination. Already, 220 workers have lost their jobs.
Donnelley gave maintenance worker L.C. Anderson a generous retirement package, but it didn’t look like it would be enough to live on.
Besides, even at 63, L.C. Anderson wasn’t ready to retire. With endless energy and arms that looked like a high school athlete’s, he was built for work.
He and his wife, Marion, had raised four children on his Donnelley salary. Once their children had grown, though, they opened their home and began taking in foster children. “We went out and got ourselves another batch,” Anderson said with a laugh.
When L.C. Anderson stopped working in March, there were three foster children and three adopted children living with him and Marion in their South Side home.
But Anderson wasn’t worried about supporting them. He would just go out and get another job.
In 1956, he had left a job in a laundry plant in Mississippi and quickly found better work in a Chicago bakery.
Two years later, while coming home from work, his bus passed the stately, massive brick Lakeside Press, which lorded over South Lake Shore Drive like a baron’s castle. Working in there would be a step up, he figured.
He got off the bus, walked into the building and found a foreman. The foreman looked him over, then hired him on the spot.
That’s how easy it was to get work in 1958.
How much harder could it be now? He loved working. Even after 35 years at Donnelley, he enjoyed going in every day.
“Even if it’s $3 an hour, it’ll be good,” he said in March, just after leaving Donnelley. “It will give us something for our kids.”
Months later, after meeting nothing but frustration in his search for a minimum-wage job, L.C. Anderson stopped looking for work. He accepted that he was retired.
With Sears’ announcement last Jan. 25, thousands of lives were sent in unanticipated directions.
Dan Skowron tried for two hours that morning to call his wife to tell her he had lost his job, but he couldn’t get a phone line out. His co-workers had the lines clogged with the same bad news.
When he finally did get through, his wife took the bombshell well. But she had experience with such things, having lost her job in a mass firing when the original Midway Airlines closed in 1991.
Once he had that precious line, Dan Skowron, an assistant buyer for Sears, immediately began using it to call the suppliers he had dealt with every day. But this time he wasn’t buying; he was selling. He was asking for a job.
Inside a single day, Skowron, whose 18-year Sears career spanned half his life, had taken the news of his layoff and started on the journey back to the working world.
A year later, however, the stocky, plain-spoken man remained on that journey. He made those phone calls from home and took refuge in his basement rec room.
By then, he had come to accept a central, dispiriting reality of the American workplace in the 1990s: When he does finally land a job, it likely won’t be as good as the one he lost.
He learned that lesson over the summer by watching what happened to his older brother, Frank, who had also been an assistant buyer at Sears and worked in a cubicle down the aisle from Dan’s.
On the day the announcement came, Frank Skowron walked outside to the smokers’ garage. He didn’t want a cigarette-he had quit smoking-but wanted to clear his head.
Like Dan, Frank had never worked anywhere but Sears. At home, as was customary in the corporate religion, he had a Sears washer, dryer, stove, refrigerator, TV, furnace, water heater and garage-door opener.
“I’ve only been here 22 years and I’m considered a baby,” said Frank Skowron quietly. “If you stayed, you were hooked.”
Then another thought occurred to him.
“I’ve never written a resume in my life.”
Within weeks, he would write one. And he’d send out more than 125 copies of it. One of them would end up on the desk of a person who would offer him a job-and a 30 percent pay cut from his Sears salary.
———-
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Next: Days of unemployment.