Nanette Bellefleur was dressed for success.
Tall and commanding in her most serious suit-one she bought in London-she commuted from her Lincoln Park condo to her Loop office and settled in behind her desk.
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But there was no work to be done. No appointments to keep. Not even a boss to impress.
Bellefleur was unemployed, living a facsimile of her working life and wearing a suit intended to impress only herself. It was one of many psychological life jackets she reached for.
“I’m in the middle of Lake Michigan,” she said. “I can’t see land anywhere.” That image surfaced often in her mind.
The offices around hers were empty, just open doors and shadows. Bellefleur’s company failed to sublet the space after cutting its Chicago staff to three from 14, so it let Bellefleur use her old office as a “command center” for her job search.
That search grew more desperate with each passing month.
In May 1993 Nanette Bellefleur, 32, was cast into a period of downtime, the agonizing expanse between jobs that often comes to feel like a lonesome social and economic exile. But it’s really a very crowded place.
Bellefleur, an account executive with a clothing manufacturer, was left jobless by the restructuring of Sears, Roebuck and Co. in January 1993. The “downsizing” eliminated 50,000 jobs at Sears and uncounted thousands at companies that did business with the giant retailer-including Bellefleur’s former employer, Oxford Industries.
These workers suddenly were pushed to the other side of the nation’s workday-a place where the want ads are studied like scripture, where “the office” becomes a family computer on the dining room table, where some days the only conversations are with voice mail.
“It is hanging over your head every minute of the day,” said Bellefleur. “I wake up in the middle of the night; there it is. No matter what I do, it is there.”
Nanette Bellefleur began her journey full of confidence. In May, she set what seemed like a reasonable goal: A job by Aug. 1.
Through the summer, she commuted to the nearly vacant space where she had handled the $13 million Sears account and managed the office.
Early on, she fired off 75 resumes to headhunters and even got a few return calls, though none was promising.
In good weeks, she was there from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., five days a week. In bad weeks, she showed up once or twice. Over time, more weeks were bad weeks, and the pressure began to build.
Searching for a release, Bellefleur took dance lessons. She started with Latin-style dance, then signed up for ballroom. Short on cash but long on time, she began answering phones at the dance studio to defray the costs.
Eventually, the one-time account executive was dancing seven nights a week, blowing away the pressures of her job search.
In August, as Sears was riding high on the news that sales at stores open at least a year increased more than any other major retailer’s, Bellefleur confronted the fact that her Aug. 1 deadline obviously had been naive.
By November, dance seemed the most important thing in her life. She wasn’t going into the office as regularly, and her confidence was ebbing.
“The ’80s are over,” she said. “Employers are unwilling to invest in people. Fewer and fewer people are doing more and more work for corporations. They are not going to go back to the freewheeling hiring.”
But for all the angst of unemployment, Bellefleur discovered that joblessness had an unforeseen benefit.
“For 11 years, I was in my own little world,” she said. “I was queen of my domain. I was very happy in my job, and I didn’t need very much else. Now I find out that I need people, and that has made me into a nicer person.”
By December, that consolation was becoming increasingly important. With money running low and no job in sight, Bellefleur decided to register with a temporary-jobs agency to do clerical work.
“I look at all these unemployed people and wonder how they are going to fit into the world,” she said. “I have a feeling I am going to end up someplace completely unexpected.”
Though the two never met, Bellefleur had a colleague of sorts in Frank Skowron.
After combing the newspaper each morning, Skowron painstakingly pecked out cover letters. When the family computer was broken, he used the old manual typewriter.
A lifer at Sears, he had never written a resume before the layoff. Now an expert, he had developed a mailing strategy: Send out resumes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays so they hit personnel desks late in the week, after the flood of letters from other applicants slowed to a trickle. After all, a Sunday want ad can draw hundreds of responses by Thursday.
But of the more than 125 letters he wrote, only a handful yielded responses. It seemed as if his resumes fell into a void.
When Skowron was an assistant buyer for Sears, he had ready access to management at his company and those he dealt with. Now unemployed, he found it mysterious, even suspicious, that managers never seemed to be in when he phoned. His calls rarely were returned, and even a rejection letter was so rare it became a welcome courtesy.
“The uncertainty is the frustration of it all,” said Skowron, 43. “I would feel better if someone would say, `Sorry,’ or, `We can’t use you.’ “
On the day of an interview, his mood was up. In the following days, when all he got were evasive responses to his follow-up calls, he turned grim, even bitter.
“Tell companies, `Don’t screw around with people.’ I won’t be thrilled to have someone say, `We don’t want you.’ But at least you’re being honest with me. If I interviewed badly, if I drooled, tell me. Then I can improve in the next interview.”
His unemployment started grimly. When he come home after his last day, May 7, Terri, his wife, knew he had cried.
“Your heart had to go out to him,” she said later. “After 25 years. After 25 years. You knew this was over. This was it. There was an emptiness. I felt for him and I knew how he felt. He came in and was just empty.”
She decided they should go out to dinner. At the restaurant, there were long periods of silence. Then he talked about friends at Sears. Then he talked about money.
Over the summer, Skowron stayed home with the two teenage kids; his wife worked overtime processing insurance claims. She wanted to put something away for when the severance-pay checks stopped coming in March.
“As much as I worry about it, my wife’s worried more,” said Skowron. “She’s worried about losing the house.”
As he speaks, a tattoo of a heart inscribed with “TTS” peeks out from his sleeve-the initials stand for Terri, Tricia and Steve, his wife, daughter and son.
By late summer, when the family was supposed to have taken a trip to Florida, Skowron was staying up late, watching sports and movies on TV. He avoided alcohol, fearing where that could lead.
It was becoming harder to get up at 7 a.m. “I find myself shutting off the alarm and saying, `Why should I get up?’ “
“You can’t enjoy anything,” he said one August afternoon. “I went out golfing today with a friend, and you have to force yourself to enjoy things. You feel guilty enjoying things. I’m not working, so I can’t enjoy myself.”
If there is one subject that rankles his normally placid wife, it is Sears.
“I’m still angry,” she said. “I hate Sears. I hate what they did to him. I hate what they did to everybody.
“I was a loyal Sears shopper. All our appliances are Sears’. I try to avoid shopping at Sears now. It’s all I can do to step in that store now.”
Frank Skowron knew that according to certain immutable laws of unemployment, his past success was making future success difficult.
“I’m afraid employers will see my experience and say I’m overqualified,” said Skowron. But “I figure at most I’ll have to take a 20 percent pay cut.”
When his downtime finally came to an end, the cut was closer to 30 percent.
“It was the worst year of my life,” he said in retrospect.
Dan Skowron was happy when Frank, his older brother, got a job and pulled himself out of the tough hunt for work.
But in Dan Skowron’s house, where the 36 weeks of severance pay from Sears were carefully numbered on the kitchen calendar, time was running out.
“It’s kind of hard to keep your head up in front of your kid now,” said Dan Skowron, a stocky, plain-spoken man.
His 8-year-old son, Ryan, asked the most questions: “Why did Sears have to close?” he asked over breakfast one June morning. “Is it the same thing that happened to Mom at Midway?”
It nearly was.
Deb Skowron lost her job in 1991 when the original Midway Airlines folded. “I’ve been there and I know what it’s like to be unemployed,” she said. “I was unemployed three months; it felt like forever.
“You never forget it,” she said.
In November, Dan Skowron passed an ominous milepost and joined the 1.75 million people who had been out of work at least six months. That figure is 50 percent higher than when the recession hit bottom in 1991, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
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Things were so bad that 1993 was about to set a record for layoffs. One estimate that 620,000 U.S. workers were laid off was considered conservative but still record-breaking.
And layoffs tell only part of the story. More and more companies have come to rely on early retirement to eliminate employees. The packages are called optional, but many who take them do so because they believe that behind the option lurks a threat of layoffs.
L.C. Anderson had such fears when he took an early-retirement package from R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., which printed the Sears catalog at the Lakeside Press plant, where Anderson worked. After Sears killed its catalogs, Donnelley announced it would close the Near South Side plant, where 660 people worked.
When he took the offer, Anderson also was confident he could find a new job.
After his last day at Donnelley, he soon found he had trouble sleeping. It wasn’t the worrying, though, that kept him up at night. He just wasn’t tired.
After 35 years of long, hard days at Donnelley, he had been accustomed to being worn out when his head hit the pillow.
Now, Anderson still had energy to burn at the end of the day.
The worrying he saved for the daytime. Being around the house, he noticed how many lights were on and became almost compulsive about turning them off.
There were six children in the house, three foster children and three children he and his wife, Marion, had adopted. He had never noticed how long they could keep their heads in the refrigerator, letting all the cold air out, driving up the bills.
One day in March, one of the children, Marcello, asked Anderson’s wife how much the grocery bills would be if only she and L.C. lived in the house.
Marion told her they would be about $30 or $40 a week. Marcello had seen the grocery bills of $150 to feed the six children.
“Oh,” she said to Marion. “Then we’re gone.”
L.C. and Marion assured the children they wouldn’t have to leave. But still, he was worried. “I’m the breadwinner,” he said just weeks after leaving Donnelley. “Here it is, Thursday, payday, and I don’t have a check.”
So 63-year-old L.C. Anderson began looking for a minimum-wage job.
In April, he interviewed with a chain of electronics stores moving into the area. The stores needed stock boys, and Anderson told his interviewers he’d take anything, even if it were only a few hours a week.
“The pay is not that good, but that’s OK,” he said afterward.
He failed to get the job.
Anderson was competing with countless workers also willing to accept minimum wage. Hadn’t 4,000 people waited in line at a job fair in Harvey that month?
By the end of April, Anderson was discouraged. Things weren’t as easy as they had been back in 1958, when he walked into Lakeside Press and got a job just by asking the foreman for one.
“Now I find it’s almost like hitting a brick wall,” he said.
During the spring, he looked for work every day, but that began to change. “I’m slacking off a bit,” he said. “It’s just not there.”
He still was restless but worked hard around the house to make himself as tired as he could. But still, he was edgy.
“He’s grouchier every week,” Marion said during the spring. “He acts like he’s worried all the time-`Don’t mention money to me’-I can’t mention anything.”
By the end of summer, Anderson’s mood had changed once again. He no longer was looking for work and had come to accept that he would never again earn a paycheck.
The family made adjustments, cut everyone’s allowance, and the bills were being paid.
By November, L.C. Anderson was smiling when he talked about his retirement. A man in love with work had finally taught himself to live without it.
“It’s working out good,” he said. “I’m finally beginning to get quite a bit of rest.”
About 5.4 million retired people would rather be working, according to an unpublished study by the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts. Half of those want to work for financial reasons, half for social reasons.
“A lot of people take early retirement thinking this is a good time to start a new career, only to be devastated to find age discrimination is still rampant and they can’t find another job,” said Laurie McCann, staff attorney for the American Association of Retired Persons.
Though early-retirement packages often are lucrative, they can contain drawbacks that take years to surface.
A 65-year-old has a life expectancy of 17 years. Even with inflation of just 3 percent a year, a retirement package not adjusted for inflation would lose 40 percent of its buying power over those 17 years, according to government statistics.
One pain of early retirement shows itself quickly: Many who take the packages naively assume they will soon find another job.
Lyle Felsenthal, working hard to find a job that would end his early retirement, strode into an office where several middle-age men in suits sat swapping tips about jobs.
“Hi Jim, did you get hold of Carl?” asked Felsenthal, a 52-year-old former Sears executive.
“Not yet,” Jim said. “Haven’t had time. I had an exciting day today. I had an interview, and by the time I got home at 4, they’d already called, and they want to see me again tomorrow.”
“That’s great,” said Felsenthal. “That’s wonderful.”
Nearby, a man in a pinstripe suit fiddled with the copy machine until a woman showed him how to work it. “Now I have a new skill to put on my resume,” he quipped.
Welcome to another Tuesday night meeting of the unemployed in the Networking Group of the Career Resource Center in Lake Forest.
Soon, all were gathered around the table, day planners open before them, jotting notes with sleek Cross pens.
Lyle Felsenthal, who lives in Highland Park, had no desire to leave his job as national quality manager for Brand Central at Sears. But the retirement offer was generous and, as important, Felsenthal thought he could find a new job after Sears.
So Felsenthal, like 3,400 others, took an early-retirement package from Sears as part of its restructuring.
To introduce the package to workers, the company staged workshops in suburban hotels to discuss life after Sears. In one exercise, the employees were asked to list what they would do in their first day of retirement. Many couldn’t think of things to do beyond noon.
“I’m too young to not be working,” said Felsenthal, whose youngest daughter is in college. “I have another 5, 10, 15 years left in me.”
In a way, Felsenthal still is working, putting in eight hours a day looking for a job. He has mailed 1,200 resumes to executive recruiters alone. He makes 40, 50, sometimes 60 phone calls a day. His calendar typically is booked with three job-related interviews a day.
At the session, a formerly unemployed “networking alum” was marched out as proof that the others, too, could find jobs. Then the 24 people around the table (including two other Sears castoffs) introduced themselves and described the kinds of jobs they wanted. All were hoping that somehow one of these other unemployed people would give them a lead.
“The odds of finding a job are murderous with both recruiters and job ads,” said facilitator Tom Slocum. “Most get jobs through friends and influential people.”
When the meeting ended, Felsenthal looked over his notes. One item had a star next to it: The executive who once made a six-figure income at Sears made a note of where he could get 1,000 business cards printed for $10.95.
Felsenthal, who wants to manage a small company, attends two other networking groups. One is for senior executives only, and that exclusivity is strictly maintained.
“This is a group of guys who have had salaries of $100,000 or more,” said the group’s facilitator, an unemployed executive in his 50s.
“I get a phone call once in a while and it will be from a district sales manager who wants to come to the group,” said the facilitator. “I hate to have to say, `You don’t make the cut.’ “
The facilitator did not want his name or the suburb where the group meets published.
“I don’t attempt to get publicity for the group,” he said, “because I’m fearful I’ll be buried.”
At 53, just two years shy of the “double nickel”-55-that would give him full retirement benefits, Rich Settey lost his job at the R.R. Donnelley plant where the Sears catalog had been printed.
In May, after collecting unemployment for just 10 weeks, he found a job at a printing plant in Marengo. Although he was commuting 100 miles a day from his home in Lansing, he believed he was lucky to have a job.
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After 14 weeks, however, things fell apart again, in a familiar way. The Marengo printing company lost a big client. “It’s happened to me twice this year,” he said, shaking his head.
Things were looking up again when Donnelley flew him to Colorado for an interview at a company plant there. The interview went well and Settey figured he had the job. Early the next morning, he was told he did not.
Desperate for work, he registered at a temporary-help agency, a particularly fertile part of the current economy.
Reluctant to assume all the liabilities that go along with hiring full-time workers, more and more employers have been using temporary workers to increase their staffs. Temporary jobs have been one of the fastest-growing parts of the workplace: More than one-quarter of the jobs created in the recovery have been temporary, an unprecedented portion.
Manpower Inc., a temporary-help company, had just the job for Rich Settey, who had put in 33 years at Donnelley. Manpower had a client, a printing company, that had a staffing shortage and needed temporary workers. The name of the company: R.R. Donnelley.
When he worked for Donnelley at Lakeside Press, Settey made $21 an hour. Now, working weekends at Donnelley through Manpower, he was getting $12 an hour.
Donnelley had no need for Rich Settey, the full-time worker. But it did need Rich Settey, the temp.
On a typical weekend, he awoke at 3 a.m. Saturday and drove 100 miles to a Donnelley plant in Warsaw, Ind. He put in a 12-hour shift, then went to a room at a Motel 6 and tried, usually unsuccessfully, to sleep. The next morning, he reported for another 12-hour shift.
By the end of the summer, Settey and his wife, Gloria, thought they should get out from under their mortgage and real estate taxes, and they tried to sell the Lansing home they had lived in for 10 years.
By October, they had signed a contract with a buyer for their house, and they hoped to close the sale in January. Convinced that he would have to leave Illinois to get a job, Settey stopped sending out resumes.
Those resumes hadn’t done much for him, anyway. For a whole summer spent “sitting by the phone,” Rich Settey did not get a single phone call from a prospective employer.
“It just goes on and on and on,” said Gloria. “I just want it to get over with. It’s been nine months of waiting for something to happen.”
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Next: Workers reinventing themselves.