All six people seated around the faux marble conference table had good reason to believe their instructor when he said the age of mammoth, paternalistic corporations was waning.
After all, each had spent a long career at Sears, Roebuck and Co., a complacent business that always paid well, was generous with benefits and never seemed to fire anyone.
But on Jan. 25, 1993, their company announced a top-to-bottom restructuring to try to halt a two-decade-long slide. Suddenly, 50,000 jobs that once had seemed untouchable were wiped out-including theirs.
If CEOs were compelled to “reinvent” their companies, well, these workers would do the same with their careers. So, with varying degrees of realism, they enrolled in a class to learn how to become entrepreneurs.
Seated at that table on an August day were Brian Barnes and Ed Colaianni, who once bought products for the Sears catalog and who now wanted to start a business helping companies comply with safety regulations.
Down the table, Kathy Millspaugh, a Sears data-entry clerk, dreamed of forming a company that would arrange parties for rich and busy clients.
One man at the table planned to make medicine cabinets from recycled plastic, and a woman wanted to open an import business.
The sixth person wanted to become a consultant on how companies could be “re-engineered” to cut costs and become more efficient. Not surprisingly, she was one of the first to land a contract.
Like countless other Americans, these former Sears workers were trying to transform themselves so they could fit into the complex, unforgiving economy emerging at the end of the 20th Century.
But while companies can reinvent themselves by killing a division or firing workers, those who have been cast off face a much tougher task. How can they make themselves more competitive, more viable in a layoff-happy day when talent and initiative often play little role in whether a worker keeps a job?
Fired workers are packing computer classes and retraining courses, even though such courses offer no guarantees of new jobs.
Some, believing they must adapt or die, enroll in college or use federal funds to take courses. Others, just as intent on changing, go it alone.
A pressman studies to become a machinist. Fashion buyers create small businesses. An auto-department manager joins the mortgage banking industry.
When all is said and done, about the only thing certain in such transformations is that they are fraught with uncertainty.
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One worker dislocated by the Sears cuts summed up the anxiety best: “Will I make it? Will I be able to do it? I don’t even know if this is what I want to do.”
Joe Nagel, old enough to be the father of the other students in Classroom 709, wasn’t back at school to improve his lot in life. He was just trying not to slide too far behind.
He hoped that with a new degree, he’d be able to get a job that paid him about half what he made before he lost his old one.
Ramrod straight in his seat, the 46-year-old former pressman was a study in preparedness: His workbook was neatly folded to Page 91. His left hand held a sharp No. 2 pencil, aching to be used.
His eyes were locked on the professor, who posed a question to the class: “What do you think would be the next step here to build this part?”
Nagel’s eyes darted down to the blueprint in his textbook. Then his deep voice rose above another student’s. “Drill?” he said.
It sounded weak. He said it again. “Drill.”
“No,” said the instructor. “The last thing you want to do is what you said-drill. I’m sorry, sir, you just ruined this part.
“You’re fired,” the professor added.
The joke was closer to the truth than the teacher might have known. After all, Nagel was sitting in that classroom at Moraine Valley Community College because he had lost his job.
Nagel had put in 25 years at R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. when Sears did away with its catalog. Donnelley, in response, decided to shut its Lakeside Press plant, which printed the catalog, targeting more than 600 jobs for elimination.
“When I’m sitting in class, at times I feel like I’m brain dead and I don’t know what I’m doing,” said Nagel. “It’s a real struggle for me.
“Sometimes I’ll be sitting in class and I’ll just ask myself, `What am I doing here? Why am I here?’ “
The reason was that he heard there are not enough trained people to program the machines used in modern industry. In changing careers, he was aiming at a growing field.
“This is the future, and it is here now,” he said. “I can’t sit (at home) for another 20 years just doing nothing.”
After realizing long ago that Donnelley might someday shut the old plant where he worked, Nagel had been saving money and paying debts before he heard of the layoffs.
When he lost his job, he quickly went to the Private Industry Council, a federally financed non-profit agency that tries to match dislocated workers with jobs. He was told about several careers, including the one he chose to pursue, machine tools.
Programs under the federal Job Training Partnership Act will pay his tuition for the two years it will take him to earn a degree. While he’s in school, his wife’s salary and their savings should keep the household afloat.
Back in school, it didn’t take him long to realize he was a bit out of his element, even though this was the same college he had attended half a lifetime ago.
“It’s really hard when you have kids in your class thinking that you’re administering the class or that you’re the professor,” he said. “I just try and tell them, `Hey, I’m here just like you. . . . I’m a student.’ “
Nagel estimates a typical starting machinist’s salary-around $28,000-is a little more than half what an average pressman made at Donnelley, including overtime. But he is satisfied with the route he’s taking.
“I figure, I’ll do this, see how I like it and try my hand at the job,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to lose, and, besides, what’s my alternative?”
The government knows that the country’s workers need to reinvent themselves. It just hasn’t figured out how to help all of them do it.
Even though the federal government spent $1.6 billion on job training for about 900,000 people in 1993, there is little satisfaction with what that money bought.
“We do not have a good system,” conceded Mary Meagher, a spokeswoman for Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who has called his agency’s programs a “patchwork quilt.”
“Information is hard to come by,” Meagher said. “Dislocated workers don’t always qualify for the benefits. In short, the system doesn’t work well.”
Under the current system of government programs, for example, the reason a worker has lost a job-the Clean Air Act, imports, military spending cuts-has to fall into a certain category. If two workers at a paper plant-a cupmaker and a streamermaker-lost their jobs, the cupmaker might qualify for money, while the streamermaker might not.
“The system is a mess,” said V.W. Souveraff, executive director of the National Center for Career Change in Walnut Creek, Calif. “It is lacking, except in the elementary areas. Skilled people don’t get the attention they need. I hear from people all the time who said they just weren’t helped.”
How bad does it get? A recent internal audit by the Labor Department found that its Trade Adjustment Assistance Program, designed to retrain workers dislocated by foreign trade, had become more of a welfare fund than a training program.
The audit found that half the eligible workers in the $200 million program weren’t enrolling in training courses but still collected the extended unemployment benefits meant to support them while they were in school.
Most of those who did finish training weren’t getting good jobs. While 80 percent of the workers found jobs within a year after they completed the program, a third settled for wages of less than 80 percent of what they made before. Furthermore, the workers kept those jobs for an average of only eight months.
Only 19 percent of the retrained workers found jobs that used their new training and paid at least 80 percent of their previous wages.
Training seemed like a good idea to Don Douglas when he was laid off after 16 years at R.R. Donnelley.
The working world seemed to be changing rapidly. He had long assumed that his son would follow him into Donnelley’s Lakeside Press plant, just as Douglas had followed his father there.
Once laid off, the idea seemed sadly quaint to him.
“We were going to keep it a generational thing,” he said.
Douglas, who had been a pressman at Donnelley, picked out some courses at Joliet Junior College-he took classes in interviewing skills, resume writing and job networking.
And he decided he needed more, though he wasn’t sure which direction to go. Douglas decided it was imperative that he get instruction in computers. He signed up for a general introductory computer course and a word-processing class.
“I felt I needed to get some computer literacy for the business world,” said Douglas, a stocky, bearded 43-year-old Romeoville resident. “The college was trying to channel people into computer courses. Everybody knows you need to know computers.”
Shortly before Douglas began his computer courses, he was hired by a Sweden-based printing firm with offices in Chicago.
As it turned out, nothing he was planning to study really applied to the job he took.
“I guess I didn’t need those courses after all,” he said.
In Paul Kriks’ view, no class could teach him how to become owner of his own business.
“I was convinced that unless the people who give the seminars ran their own business, it wouldn’t do any good,” he said. “There’s no how-to book. No one can prepare you to deal with the Department of Agriculture, unemployment, Social Security, the government, the state, the lawyer, the tax accountant. It’s mostly error, no trial.”
Over the last six years, Kriks, 46, had come to expect that big layoffs eventually would come to Sears. So he began trying to picture himself as something other than an assistant buyer for the company’s catalog.
“I said to myself, `What else can I do? What am I good at?’ I’m not an expert on anything other than what I learned at Sears,” said Kriks. “I looked at alternatives. I said to myself, `Owning or investing in my own business.’ At least I had some control or some recourse.”
What he didn’t have was a clear idea as to what enterprise would suit him best.
Eventually, Kriks narrowed his options to three: a tropical-fish store (he had bred fish at home), a hobby shop (because, as the owner of a big sandbox, he was “still a kid at heart”) or a custom woodworking store (he had worked around tools all his life).
By April 23, his last day at Sears, only one decision had been made for sure: Kriks would join the swelling ranks of people-640,000 in 1992 alone-who had decided to start businesses.
One outplacement firm reported that year that 20 percent of its clients were starting their own businesses, compared with historical rates of 6 to 8 percent.
To start his business, Paul Kriks relied on his varied career in retailing, in which he had done marketing, inventory and buying. “I did it all,” he said.
He also relied on books and magazines about entrepreneurism.
First, he analyzed whether it would be more cost-effective to buy an existing business. Then he considered whether he wanted his business to be a destination store or one that relied on foot traffic. Next, Kriks scouted locations, talked to real estate agents, mapped the locations of possible competitors and studied traffic flow, age groups and median incomes.
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He had already refinanced his brick-and-cedar home in Willowbrook to reduce monthly mortgage payments. Thinking of the long haul, he then made improvements on his house, in case he had to sell it to raise more capital.
Finally, in June, Kriks trained his sights on a pet store in Naperville that he had visited three years earlier. By August, he had taken over the store and changed its name from Tropical Illusions to Tropical Pets, keeping the change to one word to save money on the sign.
Despite his frugality, he had sunk $100,000 into the operation by September.
And he was learning things, by trial and by error.
“I imagined some of this,” said Kriks over the hum of fish tanks. “But there were some things I didn’t anticipate that took me by surprise.”
Such as the inventory that he needs but can’t get. Or the young employees who keep quitting. Or the landlord demanding a $2 million insurance policy-that’s another $200 a month for Kriks to dish out.
“It’s discouraging sometimes; I don’t know if it’s possible for a small business to go up against the franchises.”
He figures that if the store doesn’t make it, he could get a job with the companies that supply him with materials.
Like her husband, Norene Kriks is determinedly hopeful about the business.
“He’s good at this, and if you like something, it makes all the difference,” she said. “It’s another turn in his life. He seems happier for it. We just need to get around the financial stuff.”
Not everyone wants to reinvent themselves.
Frank Skowron, who had purchased products for the Sears catalog, looked for a job that was not too different from the one he had-and he took a 30 percent pay cut.
His brother, Dan Skowron, also an assistant buyer, didn’t think too long about new training. In January, he was still unemployed.
Vernita Berard, a bookkeeper at the Sears store in Sterling, wasn’t sure where to begin reinventing herself.
“I’m thinking of enrolling in some classes,” she said as she ate a lunch of grapes and crackers in the back of the store in its final days in March. And then she added, offhand, “Something in computers.”
She never did enroll and, months later, took a job with an hourly wage that was just more than half her Sears wage and gave her only about half the hours she wanted.
Others might want to find a new path to take but don’t know how to look for one.
Tom MacKenzie, manager of the Fox Lake Sears store’s auto department before it was closed, didn’t know where to begin.
“People must ask me 200 times a day, `What do you want to do?’ ” he said. “I don’t know.”
All summer, he looked at people in different professions and pictured himself in their jobs.
A friend was a gasket salesman. On the road too much, MacKenzie thought.
A neighbor operated an earthmoving machine. No good, either; the man was laid off three months a year.
A son of a friend was a seed dealer; another neighbor did something with air freight and got to work out of his home.
MacKenzie pictured himself in these jobs, trying them on in his mind as if he were trying on uniforms. But none seemed right. “I want a job where I can make a difference,” he said.
He read through the want ads as if they were a catalog of possibilities. He started with the “a’s,” trying to imagine himself in each position listed, until he got to the “z’s.” The only category MacKenzie skipped was data entry.
All summer, there was pressure to do something, to change to fit some job description.
On a warm and sunny summer afternoon, Tom MacKenzie was removing rocks from the field of his hobby farm outside Harvard. His 10-month-old son, blond and chubby, was strapped to his back as Tom MacKenzie lifted rocks and loaded them onto a tractor.
The farm was a hobby, not an income producer. In 1992, his little corn and alfalfa operation lost $300, which was just fine with him.
“I’d like to mow hay all day, but there’s no money in that,” he said as he watched his son, his dog and his cat play in the shade of a maple tree.
While scanning the want ads one day late in the summer, he stopped on “l.” Loan officer.
With interest rates at record lows, the mortgage banking industry was expanding and hiring. MacKenzie looked into it and jumped aboard.
“They say you can make some money in this business,” he said. “The greater the risk, the greater the gain.”
Three months later, though, MacKenzie-who had a wife, a son and a mortgage of his own-had not cut a single deal for a mortgage on a home sale.
Back at the class on entrepreneurism, Kathy Millspaugh faced the others around the faux marble conference table and painted an ambitious portrait of her new career after Sears:
“With both the husband and wife working and they have a party to plan-I’ll do the legwork for them,” said Millspaugh, her white tennis shoe tapping the carpet as she spoke.
“I’ll have a portfolio of floral arrangements and banquet halls to let them choose from. I want to give a more personal service.”
The instructor, Jeff Williams, listened to her plan. He was being paid with federal funds to guide the six ex-Sears employees through their metamorphoses.
Williams knew what his students were facing: He had left the world of corporate management to become president of his own small but growing entrepreneurial-training company, based in Arlington Heights. Before that, coincidentally, he had worked at Sears.
As an entrepreneur of entrepreneurism, he has a surprisingly sanguine, almost boosterish take on layoffs.
“The ’90s is the decade of the entrepreneur,” said Williams. “Getting fired can be the best thing that ever happened in your life if you’re psychologically prepared for it.”
Of the 40 former Sears catalog employees who applied for this Self-Employment Education and Development, or SEED, program, Williams accepted 16. He required that an individual have an idea, money to implement it and a way to acquire experience in the new business.
He is paid by the Private Industry Council, based in part on his performance-which actually is the performance of his students. About 50 percent of his students start businesses.
When a person leaves the entrepreneur track and gets a job (Williams never says the word, preferring to spell it out like some vulgarity), he seems to take it as a defeat.
“We’ve had a higher percentage of Sears people get a J-O-B instead,” said Williams. “Some have 25 years with the company. They don’t know anything else except corporate life.”
Of the six people sitting around the faux marble table in Jeff Williams’ entrepreneur class in August, five were still pursuing their dreams come December.
But Kathy Millspaugh had doubts.
She began to wonder whether she was cut out for a job without normal hours, a regular paycheck, medical benefits and weeks of vacation.
In November, she missed a car payment for the first time. She was rattled.
At the same time she was designing business cards made up for her new company, she also put out the word among friends at Sears that she wanted to come back.
At the start of one of his seven-week seminars, Williams said: “We’re going to wrap and protect you for seven weeks, and when we open that cocoon, either you fly or you die. As far as I’m concerned, if you have to go back and take a J-O-B, it’s like a form of death.”
But on Dec. 1, Kathy Millspaugh was offered a job at Sears.
What had she said right after the layoff? “Sears did me a favor. They’re giving me a chance for a career. . . . I want to do something else. It’s good this happened.”
———-
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Next: Back to the working world.