After plugging away at his job search for only a few months, Don Douglas brought home the news the unemployed always hope to deliver: He found work.
Today, he realizes the news wasn’t all good.
Though he’s pulling in a regular paycheck, his wife, Sarah, still must go to a church food pantry every two weeks to pick up cereal, cheese and other staples the family needs.
The new job just doesn’t pay enough.
“I thought that after I got a job, me and my family would be able to get on with our lives,” said Douglas, a stocky 44-year-old.
“But the shadows just keep following me. I was at work the other day and I thought to myself, `Why has this happened to me?’
“I didn’t know there would be long-lasting effects.”
Douglas, a pressman laid off last spring when R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. stopped printing the Sears catalogs, now works at a printing plant in Bedford Park, earning about half what he made at his old job.
Like millions who have lost their jobs since U.S. corporations started a trend of massive layoffs in the 1980s, he is finding that the hardships of being fired don’t necessarily stop when new employment begins.
A year after Sears, Roebuck and Co. cut 50,000 jobs-starting a domino effect of firings at other companies, including R.R. Donnelley-many of the castoffs are working new jobs.
But many are collecting smaller paychecks and have little job security. The American wellspring that once provided upward mobility has, for them, run dry.
That not only hurts financially, but also psychologically, leaving a hole where a dream had been.
“You figure at this age, you’d be more secure, you’d be more relaxed,” said a 54-year-old worker who took a lesser-paying job because of Sears’ restructuring. “I feel a little disgusted inside. You figure all the years you’ve been in it, and it doesn’t pay off like it should have.”
For the Douglases, the fall started shortly after Don Douglas’ 32 weeks of severance pay ran out in September, months after he had taken a job-and a $24,000 pay cut-as a quality-control supervisor at the Esselte Meto printing plant.
Since then the Douglases have budgeted and trimmed costs, but they still can’t get by without help.
They refinanced their house and are now considering selling it. But what housing, they ask, would be cheaper than their modest, one-story home in Romeoville?
Don Douglas’ dream of putting his oldest son, Robert, through college has been dashed. Now Robert is thinking of moving to the state where he plans to enroll in college, hoping to establish residency to save money.
Christmas was so spare-just one present for each person in the family-that the Douglases took their four children to a thrift store after the holidays and bought them each two pairs of pants, two shirts and a sweater.
Total cost: $40.
“We told the kids that we didn’t have enough money to do the traditional things,” said Sarah Douglas. “It broke my heart, but everyone seemed to understand.”
Money is so tight the Douglases canceled their annual donation to the church, a gift they had already promised. Sarah Douglas nearly cried when she called the church and had her name removed from the list of contributors.
“I think we’re treading water and haven’t gone under-yet,” said Don Douglas.
“It really hurts me to see (Don’s) self-esteem so low-especially when I read in the papers that Donnelley is doing so well,” said Sarah Douglas.
Don Douglas and his oldest daughter are launching a business they hope will help blue-collar or unskilled workers find jobs.
They plan to help the unemployed prepare resumes and cover letters, brush up on interviewing skills and budget their money. They’ll charge $50 for 20 resumes and 20 cover letters.
Don Douglas sees opportunity, not irony, in the fact that he didn’t fare too well in his own job change. “I’m just putting my experience to practice,” he said.
Frank Skowron had plenty of job-hunting experience of his own.
Skowron now spends his workdays in the bowels of St. Francis Hospital in Evanston. There, working in the brick-walled, windowless basement, he keeps a steady inventory of the hospital’s maintenance supplies.
During four months of unemployment, he sent out more than 125 resumes and got 20 replies, which led to eight interviews and, finally, one job offer.
When he accepted that job, he also accepted a 30 percent pay cut from what he had made after 22 years at Sears.
In an age of lowered employee expectations, Frank Skowron is just glad to be working. His brother Dan, also laid off from Sears, can’t find a job.
While munching on french fries in the hospital’s crowded cafeteria, Frank Skowron mulled his future.
“Maybe I’ll never make what I made with 22 years at Sears,” he said. “But I don’t think you have to be here 20 years to be loyal. If I’m progressing and happy, I’ll stay here 20 years and retire.”
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Skowron realizes that 1993 taught him something about loyalty: “I’m going to keep my eye open more,” he said firmly. “I’ll be more loyal to myself than the company I’m working for. I’ll put myself first instead of second.”
To Brian Barnes and Ed Colaianni, putting themselves first means working for themselves.
On a recent morning, the two worked up a pitch for a prospective client in one of their new company’s two offices (this one’s at Colaianni’s house, the other is at Barnes’).
Their company, Compliance Resource Associates, is a consulting firm helping other companies meet government regulations in the workplace.
For 42 years between them, Barnes and Colaianni, both sons of lifelong Sears employees, had the company to shield them from market forces, guide their careers and pay their salaries.
But now the tools of their trade are at arm’s reach: a desktop computer, a telephone with voice mail. But their most important assets, they believe, are their minds.
They know the risks. Historically, about half of new businesses fail in the first six months.
“It’s good and it’s scary,” says Colaianni, 32. “It’s good because you have a lot more control over your life. It’s scary because you don’t have a guaranteed paycheck.”
To help launch their business, they took a federally financed, seven-week entrepreneurial training class and spent the fall wading through such material as “Title 35: Environmental Protection, Subtitle B: Air Pollution, Chapter I: Pollution Control Board.”
Luckily, they had worked at Sears, itself a bastion of bureaucratese, where someone in department 702C1 could use a 1194 form to find out how many refrigerators were sold in the K book.
Most days, Barnes, a father of two who took a retirement package from Sears, works in his own home, reporting to his office each morning at 8:30 sharp.
“I dress to remind myself that I’m working,” he said. “I wear executive socks.”
Like many entrepreneurs, the two are trying to capitalize on one of the strongest trends in business and one they know intimately-downsizing.
They believe that as more companies cut staffs, more work will be farmed out to consultants. “The work is still there,” said Colaianni. “The work hasn’t gone away. They still need people to do it.”
So far, however, the new partners have yet to see any money come in. But they hope to land their first client any day.
Tom MacKenzie is working for himself, too, in a sense. And, as often is the case, that means he’s working harder than he did when he worked for someone else.
At least six days a week, he’s on the road, driving from one real estate office to another, trying to get his face known. Even when he’s home with his wife and toddler son, his beeper is always on.
Once the manager of the Fox Lake Sears’ auto department, MacKenzie now is a mortgage loan officer. While he once relied on a steady salary, he now earns commissions on mortgages he sells to home buyers.
After four months, though, MacKenzie has closed just one deal on a loan for a new-home buyer, the bread-and-butter client for loan officers. His own mortgage payment looms larger every week.
“I am not real happy with where I am at in terms of business, because I am not making as much as I want to be making,” he said.
He knows that if he doesn’t start generating business, he will not make enough to live on. His severance checks from Sears will run out soon.
He stopped in at another Sears auto department to visit former colleagues recently, and as he watched them work, he realized he didn’t miss it.
“I see the stuff I was doing-here’s a car that wasn’t done on time, or somebody didn’t show up for work-and I think, `Gee, I was so frustrated, I sure am glad I’m not doing that anymore.’ “
But he has come to grips with the possibility that this job change might not be his last.
“I still think I can become a success,” he said of his new job. “But if it’s not going to fly, then you don’t want to be selling pencils on the street before you realize it.”
Sitting behind her desk in the executive suite of a Chicago property management company, Nanette Bellefleur has mixed feelings about her new job.
After four months of unemployment, it is hardly what she had hoped for.
She sits outside the executive offices, not inside them. She had once been a decision-maker on a $13 million account. Here, her job description calls for “light typing, light phones.”
Worst of all, though, is that she’ll hold this job for only eight hours.
Desperate to stop the flow of money from her dwindling emergency reserves, Nanette Bellefleur has become what labor experts call “a contingent worker.” In her words: “I’m just a temp, a non-person.”
Temporary work has been one of the few job categories seeing strong growth in recent years. About 18 percent of the jobs created in the U.S. in the first half of 1993 were with temporary-help agencies.
Bellefleur, who had been an account executive with Oxford Industries, a clothingmaker that supplied the Sears catalog, signed up at such an agency in early December.
By the month’s end, she had been given just 2 1/2 days’ work.
“I’m in trouble,” she said on her first day back on the job search in 1994. “I have enough in reserves to pay one more month’s bills. After that, I don’t know what I am going to do for money.”
She toys with painful ideas: sell her condo. Raid her 401(k) account.
Much less painful is the thought of working as a temp, though she feels how little status that job holds. On the job, people walk past her, virtually ignoring her. Nobody but the person she reports to introduces themselves.
“I expect to be a zero for a day,” she said. “People are all wrapped up in what they are doing.”
Bellefleur expects that when she does find permanent work, it will pay less than the job she had.
“There is a different mindset now at companies,” she said. “Now that they have gone through the pain of downsizing, they are not going to be upsizing.”
In the meantime, she is at once fearful and hopeful that she will get a job that once sounded oxymoronic but now is commonplace: full-time temporary work.
Some people do find their way from temporary work back to full time.
Rich Settey, who had put in 33 years with R.R. Donnelley before he was laid off in spring, worked through the summer as a temp at a Donnelley plant in Warsaw, Ind.
In December, Settey was told he would be hired full-time at the plant. “It’s going to be a good Christmas,” said his wife, Gloria.
Another booming segment for job growth has been part-time work. From January to July 1993, 60 percent of the new jobs created in the U.S. were part time, and half of those were filled by people wanting full-time jobs.
During the recovery from 1991 to ’93, part-time jobs accounted for nearly 26 percent of the new jobs created. Three-fourths of those jobs were taken by people who wanted full-time work but couldn’t get it.
It was the first post-World War II recovery in which there was not a reduction in this “involuntary part-time” work force.
Vernita Berard jumped at a part-time job with the Employees United Credit Union in Dixon, Ill., 11 miles from the Sears store where she had worked as a bookkeeper since 1967.
She considers herself lucky. Even the people at the unemployment office had warned her she might never get another job.
She’s 60.
“They aren’t going to hire anybody when they know they are 60 years old,” she said just after she was laid off.
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But in October, just as her unemployment benefits were about to run out, Vernita Berard caught a break. While she was getting her hair cut at The Corner Shop in Sterling, the store’s owner overheard her saying she had to find work somewhere, anywhere.
He knew of a job. It was only part-time and paid far less than she had made at Sears, but by that point, Vernita Berard would settle for anything.
She had made nearly $9 an hour at Sears, but her new job paid $5 an hour. Also, she had worked 30 hours a week and gotten full benefits with Sears, and now she was working just 16 hours a week with no benefits.
“It’s a pretty big disappointment,” she said. “But you have to pick up the pieces and just go.”
Of course, not everyone has been disappointed by the turns the Sears restructuring has forced on their lives.
Judy Gjersoe, for one, has anything but a part-time job.
As a financial planner for IDS Financial Services, her days begin around 6 a.m., when she awakes to look over the case files of her clients-some are former Sears employees.
“I got home one night at 7 p.m. and realized I didn’t have lunch or anything to eat at all that day,” said Gjersoe, 44. “I didn’t even have time to notice.”
This is just what Gjersoe wanted. Partly because this is what she was accustomed to.
For 22 years, Gjersoe worked her way up the ranks of the Sears catalog, from copywriter to copy chief to her last post, senior advertising manager.
And though Gjersoe was loyal to the Big Book and her nearly six-figure salary, when Sears announced that it was slashing 50,000 jobs, Gjersoe decided to pursue a dream: becoming a financial planner.
After all, she had spent nearly 20 years poring over stock charts and financial newsletters on the weekends, successfully investing her money and that of friends, family members and co-workers.
Soon after the layoff announcement, Gjersoe sent resumes to Equitable Life Assurance, Merrill Lynch & Co. and IDS, then studied as much as 12 hours a day for the grueling, six-hour National Association of Securities Dealers licensing exam.
“Then came the moment of truth. At the end of the sixth hour, after which you are burned out, you hit a button on the computer and it comes back and tells you whether you passed,” Gjersoe remembered. “You sit there and wonder . . . whether it was all worth it?”
For her, it was.
Gjersoe passed. Equitable, Merrill Lynch and IDS offered her jobs. She plans to earn as much or more than in her best year at Sears.
Kathy Millspaugh, another Sears worker, has come full circle. And she’s better off for the go-round.
Eating her homemade lunch in the cafeteria of the new Sears Merchandise Group headquarters in Hoffman Estates, she waves and flashes a wide smile at another worker who, like her, made it back to Sears after being laid off.
“It has been the weirdest year of my life,” she said.
Millspaugh began her second Sears career Dec. 6 with the new title of project coordinator in department 824FP. Her gray workspace is filled with dozens of blueprints for the fixtures needed in new and remodeled retail stores.
Her new job came with a raise. But she says she would have taken the job even if it meant a pay cut; she wanted out of the unemployed world that badly.
When the catalog closed, Millspaugh was offered a job here, but she turned it down. She didn’t want to continue doing data entry.
More important, she wanted to sample life without Sears.
She had always dreamed of opening her own party-planning business. The 35-year-old took a class on entrepreneurship for seven weeks and began working on a business plan. But certain realities, including the fact that she’s a single mother, began to push her back toward Sears.
“I don’t think I was really ready,” said Millspaugh, who lives with her teenage daughter in her parents’ Jefferson Park home.
“I felt like a failure when I went back to Sears. But it’s life. It’s living. It’s something I have to do. I can’t live with my parents forever.”
Seeing that Sears was willing to rehire some of its former employees, she jumped at a chance for a regular paycheck.
“A lot of people decided Sears was the best place to go,” said Millspaugh. “They didn’t close the catalog to punish us.”