But for the hum from the filter pumps in the gleaming rows of fish tanks, Paul Kriks’ voice was the only sound in his Naperville pet shop.
“We gave up everything we had financially,” he said flatly. “The savings are all gone. The (home) equity is all used.”
This isn’t how he dreamt things would go when he got into the pet business after losing his middle management post in a major corporate bloodletting at Sears three years ago. His was one of 50,000 jobs cut by the retailer to stem a long financial swoon.
Like Sears, Kriks, then 46, was abruptly forced to reinvent himself, and therein lies a tale of uncertainty and alienation that has become a defining fact of economic life in the 1990s, as well as an important campaign theme this election season.
Since the layoffs at Sears, other major American corporations have shed jobs at a rapid clip and politicians have sought to exploit the anger and anxiety such layoffs generate.
But unlike those recently let go, the people fired at Sears have had three years to reflect, three years to struggle with the changes that come with losing a job. Their experiences offer a laboratory of sorts–a chance to assess how the upheaval at Sears altered lives and outlooks.
Recent interviews with two dozen workers who lost jobs in that 1993 purge show the experience has left an indelible, if not always predictable, stamp.
For instance, despite his resentment, lifelong Republican Kriks hasn’t been swayed by the slashing attacks on corporate greed that have become a centerpiece of Pat Buchanan’s campaign for the GOP presidential nomination. If anything, Kriks said, he is leaning toward President Clinton and the Democrats. He said they offer the promise of continuity and stability.
Many downsized Sears veterans like Kriks tune out the political noise around them. Surviving comes first.
“I don’t see government solutions to a lot of these things,” said Brian Barnes, dumped after 29 years at Sears and still struggling to find his niche. “Buchanan reminds me of the politicians of the ’30s who talked to the workers. They said one thing and did another. They appealed to fear.”
By no means have all Sears downsizing victims fared poorly, and some even sympathized with the company, acknowledging that radical surgery was needed to save the onetime king of American merchandisers. A few viewed their layoffs as a godsend, a kick in the pants that forced them to make a much-needed career switch that they otherwise wouldn’t have had the guts to try.
Still, if there’s a common thread, it’s this: They’re a little less trusting, a little less loyal. Exit the Company Man.
“My eyes are much more open now,” said Dan Skowron, a former buyer for the retailer’s catalog who finally landed a job with a Sears supplier after an 11-month hunt. “You can’t assume any job will last forever. I don’t think people can have blind loyalty to companies anymore.”
Sears is as much cultural icon as corporation. Its Big Book catalog served as a virtual shoppers’ bible for generations, and its network of stores was once as intertwined with the identity of rural communities as the Sears Tower is with today’s Chicago.
So it was a sad day for many Americans when the company closed the money-losing catalog operations and shuttered the small stores.
In the natural ebb and flow of the economy, jobs are always being created and lost. But since 1979, Fortune 500 companies, historically the most stable and best paying, have cut their combined workforce to 11.5 million from 16.5 million.
Massive layoffs are not new, but increasingly they affect white-collar workers and managers, and they occur in good times as well as bad. On the heels of a very profitable year, AT&T recently announced it was cutting 40,000 workers. With the economy zipping last year, half of the major U.S. firms surveyed by the American Management Association said they had carried out cutbacks.
As Kriks can attest, it can be a bumpy ride for those caught in the switches.
The forced march from middle management to wobbly entrepreneurship has robbed him of the sense of security that he once enjoyed at Sears, the oldfangled American notion that if you worked hard and were loyal to your employer, it would be loyal back. In its place is frustration, worry and anger.
As his own boss, Kriks has found the hours and headaches brutal, the customers few and the bills ever mounting. There are no more vacations, no cable TV, no time to shoot hoops in the backyard with his two boys or watch them play Little League ball on a warm summer night.
“Did it have to happen?” Kriks asked. “It’s hard to say. I always like to believe in corporate responsibility, but you get a little bitter because it was a viable business.”
There is a story that has made the rounds for years in the Barnes family.
It’s about his grandfather, a railroad engineer, who got mad one day and stalked off the job. Grandpa Barnes eventually returned, but fell a few notches in seniority and was one of the first to be let go in the Depression. For decades, the story served as a reminder of how not to act at work.
Now 53 and a few post-Sears business failures behind him, Barnes sees his grandfather’s rashness as more fortuitous than folly. During his walkout, the grandfather worked as a carpenter, developing a marketable skill that saw his family through the Depression.
“Maybe grandpa wasn’t so dumb after all,” said Barnes, another former buyer for the catalog. “What our generation did was we placed our careers in the hands of our employer. There was a social compact that corporate America had with its people. We no longer have that.”
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The disintegration of that hallowed, though unspoken, compact is taking a toll, and no one is better positioned to see that than former senior advertising manager Judy Gjersoe, a 22-year Sears veteran.
Within months of the layoffs, Gjersoe landed as a financial planner at the Wilmette office of American Express Financial Services.
But if she has done well, she knows that many former colleagues at “mother Sears”–including some who are her customers–haven’t.
“It is sort of heartbreaking,” she said. “I don’t think the majority are where they wanted to be.”
Most of her clients feel insecure in their jobs, she said. And many who had rebounded from past layoffs routinely work 60- to 70-hour weeks to make sure it never happens again.
Such pervasive fears haunt Kathy Millspaugh, 38, of Algonquin, a data entry clerk for Sears when she was let go in 1993. Millspaugh, who waited tables to augment her income, flirted with the notion of starting her own party-planning business.
After seven months, she concluded that she was ill-equipped to strike off on her own and went back to Sears, which was rehiring some workers.
“It’s scary,” Millspaugh said. “They’re still letting people go. You’re afraid the phone’s going to ring and they’re going to call you in and tell you you don’t have a job.”
Even so, she insisted her return was not a retreat and defended Sears as a “great company with great benefits.”
In a way, Millspaugh saw Sears as part of her extended family. Her mother and brother, as well as her ex-husband and his mother and grandmother, all worked there.
Tom MacKenzie was once auto supplies manager at the small Sears store in Fox Lake, but it has been three years since the store was shuttered and MacKenzie sold his last battery.
For MacKenzie, too, Sears had been a family affair. He had 16 years in it, his father, 30. He met his wife, Caren, when she worked at Sears.
Still, near the end, MacKenzie was chafing under a bureaucracy he considered stodgy. When the downsizing came, he was told he could transfer to another store, but he decided to move on. To what, he was not sure.
He tried writing mortgage loans, but found the field saturated by competitors. He added a night job, sorting packages for United Parcel Service in Rockford, and many days worked from 10 a.m. to 4 a.m. the next day.
His credit card balances soared, and MacKenzie sold land he owned to make ends meet. The theme of the MacKenzies’ 1995 New Year’s party was goodbye and good riddance to 1994.
By then they had reason to celebrate, for Motorola had just opened a new cellular phone plant about four miles from his house and MacKenzie landed a job. He is now a supervisor.
MacKenzie said his odyssey has left him not with bitterness but with wisdom tempered by a little wariness.
“I think people learn there’s no guarantees,” he said as he cradled 3-month-old son Michael in his arms. “I don’t like changing jobs. I’d rather stay at Motorola.
“But if I saw things deteriorating, I would not be as hesitant to look somewhere else this time around.”