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GRIEGO: The line for finding a job grows longer

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published October 10, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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Arapahoe/Douglas Works! employee specialist Sandy Campbell tells Steve Brown, an Army veteran who was laid off two months ago from Robinson Brick, that he has to be able to deliver a short resume when employers ask him what he does for a living.

Photo by Judy DeHaas / The Rocky

Arapahoe/Douglas Works! employee specialist Sandy Campbell tells Steve Brown, an Army veteran who was laid off two months ago from Robinson Brick, that he has to be able to deliver a short resume when employers ask him what he does for a living.

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Michael Daviss showed up to work on a Friday just before 8 a.m. He went out to his truck, lit a cigarette and waited to clock in. He was looking at a typical day. Pick up a load of tires, deliver them to four or five stores, on the road most of the day between Brighton to Elizabeth.

When you get through smoking, his boss said, come in and holler at me.

Daviss finished up and went inside, took a seat in the office.

"He tells me things on my route are going slow. He says, 'We're going to have to lay off some people and you're the first one."

Three years on the job, 15 years in the furniture moving business before that, 53 years old, no savings.

Why me, Daviss asked.

Four of the five stores on your route are closing, the boss said.

Later, Daviss would think he should have tried to persuade the boss to split up the workload of another driver. Of course, Daviss tells me, you think about all these things later, the should've, would've, could'ves that bounce around in your head when you can't sleep and it turns out finding another job paying anything a man could actually live on isn't easy.

So, he applied for unemployment and I find him, two weeks post-layoff, a frustrated man pecking a computer keyboard, trying to complete an online job application in a work-force center in the Denver Tech Center.

"I have no income coming in now," he says. "I'm broke. When I say broke, I mean broke. I've got three dollars in my pocket and I'm $200 overdrawn at the bank."

As Daviss speaks, a man a few computers over looks at us, looks away, looks back. He doesn't say anything, but he tells me later he's thinking: Two weeks. You've been out two weeks. My friend, I worked 41 years for Samsonite and now Samsonite is in Jacksonville, Fla., and I've been looking for work since June.

You want to see the front lines of an economic slowdown - and fair warning, it's depressing - Arapahoe/Douglas Works! is a good place to start. It's a state Department of Labor and Employment center, a place that trains and connects workers with employers. It's full of job seekers, people just entering the job market with entry-level skills, people laid off, people retired and trying to break back into the work force.

About 26,000 residents of Arapahoe and Douglas counties have registered to use this Works! office since July. About 8,000 of them are collecting unemployment. An unknown, but significant number of the remainder have exhausted their benefits and are still jobless, says division manager Joseph Barela. Others are underemployed and come in for anything from job searches to workshops on say, salary negotiation, to learning, as the "50+ & fabulous" crowd does, never, ever, to put on the resume: 41 years experience. Write instead, "15-plus years."

This is the kind of market in which job seekers must compete. Since the beginning of the year, new job orders from employers coming in to the office have dropped by one-third. In that same time, the number of new employers wanting to post area jobs online has dropped by two-thirds, Barela says. The number of employers coming in to do face-to-face interviews has dropped by more than half.

Barela is an upbeat guy and he's trying to stay that way. This is a bright, friendly office and in it you will find Christi Dailey, a veterans employment specialist, telling a downbeat vet "we'll work this out; we'll get you a job." And Marie Valenzuela beaming with the news that a client found work, and Tanya Nixon literally springing to her feet to champion older workers. More of them are returning to the work force these days because they must and they enter her office with a shell-shocked look.

The older worker faces a lot of barriers, she says, sitting back down. "Oh, goodness, yes, it's sad these days. Some days, I do everything I can to hold back the tears."

Every weekday morning, the first thing labor and employment specialist Richard Gilstrap does is check the new job listings for the metro area.

On Wednesday, he posted 57 new jobs. They included: Security officer in Denver, $10.50 an hour; lead cook in Black Hawk, negotiable wage; palliative care nurse in Aurora, negotiable wage; software development engineer in Denver, $20 an hour; lingerie sales associate in Broomfield, $9 an hour.

There is still work and people are finding it, especially in the health care industry, but also in renewable energy and some segments of the construction industry. In this Works! office, nearly 5,000 people have come back since July to say they found a job, Barela says. Colorado, with its August unemployment rate of 5.4 percent, is faring better than other states, though if what I see here is but an inkling of what is happening in other states, we are in a world of hurt, ladies and gentlemen.

It's a world that seems entirely disconnected from the rhetoric of the campaign trail where promises are easy when the problems are anything but. This is not the place to introduce the concept of taxpayer bailouts and $400,000 insurance executive junkets. This is not the place to laud free trade and the global marketplace.

This is the place where a laugh meets the question, "What do you do about health care?" What do you mean health care? This is the place where people will tell you they are living proof the middle class is disappearing and an interior designer with 28 years experience will say she had to borrow $700 from her mom to get by because in a wants vs. needs economy, her business loses.

This is the place where Dailey, the vet specialist, will introduce you to a veteran who served out his contract in 2000 with expertise in construction and project management. He has not been able to find a job since April. He will sit across the table from you, a single father, and tell you of his children and his dwindling savings account and the employers who tell him, we're not making any moves until after the election. He will admit, looking away, that he just applied for public assistance, for food stamps. He will tell you it was humiliating.

I worked in Southern California in the late '80s, when the economy there was tanking and I interviewed a laid-off accountant so desperate for work, he dyed his gray hair black, thinking if he looked younger, he could land something.

I think about him now, not because the economic situation here in Colorado is as bad as it was in California then. It's not. But I had forgotten the psychological toll of job loss and search. I had forgotten the acute loss of identity that can come with the loss of work, the demoralization that becomes shame so strong, most people won't allow me to use their names. I had forgotten, too, the way in which dedicated job seekers make the search the job. How they order their days, establishing a routine, how some will offer, in response to the "how do you manage" question, a succinct, enumerated strategy.

"Number one, you do without. Number two, you don't buy anything unless you pay cash. Number three, you take temporary part-time work while doing the job search." This sage advice comes from a laid-off engineer.

A last bit of advice comes from a 15-year federal employee who lost her job in a reduction in force: Don't listen to the news. Attitude is everything.

Daviss is still sitting at the computer when I leave. The Samsonite guy stops to chat with me in front of the building. He has about 40 resumes out now, he says. He hands me one. Samsonite, it says under his job history, September 1967 to June 2008.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

Comments

  • October 10, 2008

    5:22 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    mrfxx writes:

    This article gives the lie to the unemployment rate, in which only those receiving unemployment are counted: "26,000 residents of Arapahoe and Douglas counties have registered to use this Works! office since July. About 8,000 of them are collecting unemployment". In other words, the 5.4% unemployment rate that Colorado boasts could be more than TRIPLE that number if this Works! office is representative of the state - with more to come thanks to offshoring and hiring of illegals. Is any other state (except Alaska, in which the citizens own their resources and get an annual check from them) doing any better?

    Meanwhile, multimillionaires are given handouts by the US government (more for the middle class taxpayer to bear, as the wealthiest have more tax shelters - and while they may pay a large portion of taxes, as a percent of income it is almost as little as the folks on the lowest end of the economic scale) - and "party hearty" after getting them (and give themselves multimillion dollar bonuses while going bankrupt). The US is fighting a war on credit - in point of fact loans from China - which Bush originally called a terrorist nation (never in the history of the US have tax CUTS been given during a time of war) to the tune of $10 BILLION a month - and members of the party formerly known for fiscal conservatism are responsible for the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We are warned that a vote for Obama means socialism - but it would be individual socialism - while a vote for McCain means CORPORATE socialism: privately held profits, publicly paid for losses.

    A few recommendations, since management needs to share the pain it has caused:
    If there is to be corporate welfare, it needs to be applied as even-handedly as individual welfare: once XYZ Corporation can is making a certain percent, ALL TAX BREAKS ARE RESCINDED.
    If there is a $1 million dollar tax deduction for executive pay, there are no loopholes (such as perks and bonuses) that "don't count" against that amount. No corporation selling the middle class down the river by offshoring those jobs gets any tax breaks - and must offshore the same percent of upper management jobs as lower/middle class jobs. No arguments can be made about "protectionism" since every country the US is offshoring jobs to actually protects its national workforce better than the US protects its own.
    Any company executives whose companies are caught hiring illegals more than once faces jail time - and the company is banned from receiving government contracts (at any level) for 10 years (unless management can prove it used eVerify and that was in error).
    For the upper management which compares itself to highly paid athletes and entertainers, those folks can be cut "at whim" without platinum parachutes and are only bonused on performance, instead of merely for breathing. Allow the stock holder to vote on upper management pay - and the person whose pay is being voted on CANNOT VOTE.

  • October 10, 2008

    12:01 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    gary writes:

    Well Tina, tell us how your illegal aliens are helping out the job market in Colorado.

    Oh I forgot, they only want jobs that noone else will take right?

    Hmmm....maybe they haul and deliver tires and furniture cheaper than Daviss.....could be...huh?

    Nuff Said!

  • October 10, 2008

    12:52 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    Submrnr writes:

    Thank you Ms. Griego to this growing problem. If anyone would like to read more feel free to check out what our politicians are doing, or not doing for the unemployed at the following link:

    http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-...#

  • October 12, 2008

    7:54 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    rlutzs writes:

    If you got your precious Illigals out of the country a lot of these problems would go away.