In these times, when every spark of hope in the economy is heralded by politicians as a turnaround in unemployment, some people aren’t buying it. They’ve learned the hard way what it’s like to lose their jobs and struggle to find or create new ones. For many, it’s a long process, one that often leaves them feeling invisible to the working world. It’s as if they’ve lost their passport back into their home country and are now making a transition to someplace else — but they don’t know where.
In his book Transitions, William Bridges describes this change as a process of three overlapping stages: an ending, a “neutral zone,” and a new beginning.
The ending — losing one’s job — is hard enough, but most people are even less prepared for the neutral zone, where they feel a need to move on but can’t make it happen. It’s like a long march to a place they’ve never seen through a country they don’t recognize. It’s a time when they need all their supports, all their resources, even while they expend those resources while looking for solutions.
Interviews with four people in the Charlotte area who are in different stages of this struggle tell what it’s been like in their own lives. In a city that celebrates economic success and barely acknowledges the reality of long-term unemployment, their stories say a lot about what’s going on in Charlotte under the boosterism radar.
There is a learning curve in each of these people’s transition, as well as much we can learn from each one’s ways of renegotiating their work and life.
Judy Tooley — The Trauma of Being “Let Go”
Judy Tooley never expected the first stage of transition — the ending of her job — to happen to her 12 years ago. Now in her late 50s and an avid storyteller and writer when she has time, Tooley founded her own cleaning business in Charlotte five years ago. It was in some ways a desperation move. She’d tried everything else.
When she’s relaxed, Judy tells stories about her life as a Southern woman. She was a single mother, raising two daughters and working for General Electric in its Hickory, NC, plant. She supplemented her income with evening and weekend work as a bartender, but her main income was her 21-year job with GE, rising from temp work as a switchboard receptionist to becoming the administrative assistant for an engineering/marketing unit of 30 people. And one day it was over. Let’s let her tell her story in her own words.
“The downsizing began in the early 1980s,” Judy begins. “It got worse throughout the decade, and especially in the early 1990s after NAFTA. The general manager had left and they didn’t replace him for months. Everyone was wondering what’s going on. . .Then in the fall of 1992, they brought in this guy, and it was suspicious right away.
“He was always very friendly, very personable, like “Oh, I want to be your friend, I’m going to help you. . .’ He reminded me of the guy in V — did you ever see that movie? It was about these aliens but they were really reptilians and there was a food shortage on their planet. They were coming to earth to get food — people-food.
“We knew something was going to happen. My daughters were grown and living away from home, and I had taken in a roommate who also worked at GE to share expenses. She asked her boss: “What’s going to happen to me?’ He just looked at her and said: “Be strong.’
“I went in to work that day — they called it Black Friday — dumb as a brick. I thought my seniority would take me through. One of the guys from Systems comes by. He says: I hear you’re going to be laid off. He walks off and about that time my phone rings. And it’s the manager. I see it and I almost didn’t pick it up because I know what it is now, he’s going to downsize — terminate — me, whatever you want to call it.
“I pick up the phone, and he’s like: “See you for a minute?’ And I knew. I knew. . . And so I’m walking down — and everybody knows! Everybody’s hanging over their cubicle and I’m walking, I’m walking, and everybody’s like, “Hang in there, Judy, you can do it, we’re with ya!’ And I’m thinking, all I need is two guards and a priest.
“Once I get there we go in his office and he closes the door. They’re sorry but due to less orders, cutbacks — all this stuff — my services are no longer needed. I wasn’t going to cry.
“I walk out, gather up my stuff. And of course they were real sweethearts — told us we could go home for the rest of the day if we wanted. Which I thought was, you know (laughs) — what a prince. I got my purse, managed to drive home. Since my roommate got laid off too, we just decided to go out and get drunk. I worked part-time at a restaurant so we went there. The piano player was there and I had a few really stiff drinks, the next thing I know I’m sitting with him on the piano bench and he’s playing and we’re singing Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire.’ It was sad, just sad. . .I had planned to retire from there.”
Judy had hit the first stage of transition — the trauma of a job ending, a job that had become a way of life. But ending is a process, and this one wasn’t over yet. Judy and the other 40 displaced workers banded together and went to a lawyer. They felt they had been let go because they were too close to what GE didn’t want — people who were at least 50 and had 25 years with the company. That was the magic number for full benefits if the plant closed. Judy knew the session with the lawyer was a waste of time when he said, “Well, let me talk to my partners and I’ll get back to you.” Judy and the others had to pay about $80 each for the “consultation.”
Next they went to the Employment Security Commission and filed age discrimination suits. The pressure worked for awhile. It led to the company temporarily rehiring some of the workers, but they were laid off again when the plant closed down for good a few months later.
“We were out there looking for justice,” Judy said, “and we just didn’t know one thing — there wasn’t any.”
Now, 12 years later, after doing everything from driving a limousine to working as a legal assistant, bartender, and employee of a cleaning company, would she have wanted to stay in the same job if she could? She pauses.
“I dream about it sometimes. I did just the other day. And for the security, yes. I could use that. Especially the health insurance. But then I wouldn’t have come to Charlotte. I wouldn’t be living in an old apartment uptown, which I love. I wouldn’t have my new boyfriend and a business associate working with me. And I wouldn’t be running my own cleaning company.”
Over the past five years the cleaning business, Maid In Mecklenburg, has been a mixed blessing. It was “under-capitalized” from the beginning, as many new businesses are. She had started on nothing except her own will to make it succeed. She was feeling she had to make it work this year. But she had also become her own boss and she wasn’t going to give that up easily. She and her associate had two teams cleaning houses. And this year, with some new clients and improvements in efficiency, she hopes to turn the corner on the profits she should be making. It’s a back and forth thing many days, when she looks at her profit and loss statement. But she doesn’t want to go back — not if it means putting herself at the mercy of some company official who could slither into town one day and wipe out the life she’s built for herself in a single stroke.
John Doe — If You Survive It
The trauma of a job loss — the ending — can last a long time, and then the neutral zone can seem to go on forever. John Doe (obviously not his real name) was much closer to the initial pain and trauma of losing his work even as he moved into the neutral zone where it seemed he made no progress toward new work, no matter what he did. He had held several short-term jobs when I interviewed him, but none were in his field. He had been unemployed 72 weeks.
John, now in his mid-40s, had been an IT professional with a high paying job where he had won company awards for in-service and marketing. But the corporate mania for acquisitions struck and the company he was working for was sold. The new owners were interested in one thing: the customer base for their own competing software. The layoffs began the day of the merger. John survived eight cuts, but finally it came to him.
John thought using his real name in this article might work against him for future employers, and although some of his children didn’t care, some did. He was proud of his kids, always talking about what they were doing in school and their accomplishments, and he didn’t want to do anything that would embarrass them.
John speaks slowly but passionately, every word deliberate, every sentence fully formed.
“It’s like being sent to prison,” he says. “It’s like having your life taken away from you. . . Are you stronger from it? Of course you’ll come out stronger — if you survive. ”
John spoke feelingly about his wife, the person who “held it together” when they hit bottom financially. When he first met her, he was the “knight in shining armor” — the provider, protector, the person who rescued her from her previous life. Now it was reversed. “We lost our house and purchased another one based on her income alone.”
An unexpected frustration during the “neutral zone” arose from people who thought that since he was unemployed, he had loads of time on his hands. It was exactly the opposite.
“It’s ironic — you’re busier than if you were working! I’ve got classes, interviews, taking the kids here and there. . .And always projects around the house. Not working is like having a noose around your neck. What it means is you can’t spend any money, you’re not allowed to enjoy yourself. You’re not allowed to take a day off. Otherwise why aren’t you looking for work? How many resumes have you put out this week? And it’s hard work, job hunting. There’s a piece of you in every one of those resumes.
In our conversations, John expressed concern that this article wouldn’t show the pain of unemployment, that an emphasis on how some had made a successful transition would make layoffs seem like a good thing. The final result can be better than expected, but it’s still a hard truth that unemployment is often demeaning and exhausting — often people have to finally decide they can’t get a job in their chosen field and begin to take low-level, part-time, or temporary jobs. As hard as he’d looked, John had been unable to find anything in his field.
“I’ve been to every job fair. I’ve handed out 30 resumes at every job fair they’ve had. I’ve gone to classes. I’ve done seminars. I’ve done workshops.”
He attended Phil Adams’s job skills class at CPCC. It was good, he says, but what worked best for him was the “Pronet” group at the Employment Security Commission. “When you’re at home with a spouse, it’s easy to feel like a failure, like you’re not pulling your weight. But go in that room full of unemployed people and you feel you are not alone.”
Looking for a job is “cyclical,” he says. “Some days you’ll get a couple of hits — make contacts or get a response of some kind. Some days you won’t. Some days you’ll feel good and you’ll print out 10 resumes and you’ll drive down Independence Boulevard stopping at stores and walking inside and saying, “Hi, I’m John, and I’m looking for work. I have a great track record. I’ve been very successful in the past, and I’m looking for an opportunity to make you successful.’ Some days you can’t wait to jump up and go out and deliver resumes. And there are other days when you’re scared of your shadow. ”
When John talked to me a few months later, he was feeling a little better. He had prospects for a sales job at a department store during the Christmas season. He felt his family life had improved; his wife and children said he was nicer to be around these days. His volunteer activities were getting him recognition in the community. His wife later told me she didn’t realize how scared and angry she had been and that she’d only gradually come to see what John was up against and how the financial pressure had affected both of them. There were also some good things, she thought. Now he knew much more about what it was like to run a house with active kids.
I asked John if there was any way that he had significantly changed, or was the layoff and joblessness like a bad case of the flu.
“Having the flu is a good analogy,” he replied, “except that you can expect the flu to go away in a few weeks. This talk about a jobless recovery scares me to death. Unemployed people don’t need to have a good spin put on their unemployment. What unemployed people need is an opportunity to feel whole again by serving their community in the manner they trained for their whole life.”
Sheri Hood — Faith In Yourself, For Your Kids
Sheri Hood took another route in her transition. It wasn’t a corporate position that she lost. It was her full-time work as a homemaker with two young children. This job was, she said, “the best and at the same time the hardest job I ever had in my life.” She also did volunteer work, including a life-changing experience with wildlife preservation in the Lake Wylie area:
“One day we found a dead mama possum in our yard with nine babies. We took them in. I looked everywhere for something to do about it. I couldn’t find anybody to help. I got on the Internet and it said the best thing to do is warm them up slowly. So I put them in my T-shirt and placed them on my stomach. I finally came across this organization called ARC [Animal Rehabilitators of the Carolinas], and she asked me: “Where are those possums now?’ I said: “You’re gonna think I’m insane, but they are wrapped in my T-shirt on my tummy.’ And she said: “You have to come work with us.'”
Sheri’s volunteering moved her in a direction she continued with when her husband decided to leave. It was sudden — one day he just disappeared. Sheri and her two young daughters, then 11 and 14, were in a state of shock.
“I was crushed for a long time. . . still am in a lot of ways, but me and the girls are so much more happy now.
“I hadn’t had a job in 10 years and I’m thinking “What am I going to do?’ because there’s no way I could make enough money to support us properly.” But she knew she cared deeply about nature and the environment, and she soon hit upon it: a hydroponics store.
“Hydroponics is growing plants in specially prepared soil that can grow in small spaces,” she explains. “It’s mostly water. Other mediums would be like a soilless mixture. For example, you’ve seen the soilless mixtures of pearlite and vermiculite, things like that. We have compressed tree bark that we would use as a medium or clay pellets. I’ve grown corn in three-inch cups as well as grown fruit, just to see if I could do it, and I did.”
She started her store, ran it for a year and a half, and used money her husband had given her before he left for the initial costs of moving her store to Independence Boulevard. Things had started well, and she was beginning to build a clientele when the Independence Blvd road construction began. Like other businesses on both sides of Independence, Sheri Hood’s hydroponics store suffered.
“My business is half of what it was this time last year. My bills at home haven’t changed. The bills here at this store — the overhead certainly hasn’t changed — and it’s become a struggle. My rent here is due on the first and I just now paid my rent today because I didn’t have it. The landlord is working with me, he’s been very nice about that, but if we stay here, and our businesses continue to go down, we won’t have any income.”
She looked at other properties, but the costs of moving a business proved to be cost prohibitive. Her two daughters have been her greatest motivation, helping her as she put in the long hours to make the store work.
“We all pitch in and take care of each other now. Even though I work at the store, things are better and more comfortable — there’s no mixed feelings. We’re all very honest with each other. We all do our part to take care of each other and the house and the business and everything. When she can, the older one is running errands, going to the bank or the post office or picking up this or that, to typing up flyers and printing them. The younger one does more work here. I don’t make them come after school but whenever school is out, they come up on a Saturday and help me out, or we’ll come on a day the store is closed and do inventory.”
If the business just can’t make it, would she return to a regular job?
“I’ve actually looked for jobs, very recently in fact. I never went to any interviews or anything, just looking at the different ads. Maybe running the store for so long, maybe I qualify for things I might not necessarily realize. There’s not a whole lot out there that I feel like I could do, although I would like to be able to take a sick day or any of the other perks that come with working for somebody else, that would be nice. I kind of miss that. Then I think. . . I’d have a boss, I’d have co-workers, you know. If I can, I want to do something for myself, even if it’s just doing stained glass in my garage or growing herbs and selling them at the flea market. I’ve wracked my brain and can’t come up with anything that would make a whole lot of money. I want to be at home, it’s important. I want to continue to work for myself, no matter what I’m doing, I’m definitely sure of that.”
Sheri was describing the ongoing conflicts that occur once the new beginning is made. Although she had turned the corner on her beginning, her work was thrown back to an earlier stage by economic developments she had no control over. Like Judy Tooley, she wanted to work for herself, but her opportunities continued to be iffy in the current economy. So far, she was living through setbacks, holding on.
Ethel Harris — Doing It Right or Not at All
Ethel Harris faced conditions similar to Sheri Hood’s, but in her transition she chose a path that put her in daily contact with people who were in work transitions themselves.
Ethel is from the steel magnolia tradition, and has had to face overlapping tragedies in her own life as well. Two of the greatest were the loss of a child and a re-structuring/lay-off from an employment company that she had helped make successful. She later established her own employment temp agency, ethel harris incorporated.
From the beginning, Ethel took special pleasure in helping people build back their confidence in temp jobs. She seemed to know what kind of jobs people could take to accomplish that. When I talked to her, someone who had been a top accounting executive with a six-figure income was getting jobs through her agency. He would take anything that came up, even one-day jobs, she said. He was just glad to be able to put his skills to work in the interim, to get up in the morning and have a place to go. Ethel knew that feeling. She had been through it herself. But she found, like Judy and John, that longtime experience and seniority with a company and high salary can work against you.
“The [employment] company I was with merged and my salary was too high,” she explains. “They could get rid of me and hire three people to handle my position for the same salary. But they didn’t have the contacts. The corporation didn’t have a clue what was really going on in this small company. They didn’t realize that I was one piece of the pie that made things work. The owner ran the company but he didn’t know all of the contracts. I made a list of all the contracts for him. ”
After the some time off, she decided to establish her own company. She was determined to use what she had learned and to run the new temp staffing company very much her own way.
“I wanted to operate with quality rather than quantity and have candidates feel the personal touch. Also, I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me again in five years. You see the handshake (pointing to the company’s logo). That’s our trademark. We do everything personally.”
Ethel also said, with quiet conviction that seemed to come out of the pain of a long, thoughtful struggle, that she didn’t want to “settle” — not in her work, or in her life.
Does the neutral zone last forever?
Judy Tooley, John Doe, Sheri Hood, and Ethel Harris were all at different stages of transition after being fired or laid off at the time of these interviews. Still, their stories help map the territory that they and many others have to travel. They help us see what happens in the “neutral zone” between losing one’s livelihood and getting another — and they make more visible the courage it takes to go through that transition.
The neutral zone is often accompanied by anxiety and depression. It is often hard to let go of the old to take hold of the new. Paradoxically, it’s in this place that people begin to get an idea of what their new lives might be.
During his time in the neutral zone, John was doing more for his daughters and his family than he knew. Judy was working with a Rainbow AIDS group connected with the Methodist Church uptown. Sheri had worked as a committed volunteer with a wildlife association, which helped her see ways to put her love for nature and the environment into an ecologically aware business. Ethel regrouped, using her established skills to start her own business helping others with their own job transitions.
On the whole, these four people felt they were in a better spot than they were when they first confronted the end of their jobs, but there’s no denying that they all suffered financial hardship along the way. They often found themselves having to take loans, tap savings or retirement accounts, sometimes making drastic changes like selling their family home and moving to a smaller one. At times they weren’t sure where their next dollar was coming from. Most of their stories are even now filled with uncertainty, and long-term security is still a serious question.
The bigger picture
Our society seems to know little about how to face or acknowledge social pain. Instead, powerful economic and social forces are personalized and the victims blame themselves. Everything is supposed to be normal as people get up, go to work, and go on with their lives. But at least nine million people are officially “unemployed” at last count, and that doesn’t take into account downsizing, downgrading, and the many more who are overlooked in official statistics. The true number of those displaced, according to many experts, could be as much as twice as high.
Listening to our four protagonists’ stories brings home an uncomfortable truth. The people who tell these stories are no longer the “fringe,” the “invisible,” the “other” whom we cannot recognize. The existence of the jobless, individually and collectively, is now too overwhelming. They are us. And so are those who stay with jobs they hate because they’re afraid of the wilderness awaiting them when they enter the neutral zone that can bring such hardship. These people are not on the edges, but at the center of massive economic changes that are affecting us all.
How do we honor these people and their struggle? One way is to recognize, be patient with, and help people we know who are in transition. Another equally important way is to look unflinchingly at larger questions about American politics and the economy. Who and what created the “jobless growth” economy in America today? Why have there been so many mergers, restructurings, and layoffs, not to mention soaring corporate salaries and perks and mounting evidence of corruption at the top? Who’s benefiting? Who is losing out?
People will hopefully be thinking about these issues, these stories and these people when they show up at the polls in November.
Bernard Timberg, a former professor at Johnson C. Smith University, is a writer, media consultant, lecturer and media producer who lives in Charlotte. He acknowledges and thanks Judith Levin for her considerable contributions to this article. Timberg and his son are currently working for some of the changes advocated in this story by working for the Dennis Kucinich presidential campaign.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2004.
