Labor Day: 38,000 mortgage jobs lost

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Good morning, Joe Hill, and happy Labor Day. You won’t read much today about the 38,000 mortgage industry workers who have lost their jobs already -- there’s no union to speak for them, nobody will march for them today. Some of you believe the work they did was tainted -- they worked in an industry that made some bad choices and sold some bad products. True. But most of them worked hard and honestly, and their lives have been turned upside down. Here’s an e-mail we received recently:

‘I worked at my company 10 yrs. I knew my job inside & out & could do it better than anybody.

‘All of us were so confident that we would survive because our branch in always met or exceeded our monthly goals. But this last 3 to 4 months or so has been a real trial. We watched a lot of our coworkers be layed off. We were a family in a sense because we all spent so much time together. It wasn’t unusual to see people greet each other in the morning with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Not one of those fake Hollywood hug-hug-kiss-kiss things, a real hug & a little kiss on the cheek.

‘We had baby showers, birthday parties, bridal showers, etc...right there in the conference room. We all helped each other. We listened to each others baby/kid/teenager problems, relationship drama, gave advice or sometimes you just had to take them to the bar for a couple of tequila shots.

‘This close down came as a surprise. We actually thought that we would be ok and that they would close other lower producing branches. Oh....little did we know. A lot of our mortgage brokers heard about it on CNN and the financial websites before we even knew in the branch. Our acct execs were getting phone calls from brokers & then our inside people were and 20 min’s later we got an email telling us to go to the conference room for a meeting. We all knew by then. The president of our company got on the phone & told us himself. And I can honestly say that he was genuine. He was struggling to talk and you could tell he had a lump in his throat & he was close to crying. It wasn’t an act. That company was his baby & he’d been there from the very beginning. It was hard.

‘I think we all knew that it wouldn’t last with some of the crazy loan programs that were out there. Creative finance was the PC term for it. What goes up, must come down sometime.

‘We will be there until 9/30. Then we are done. The next 4 weeks should be interesting.’

Thoughts? Comments? E-mail story tips to LALandblog@yahoo.com