‘Y’ Gives Job Seekers Helping Hand

When Kitty O’Neill separated from her husband three years ago, she had to move from San Luis Obispo back to Orange County to live with her mother because she had no income to support herself and her two daughters.

“I hadn’t worked in 15 years and didn’t know where to look,” said O’Neill, whose only work experience had been three years she spent as a waitress before she was married.

In the first five months after the separation, O’Neill tried to land a waitress job but couldn’t find one that paid more than the minimum wage, which was not enough to support herself and her two daughters, then 5 and 12.

Today, O’Neill, 39, is a tape librarian for Avco Financial in Irvine, thanks to the YWCA’s Employment Program for Mature Women. Mature Women offers free counseling, training and job placement for “displaced homemakers” such as divorcees, widows and women whose husbands are disabled.

During the four-week Mature Women session O’Neill attended in April, 1983, she remembers, she was “brought up to speed on how to approach the work world again. I didn’t even know how to write a resume or how to interview for a job.”

Now self-supporting, O’Neill is one of more than 3,000 women who have completed the Mature Women program since it began in 1976.

Displaced homemakers often find it difficult to find jobs because they frequently run into age discrimination and they often have limited job skills, explained program coordinator Lois Morgan during a recent interview at the South Orange County YWCA in Santa Ana.

According to Morgan, the need for a program like Mature Women is documented in a 1982 state study on the status of displaced homemakers in California. As of 1982, the last year for which complete figures are available, there were nearly 34,000 displaced homemakers in Orange County--which means that one of every 10 women in the county between ages 22 and 64 is a displaced homemaker, according to the study.

Regardless of the circumstances, displaced homemakers share a common trait: Their economic prospects are bleak. The majority have annual incomes of less than $7,500, the study shows. Widows not only have lost the income from their husband’s employment, according to the report, but in less than 18 months most go through the life insurance and other death benefits (about $12,000, on the average) that their husbands leave them.

Divorced women face a similarly grim financial future, the study says.

Few Divorcees Wealthy

“Contrary to popular opinion, only a few divorcees are wealthy,” the report notes. “Only 4% of divorced women receive alimony. While 89% of single-parent families are headed by mothers, 75% of these women receive no child support from fathers.”

“These women are poverty stricken and emotionally down when they come to us,” program coordinator Morgan says. “They’re unprepared for the barriers to their finding employment.”

Personal development and job-seeking skills are stressed during the four-week sessions, which consist of 20 hours of morning classes weekly. As the end of the session approaches, counselor-trainer Susan Sallee helps each participant find a job.

Over the past nine years, through its contacts with local employers, Mature Women has been able to find jobs for 60% of its “graduates” younger than 55 and for 80% of those 55 and older, Sallee said. Another 10% develop career plans requiring additional education. During the fiscal year that ended June 30, the program was unusually successful, according to Sallee, finding jobs for 92% of its participants.

Among these recent successes is Tina Powers, who has led a roller-coaster existence since her 23-year marriage to a machinist ended in 1977.

Limited Experience

Powers, 55, had done some factory and clerical work in her native New York, but since moving to California with her husband in 1957, Powers had occupied herself with rearing the couple’s five children, whose ages now range from 18 to 30.

Powers’ divorce settlement left her with just enough money to make a down payment on a condominium in Garden Grove. She received $150 a month in child support for her youngest son until he graduated from high school this spring, and the court had awarded her just $150 a month alimony for three years.

When Powers separated from her husband, she started working part time as a restaurant hostess. But by the time her divorce became final in 1977, she needed a full-time job. Through a restaurant customer, she learned of openings at a Garden Grove firm that manufactures venetian blinds, where she got a job on the production line.

But after seven years, she was fired. Her employer claimed she was no longer a productive employee. Powers, then 54, claimed she was terminated because of her age. She has filed age discrimination complaints, which are still pending, with state and federal job discrimination authorities.

Without her $1,000 monthly salary, Powers found it difficult to make the $325 monthly mortgage payments on the two-bedroom condominium she shared with her son. She was receiving $500 a month in unemployment benefits, but her monthly bills amounted to $900. Fortunately, her children chipped in to supplement her income.

Searched for 4 Months

“I felt very depressed because I had bills to pay, and I was afraid I was going to lose my condo,” Powers said. “I didn’t have many job skills because I’d quit school at 16 and only had a 10th-grade education.”

After she lost her job last September, Powers spent the next four months going on two or three job interviews a day. Finally, last January, she was hired for a production job with a firm that manufactures semiconductors. The job lasted only a month, however, because the firm moved to San Diego.

Powers resumed her job hunt but had found nothing after six months. She enrolled in Mature Women last April, and just a month later she was hired by Bell & Howell/Columbia Pictures Video Services in Garden Grove as a packager of videocassettes.

Powers noted that before she enrolled in the program, she had submitted two applications to Bell & Howell but had received no response.

After being enrolled several weeks in Mature Women, she sent another application to the firm. Unlike her previous two applications, which had been handwritten, the third was typed. She was hired a week later.

Self-Doubt a Problem

Knowing those kinds of job-search strategies gives unemployed homemakers renewed confidence in themselves. “With a lack of security comes self-doubt,” program coordinator Morgan explained. “A woman in this situation asks herself: ‘Am I able to function?’ ”

It’s also a question expressed privately by employers, said Morgan, who tries to refute the belief that older women are poor job candidates: “We educate employers to try to eliminate their stereotypes of older women: They think these women are not flexible; for some unknown reason they think these women really don’t have to work to support themselves; they think older women are hard-headed and stubborn; they think older women will want to be the boss--and this is particularly troublesome for employers who’re concerned about whether older women will be able to take orders from supervisors younger than they are.”

Returning to school to improve a displaced homemaker’s employability is not enough to land a job, Alyce Gratto, 49, discovered. After her 19-year marriage ended in divorce, Gratto completed college--and even earned her master’s degree in social work--so that she could become self-supporting. But she found she had missed a crucial bit of learning in all her education: She didn’t know how to get a job.

In 1977, less than a year after her divorce, Gratto and her four children moved to California from Iowa. But years of being battered by an alcoholic husband had taken its toll. Gratto went through years of counseling, which she began receiving when she separated from her husband.

“I knew I needed help,” Gratto said, “because I didn’t have any self-esteem left.” She and her children lived in a small apartment in Orange. They survived on the $700 a month in child support her husband provided; she received no alimony.

Job Prospects Dismal

In an effort to improve her employability, Gratto returned to college in the fall of 1977, underwriting the cost of her education with a federal work-study grant.

She received her associate of arts degree from Santa Ana College in 1980. Gratto then went to Chapman College in Orange on loans and scholarships, receiving her bachelor’s degree in social work in 1982.

“When I graduated in ’82 from Chapman, I began looking for anything in social work--but with no luck,” Gratto said. “I didn’t know how to interview for a job. I didn’t even know the process you used to try to get a job.”

Gratto’s job prospects proved so dismal that she enrolled at the University of Southern California to earn her master’s degree in social work in the hope that an advanced degree would improve her chances of getting a job. But as her master’s graduation date approached last December, her chances of landing a job were as distant as they had been when she completed her undergraduate studies two years earlier.

Then last October, Gratto enrolled in Mature Women, and two months later she landed a job as a medical social worker at a hospital. However, she lasted only four weeks on that job because, she said, she couldn’t adjust to the hospital’s treatment regimen.

Persistence Paid Off

She gives the Mature Women program credit for helping her bounce back quickly after being fired from that position. She went back to the program while resuming her job search, and last spring, her persistence paid off: She was hired as a social worker at Riverside General Hospital. Gratto still lives in Orange with the youngest of her four children, a 17-year-old daughter who will be a high school senior this fall.

“Since divorce no longer has the stigma it once had,” program coordinator Morgan says, job-hunting difficulty is something that more and more women are experiencing. “After 30 or 35 years of marriage, a 55-year-old woman is divorced by her husband and is pretty much left to her own devices. These women find this situation really scary; they’re left almost immobilized by fear.”

Audrey Gerbac, 58, has faced this fear. Gerbac found herself needing help when the company for which she had worked as a bookkeeper for three years went out of business in December, 1982. For the following 11 months, she went on two job interviews a day, five days a week.

The fact that Gerbac had worked 16 years in accounting and bookkeeping--part-time when her two children were in grade school and full-time when they entered high school--left prospective employers unimpressed.

Applicant Rejected Repeatedly

“I was out of work and worried that I might never find another job,” Gerbac said, remembering her despair. “I got turned down so many times that I really got worried.”

Looking back, Gerbac believes her age was the main reason prospective employers rejected her.

“When I’d send in my resumes and call up for appointments, the personnel people would sound real enthusiastic--and even ask me when I’d be able to start work,” Gerbac said. “But when I’d show up at the personnel office, they’d take one look at me and they’d get this real disappointed look on their faces.”

Gerbac had been separated from her husband for six years and was the sole support of her family before she lost her job. She worried most about making the monthly rent for the apartment in Huntington Beach she shared with her daughter, then 20, whom she was supporting through college.

During the year she was unemployed, Gerbac tried to survive on unemployment but couldn’t pay her bills. Her son, then 23 and in the Marines, started paying the rent on her apartment. He also lent her his car for her job search.

Interview Behavior Changed

Gerbac was at the end of her financial--and emotional--rope when she enrolled in Mature Women in October, 1983. Counselor Sallee first reviewed Gerbac’s work experience and resume (which Sallee revised to give a more detailed description of the responsibilities Gerbac had shouldered in her other jobs).

The Mature Women classes Gerbac attended met in the morning so that participants could go on job interviews in the afternoon--even before the month-long program ended. In those job interviews, Gerbac found employers much more receptive because she came on forcefully, thanks to the coaching she had received from Sallee. However, salary proved a sticking point.

“I needed to make about $900 a month to live on,” Gerbac said, “but they weren’t willing to offer me more than $650 a month. This just wasn’t enough.

“It’s not that I expected to find a job making the $1,300 a month I’d been making at my other job. I knew I’d have to take a pay cut, but I still needed to make enough to live on.”

Gerbac eventually landed a job as a bookkeeper for Amies and Associates, an Irvine advertising and public relations firm, which offered her $950 a month plus fringe benefits such as medical insurance. And after being there nearly two years, she has no regrets.

Employer Satisfied

Equally pleased is Grif Amies, owner of Amies and Associates, who notes that Gerbac was chosen out of 35 people who were interviewed for the job. Gerbac is the oldest of the firm’s 18 employees.

“I’m 30,” Amies said, “and the person closest to Audrey in age is 35; the controller--Audrey’s supervisor--is just 25. But everybody gets along fine. And Audrey, like a lot of older people, has experience and is really good at handling unexpected problems that come up and ‘putting out fires.’ ”

Discussing the reported reluctance of employers to hire older workers out of concern that they will be ill more often, Amies said: “Audrey’s health is good; it’s no problem. She participates in our medical insurance plan, and our premiums are a little higher, but not by much.”

Mature Women trains and finds jobs for nearly 80 women each year. Since the program’s inception nine years ago, more than 135 companies in Orange County have hired graduates of Mature Women, Morgan said. Further, Sallee said, an unusually large number of the program’s graduates hold onto their jobs once they get them. Of the women who went through the program during the fiscal year ending in June, 1984, 90% reported a year later that they still had their jobs, Sallee said.

Women at Jobs 2 Years

Representative of these successful graduates are three women who have worked at Avco Financial for two years.

Working with Kitty O’Neill in Avco’s Irvine office is Diana Glenn, 36, a divorced mother of two who is an insurance clerk. Gladys Rovano, 55, is an insurance clerk at the firm’s headquarters in Newport Beach. Rovano, a mother of four, was forced to return to work after she stopped receiving alimony in 1983, four years after her 27-year marriage ended in divorce.

Rovano, Glenn and O’Neill are testaments to the benefits of Mature Women, according to Carolyn Scott, supervisor of human resources for Avco Financial. She noted that Avco had hired six women through the program, three of whom were still with the firm.

“As a ‘back-to-worker’ myself, I know how dedicated and hard-working these women can be if they’re given an opportunity to show what they can do,” said Scott, 43. Scott had been a homemaker for 10 years before her marriage broke up, making it necessary for her to take a job as a receptionist at Avco 15 years ago.

(Mature Women has an annual budget of $85,000, which is provided by the Orange County Job Training Partnership Agency and which covers the cost of training 11 women each month. The program is available to unemployed or underemployed women in Orange County who are older than 30 and who are economically disadvantaged. Additional information on eligibility and other program details are available by calling the South Orange County YWCA at (714) 542-3921 or (714) 542-3577 .)

In some instances, mature women prove to be better employees than recent high school or college graduates, Scott said. “These women are so determined to prove they can make it in the work force that they are always on time, and they rarely miss work. They’re the kinds of employees you can count on.”