‘Gold-Collar’ Workers Learn to Cope With Trauma of Job Loss
Barbara Henry knows terror. She lost her job.
“My thoughts were of sheer panic,” she recalled. “I was surprised and humiliated and alone and staggered. All at once.”
Henry was single and 39. She owned a home in the Dallas area and supported a child in college. She had been wooed from a $45,000-a-year job--a job she loved--to take this executive position with a prosperous health service concern. Now and then, she chatted coyly with rival firms that sought to lure her away.
Her specialty was advertising and promotions, and, sometime in August, the company decided that it would get out of the advertising and promoting business. Henry was handed 30 days’ pay and cut loose. The job offer she thought was waiting was not. She sold her home. She felt cheated--after 20 years in the job market with a lot of solid achievements, she was being told that her work was frivolous.
‘We’re All Vulnerable’
“I realized it can happen to anybody, anywhere, at any time,” she said. “We’re all vulnerable.”
Henry knew there were three strikes against her being re-employed quickly. “I was a female. I had no college degree. And I was a single parent.” It was three months before Henry got back on her feet.
Damon Braden, a 29-year-old engineer, has yet to get back up. He lost his job in November, a few months after his marriage.
He once rubbed elbows with the big developers in this big development city, helping carve office-residential complexes from raw land. But, when his company was sold to a competitor, he was told that his job was redundant. He had not seen it coming. “I always thought it was going to happen to the other people. I thought I had a good job and good future. Ha!”
Gone is the good pay and the company car and all the perks. He can eat because his wife works. “This is the greatest pain. I am dependent on my wife. I know she has rough days, but I can’t even go down to the flower shop and buy flowers for her. Not on $210 a week (unemployment compensation). It cuts into my being a man.”
Henry and Braden are examples of a phenomenon affecting the once-prospering Southwest, reeling from mergers, bankruptcies and layoffs in scores of hard-hit industries. Unlike other parts of the region, where unemployment ranges from 15% to 20%, Dallas has kept joblessness at a low 5.9%. But the industries that have been hit are the traditionally stable ones--engineering firms, banks, defense suppliers--and those who lose their jobs are often the best and the brightest in those supposedly stable industries.
“We’ve given these new people a name--gold-collar workers,” said Aletha Beane, employee supervisor for the Richardson, Tex., branch of the Texas Employment Commission. “These are people who were in professional or executive positions. They were in career jobs. Some made incomes in six figures. Now they’ve been dropped.”
Workload Doubles
Beane’s office workload has doubled in the last few months. Her placement roster includes computer executives, lawyers and company chiefs. “We have so many Ph.Ds it’s not even funny.
“The average age of these people is 41. Most are married and have never been unemployed before. They were trained to do everything but look for a job.”
A task force named by President Reagan investigated worker dislocation at all levels--blue collar to gold collar--and recommended a number of innovative programs to staunch the flow. Among its suggestions:
- Greater efforts by private industry to notify authorities of coming layoffs and help with retraining and relocations.
- Creation of a $900,000 program to coordinate federal, state and local job-locating efforts.
- Efforts at the state and federal levels to help jobless workers create their own businesses.
“Experience has shown that the most effective and successful dislocated worker-adjustment programs are those where employers and workers are directly involved in the design and delivery,” the report said.
Private Sector Role
“The private sector has a fundamental responsibility in relieving the problems of displaced workers,” it concluded.
In Dallas, a private sector campaign to re-employ workers at bankrupt Braniff Airlines was successful, although short-lived. When the air carrier collapsed four years ago, city fathers appointed a blue-ribbon committee of top industry executives to get jobs for Braniff’s 5,000-plus workers, including hundreds of pilots and engineers.
Space was cleared out at a large hall for job interviews. Solicitations were sent to 55,000 employers in the region. Thousands of Braniff employees were quickly re-integrated into the region’s economy.
“This was a smashing success,” said I. V. Ferguson, head of the regional office of the Texas Employment Commission and a participant in the Braniff job rescue. “But it was a one-time thing and it hasn’t been done since.
Community Support Needed
“Too often, this country thinks of job-creation programs as the business of the government,” he said. “But it isn’t. It’s the job of every business which hires and fires people. A true job program must have community support.”
The traditional image of the employment office is a problem.
“People think of the local unemployment offices as places where blue-collar workers line up to receive their checks. Businesses with job needs don’t approach us with their listings. But we can fill those big executive slots too.”
In fact, the nation’s state job offices are trying to teach executives how to market themselves. One of the pilot programs is offered in Richardson, a Dallas suburb, and is run by Beane.
“First of all, we try to address the psychological impact of being unemployed,” Beane said. “It’s like the grieving process. First, there is depression, then anger and denial. Losing a job, in some ways, is harder than losing a loved one. Because, when somebody dies, you know they cannot come back. But, when you lose your job, part of you dies.”
Refusal to acknowledge the emotional damage may lead to troubles later.
“Somebody terribly angry at a former employer will take that attitude into their next job interview,” she said. “The new employer doesn’t want to deal with that.”
Evaluating Weaknesses
In the next phase, the program evaluates executives’ job skills and weaknesses and teaches them to market themselves. “We tell them they are the product. A lot of them have never thought of themselves that way.”
Part of the process involves conducting mock interviews.
“The job applicants are videotaped and those tapes are played back,” Beane said. “It can be a real eye-opener. Suddenly, they know what they look like when they present themselves to a potential employer. They suddenly realize what they’ve been doing wrong.”
Perhaps the most important aspect of the new training is that the worker no longer feels alone. “Being unemployed, being at home, by yourself, getting all those rejection letters in the mail can be the most miserable experience in the world,” Beane said. “We provide a support network. Each member of the program is looking for a job, not just for himself but for fellow members of the class.”
Damon Braden is taking the course. It has given him courage, but not yet a job. He has interviews set up on the West Coast and a few contacts, through executive recruiters, back East. But his wife has a good job and he wants to stay in Dallas. “(The course) helps because I know I’m not alone.”
Attitude Important
Barbara Henry is also a graduate of the course. “I thought I knew a lot about getting a job, but I found I had a lot to learn,” she said. “Everything is attitude, mental attitude. Once your thinking is on line, everything else falls into place.”
It fell into place for Henry, who is now a marketing product manager for a financial software division of a 110-year-old Swedish firm. Henry’s job is wide-ranging, and her salary is “significantly greater” than the $45,000 she once made.
“Too many businesses ask us to have a heart, to perform during a period of cutbacks, to do two- or three-day jobs,” she said. “But then, the job comes to an end, and they don’t care. They pay attention only to the bottom line.
“They don’t have any idea what sort of impact they have had on our personal lives.”
