Layoffs Hit These Workers Especially Hard : Program for Disadvantaged Included Self-Esteem in Every Paycheck
For five months, Kenneth Matchett had stopped being a statistic.
After a lifetime of joblessness that had sapped his hope and gnawed at his self-esteem, the 20-year-old cerebral palsy victim in February landed an assembler’s job with an East San Diego program for the disadvantaged. It was his first job, and Matchett believed it would last forever.
But Wednesday he found that he had again become an unwilling player in the numbers game.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said Matchett, who was one of 18 handicapped or indigent assemblers to again join the ranks of the unemployed when they were laid off by Skill Centers of America.
‘I Was Hoping to Build a Career’
“I don’t know what will happen to me without the center,” said Matchett, a native of Iron Mountain, Mich., whose disability confines him to a wheelchair. “I was hoping to build a career with this. Before, finding a job was frustrating because of my handicap. I didn’t like myself. I was depressed, and what was really bad was knowing I’m able to produce something--if I had the chance.”
John Cunningham, 47, one of two men spearheading the assembly program at 6195 University Ave., said that, if Skill Centers cannot find backers to revive the assembly program, it will suffer irreparable damage.
Employees in the program made water-ski straps and, until recently, produced “Stupid Hats,” plastic foam hats shaped like stars, airplanes and animals.
“The assembly program brings in the most money,” said Cunningham, who was also forced to tell 22 other prospective employees that they have no jobs waiting. “It was bringing (in) about $1,500 a day. If we would have added 22 more, we would have made about $3,000 or $4,000 a day.”
The money ran out when Packaging Industries in Hyannis, Mass., petitioned to file for voluntary bankruptcy May 25, freezing payment of debts incurred before the petitioning date. Skill Centers’ sole patron, Sentinel Corp., is a subdivision of Packaging Industries.
“We understand that it is a program for the handicapped,” John Gobil, controller for Packaging Industries, said in a telephone interview. “There’s just nothing we can do. We petitioned the court for a voluntary Chapter 11 to protect us from . . . debts, because we are reorganizing. We’re not bankrupt.”
Gobil said the company cannot begin paying most creditors until after the petition is approved and filed and the reorganization is completed.
However, he added, “I don’t know how long that will take.”
But the assembly program also faces another obstacle. According to an assistant manager, the program also was hit hard when the federal government forced Skill Centers to stop making the hats.
“The Environmental Protection Agency said it was doing something to the ozone level, so we stopped,” said Cynthia Horton, 29. “The material is just piling up now.”
Cunningham said he realizes that Packaging Industries can no longer support Skill Centers, which Friday postponed its employees’ payday because it lacked the cash to back their paychecks, but he did not criticize the company or its subdivision for the center’s woes.
“It’s not their fault,” he said. “They’ve done all they can. They are super people.”
Rather than pointing fingers, Cunningham said, everyone at the center is working to avoid closing the assembly program, a loss he fears would ruin the center’s rapport with the handicapped and the homeless.
Losing the assembly program “will cause us to have a reputation with the handicapped and homeless of not being able to (follow) through,” he said. “They’ll lose confidence in us.”
Cunningham said the center has two other work programs for employees, a washer and dryer repair service and a retail store, and is preparing to open a third, a printing shop.
Nevertheless, Cunningham said he and Skill Centers employees, who receive the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour, are doing their best to find new patrons for the assemblers.
“We told them we would find them work, and we will,” he said. “I am not giving up. With the help of the people in the community, we can keep this going.”
It was that same “community” Cunningham sought to aid in 1986, when he and Keith Davis, 29, a former basketball player at San Diego State University, opened Skill Centers of America.
“We looked at the homeless problem in San Diego and figured one of the things this city needed was a work program,” said Cunningham, who had worked with Davis distributing an advertising publication. “We wanted to do work for the community that a corporation either couldn’t do or didn’t have the money (to do). We also wanted to do it in a way the community wouldn’t have to pay for it.”
He began the washer and dryer repair shop in 1986, paying homeless and handicapped workers to fix old machines and renting them to people unable to buy their own.
“After a year,” Cunningham said, “they would own the machines.”
Later in 1986, the program expanded to include the retail store, in which employees sold secondhand clothes and household appliances.
But the assembly program has been the largest thus far, employing 21 of the centers’ 45 workers and managers. For this reason, Cunningham is reluctant to allow the assembly program to die.
“Some of these people are caught in desperate situations,” said Cunningham, who also plans to open centers in 10 other major cities. “This is the money they have to eat with.”
The assemblers said they will also miss the daily activity the job afforded them.
“Going to work gave me something to do,” said Wayne Barkman, 26, a paraplegic who lost the use of his legs in a 1981 car accident. “It gives me a place to go and a chance to make my own money. It’s better than sitting around watching soap operas, which is what I was doing before.”
However, Barkman said he would also suffer financially.
“My Social Security got cut when I started working,” he said. “I still get money, but not enough. I’d much rather work, though.”
Added Matchett, who also gets government aid: “Right now, for my food money and other things, this is pretty much all I have.”
