Layoff Ax Is Falling at All Levels in O.C.

First, Bob Fender was laid off from his $35,000 sales job. Then, in November, a month after he found work, his wife, Jeri, was let go from her $32,000-a-year administrative job.

The one-two punch left the Irvine couple--parents of an 18-year-old in college and a 4-year-old in preschool--without a safety net. Until Tuesday when Jeri Fender signed her first client to her new consulting business, their future was so uncertain even homelessness loomed as a possibility.

The recession continues to hit home in Orange County, where it was announced Monday that unemployment has crept to a six-year high. Though the county’s 4.7% jobless rate is the third lowest in the state and not yet nearing the 9.4% high of 1983, its effects are visible in unemployment lines and personnel agencies filled with white- and blue-collar workers who never expected to wind up there.

“It’s pretty tough out there,” said 49-year-old Jeri Fender, who, having faced four months of choosy employers, is now picking her own employees from a growing pool of qualified applicants.

Frank Wiedner, who owns a personnel agency with offices throughout the county, said: “We’ve got people who have been working for a company 17 years and then got laid off. We’re seeing people at all levels. It could be a production worker, a supervisor.”

Since last year, unemployment claims have risen 33%. Those now looking for work are primarily laid-off workers in building and construction, the aerospace industry and retail-related fields, employment officials said.

The recession’s toll was highly visible Tuesday at the Santa Ana unemployment office where 100 people waited in a two-hour line to receive benefits. Among them were a 56-year-old carpenter, a 21-year-old cabinetmaker, a 35-year-old marketing administrator and a 64-year-old medical office manager.

Also waiting was Irene Montoya, a 30-year-old Colombian immigrant who was laid off from her sewing job in a factory last August and has been looking for work ever since.

Montoya’s husband, Alverto, 38, works for an upholstery company and is fearful of losing his job too. He does independent upholstery work in his back yard to make up for the 15-hour-per-week cutback his company instituted last month.

“We are always thinking of the children,” he said during an interview at the tiny two-bedroom home his family shares with another couple and their baby. “When I have work I am looking for more to support us.”

In Stanton, 45 people waited in line at the job service office.

Mike Mengel, 34, had lost his job Friday as a chemist for a Huntington Beach paint company. It was the second time in five months that he had been laid off.

“I walked into work on Friday and found all my stuff boxed up,” he said.

Mengel worked at another paint company in Los Angeles, but he was laid off from that job five months ago. Still, he was able to find another job because the company gave him a month’s notice.

Altogether, his expenses add up to about $1,500 a month. To make ends meet, he might have to find a cheaper apartment.

In Orange County, that’s not easy. “It’s a good possibility that if I don’t find a job I will have to look for a new apartment.”

In a ripple effect, day-care centers throughout the county are losing enrollment due to the high number of layoffs in dual-income families.

“Parents are coming in and informing us one parent or the other has been laid off,” said Gail Nadal, director of the Early Childhood Education Center at UC Irvine. “It’s the full gamut, all the way from computers, engineering, to real estate to clerical people. Across the board.”

As a result, the center was forced to cut back teachers’ hours to 85%, she said.

Some parents have made arrangements to delay payments, said Karen Mestemacher, director of Mesa Verde Preschool in Costa Mesa.

“They’re trying their hardest, especially the people in construction. There just isn’t work,” she said. “These are people who are small contractors, some doing labor work just to work. And even if they do have the work, their contracts are not being met and they’re not being paid. It’s a vicious circle.”

For at least one parent, however, unemployment offered a “mixed blessing.”

Marketing administrator Laura Munoz, 35, was laid off with about 30 others from Alpha Microsystems Feb. 15 during her maternity leave.

“I always said, if they ever laid me off, the timing would be perfect if it happened during maternity leave. Then I’d have more time with the baby. That’s exactly what happened.”

She has also cut back preschool time from five days a week to three for her 4-year-old son, which saves about $170 a month.

Eventually, she said, bills from Visa and MasterCard will dictate that she return to work. But that may not be easy.

“This was my first job out of college,” Munoz said. “I have very little experience looking for a job. I don’t even have a resume.”

Others elsewhere are scrambling for work.

At a state-run program designed to help unemployed executives find jobs, there is a waiting list of about 80 people just to attend an orientation workshop, said Norma Reagin, a coordinator for the Professional Employment Network based in Santa Ana.

About 230 people belong to the job club which specializes in finding employment opportunities for professional, technical and managerial personnel. Before being laid off, Reagin said, most of those now looking for work earned upwards of $50,000.

They range from chief financial officers at lending institutions to engineers to entry-level college graduates, Reagin said. “Probably the hardest hit people are in the aerospace industry--highly technical people who have been working on some particular component for years,” she said.

“They’re willing to make the transition into other occupations, but employers put them in this little box and think they can’t work in any other industry.”

Still, the county’s job picture is brighter than the state as a whole, which is experiencing 7% unemployment, and some rural counties with rates over 20%.

There are jobs in Orange County--largely in the service area, said Eleanor Jordan, labor market analyst for the state Employment Development Department. But she said, “They’re lower-paying jobs than some of the people would like to take.”

Despite the downturn, Orange County has a relatively high number of jobs because it does not depend on one single industry, she said. “That is sustaining us and will continue to sustain us.”