RECESSION IN LONG BEACH: A SPECIAL REPORT : For 1 Jobless Man, a Cycle of Resumes, Interviews, Anger : Unemployment: Xavier Rodriguez has experience, knowledge and enthusiasm, but no job that pays him enough. For this numbers cruncher, it doesn’t add up.
In his seventh month of unemployment, Xavier Rodriguez realized that it was not enough that he had begun crunching numbers for aerospace companies 15 years ago, when most of his rival job applicants were still learning their multiplication tables.
The 43-year-old budget analyst had the schooling; he had the skills. Even so, he found himself one morning in February standing in front of his bathroom mirror, with black tint dripping from the roots of his graying hair, onto his collar and down his back.
“I have to do whatever it takes to get a job now,” he said, patting his short, neat, black-by-Clairol hair. “I’m using every tactic I can. I rewrote my resume so that it looks nicer. I highlight the fact I’m bilingual. I let people know I am a vet. I have learned to be very aggressive, to tell people up front that I am willing to do the job and can do it right.”
Rodriguez had been laid off with about 450 others from McDonnell Douglas Electronics Systems Co. in Huntington Beach on July 27, 1990. It was the third time in eight years in the aerospace industry that he found himself in the unemployment line, but this time the line was longer than he had ever seen it.
Despite his career as a budget analyst and prior experience with layoffs, Rodriguez had never thought that he needed to save money. Instead, he preferred to invest his spare cash in baseball cards, plunking down hundreds of dollars for set after set until he had amassed a collection of 35,000 cards.
After the layoff, he received $760 a month in unemployment. It covered the $555 rent on his one-bedroom apartment in Lakewood, but it did not leave him enough cash to buy groceries, gasoline for his ’83 Buick and make the payments on his credit cards and a $200-a-month loan. With his upper-$30,000-a-year salary only a memory, he borrowed money from his 88-year-old mother.
“I felt so bad. Here she is 88 years old and she is sending me money,” he said. “I should be taking care of her.”
The days that followed the layoff blurred into months of poring over help-wanted ads, jostling crowds at job fairs and sending off hundreds of resumes. He got few responses. He applied for jobs in Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. He had 27 different headhunters beating the bushes for him.
One company that liked his enthusiasm and his smooth conversational manner offered him a job selling precious metals by telephone. A couple of insurance companies offered him sales jobs. He turned them down, wanting something meatier.
In January, he attended a job fair at the Marriott Hotel in Lakewood. Dressed in a suit and tie, he watched hundreds of former McDonnell Douglas workers, all with stacks of resumes, mill through the banquet room.
Rows of booths, set side by side, crammed the room and, in front of each, hopeful men and women lined up to talk to recruiters. Engineers looked over brochures from Disneyland Imagineering and Honda and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Two recruiters from the Queen Mary handed out flyers advertising jobs for tour guides at $5.14 an hour. Several booths over, representatives from the Greater Long Beach Restaurant Assn. were busy answering questions. A man and woman, wandering from booth to booth, joked that the layoffs have given them a nice vacation. A representative of the local unemployment office watched them pass. “That attitude will last until their unemployment runs out,” he remarked.
Rodriguez, sitting in one corner of the room, turned toward the wall. Caught up in his anger and frustration, he wept.
“I have a lot to offer. I went to school. I have the experience and no one gives a damn,” he said angrily, not bothering to brush the tears away. “I go to a store and I see a 19-year-old working behind the counter and I think, ‘Why are they working and I’m not?’ I have a neighbor, a young woman, and I see her go to work every morning at 8, and I am so jealous. She has a job and I don’t.”
Throughout his job search, Rodriguez attended motivational seminars and read books on interviewing techniques--cover-to-cover, two, three times a month. He can cite the lessons as diligently as a schoolboy: “The first four minutes make all the difference. A little smile is very important.”
By January, when he attended the job fair in Lakewood, his search for work had yielded a handful of interviews, but the only offers he had received were the commission-only sales jobs with no benefits.
One month later his unemployment compensation ran out, and he was forced to pawn two gold rings, his gold watch and his treasured 1958 Topps Mickey Mantle baseball card. That same month, he began selling his mint condition baseball cards to pay the rent. A dealer gave him $1,000 for a 1972 set and $700 for a 1973 set.
“The only way I maintain my sanity and my dignity is because of my family and friends,” Rodriguez said. “They have been so supportive. It’s a very lonely feeling. It’s as if nobody cares about you, even though there are a million people like me.”
In late February, with no money coming in, Rodriguez took a job soliciting memberships for the Santa Ana Chamber of Commerce. He now spends most of his time on the phone, wooing business owners (“Over 1,000 members and 102 years old”). The job pays on commission, and on his best week Rodriguez took home $442.50, not enough to stave off bill collectors.
But he is grateful to be working.
There are still bad times--times when he is alone in his apartment and cannot stop crying, times when he cannot sleep--but he tries to keep his spirits up.
“I’m working at keeping a positive attitude. I tell myself, ‘Hey, this is not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong. We were all just at the wrong place at the wrong time.’ ”
