SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : Like the Piper, Career Dues Must Be Paid : Struggle: Twenty-year-old millionaires are as passe as yellow ties and suspenders. Dig in for the long haul.
Paying dues used to be a simple transaction: Work hard, learn a trade and steadily advance to fulfillment and security.
In other words, you got what you paid for.
Then came the 1980s. The stock market was booming, the economy was expanding and paychecks were fattening. Fresh-faced kids got rich quick. In dues, success seemed to come cheap.
But now these lofty expectations have collided with the hard reality of recession, layoffs, downsizing and the savings and loan crisis. The dues for success have gone up.
Now paying dues can mean standing in the unemployment line, taking credit cards to the limit and taking a job you might have shunned just a few years ago.
“It’s very scary,” says Mitchell Marks, an organizational psychologist and principal in the Los Angeles office of human resources consulting firm William M. Mercer. “The rules we grew up with just don’t matter any more.”
Millionaire 24-year-old investment bankers notwithstanding, dues-paying is pretty universal. Although some professions--such as law, accounting and publishing--traditionally involve a relatively formal apprenticeship of long hours, lower pay and scut work, nearly everyone--from chief executives to blue-collar workers--must pay dues of some kind.
And hard work can still get you your just desserts. Luis Puncel, an accountant at Coopers & Lybrand in Los Angeles, can attest that those desserts taste mighty sweet.
Puncel, 33, spent the past 12 years working his way up the ladder at the big accounting firm. On Oct. 1, he becomes a partner.
“I’m just jazzed,” Puncel says. “I wanted to be a partner from Day One. Every bit of sweat has been for that.”
But with belt-tightening taking place across a wide spectrum of industries, workplace specialists say the way we think about the dues we pay and the rewards thereof will have to change.
Indeed, for many Americans, the ‘90s have meant starting over. Patty Johnston, 39, began her career in the thrift industry 20 years ago as a teller and worked her way up to senior business analyst at Gibraltar Savings in Simi Valley, once the nation’s 10th-largest thrift. Johnston figured she had finally made it.
But by March, 1989, Gibraltar’s financial condition had been eroded by bad real estate loans and risky investments, and the thrift was seized by federal regulators.
In 1990, Johnston was laid off with hundreds of other Gibraltar employees when the government sold most of the thrift’s assets to Security Pacific Corp. Unemployed in an industry that was shrinking fast, Johnston was so desperate she interviewed for entry level positions--and was rejected. She was considered overqualified.
Meanwhile, Chris Ritter’s aspirations were derailed because of economic pressures and internal disputes at the San Francisco law firm he joined in 1982. For nearly seven years, Ritter, 35, had been told he was in line to become a partner. But a month before the expected vote on his partnership, he was told he wouldn’t be promoted. A key reason, he suspects, is the existing partners weren’t willing to split the profits further.
“It was a sign of the times that firms are tightening up,” Ritter says. The traditional six- to eight-year time frame for becoming a partner at a law firm “just doesn’t hold up anymore. You see law firms winnowing down and lawyers switching firms. It’s a system that’s far different than when a lot of us left law school 10 years ago.”
Both Johnston and Ritter have happy endings to their stories. After three months of unemployment, Johnston landed a job at financially stable Fidelity Federal Bank in Glendale. She says she loves her work as a training specialist and even makes more money than at Gibraltar.
Ritter moved on to another San Francisco firm, Gordon & Rees. A year and a half later, he made partner.
But even when paying dues pays off, the rewards are often less clear-cut than in the past.
Jazzed as he is, Puncel acknowledges that being a partner at an accounting firm isn’t quite what it was when he started out. The accounting industry has suffered from audit failures, as well as from the collapse of the junk bond market and the savings and loan crisis. One big firm--Laventhol & Horwath--recently closed. Others have been forced to merge.
“When I first got into the profession, being a partner was the ultimate because it was very secure,” Puncel says. But today “there’s much less of a certainty that once you get there it’s going to be a secure position.”
Despite tougher times, Sam Culbert, a clinical psychologist and professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Management, worries that young people’s notions about dues-paying remain “a little perverse.”
Culbert finds that many of his students and recent graduates are driven by money, which he blames largely on the high cost of housing. “Young people are working extraordinary hours and forgoing social endeavors,” he says. “They’re inventing concepts such as quality time.”
Culbert and others also find that such high expectations are leading to early burnout.
The Los Angeles District Attorney’s office has long been a breeding ground for promising young attorneys. Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael J. Cabral, 32, has risen through the ranks by accepting transfers among divisions and the least glamorous assignments. Since starting at the D.A.’s office fresh out of law school, Cabral has been transferred half a dozen times and has graduated from misdemeanor drunk driving cases to his current position in the major fraud unit.
But Cabral also senses an impatience among some of his young colleagues, many of whom give up after a few years and opt for what they hope will be a faster track and more money in private practice.
“Everyone wants to handle the homicides and high-profile publicity cases as soon as they get out of law school,” Cabral says. “I think a lot of people become disenchanted in a hurry.”
Dues paying--and disappointment--isn’t limited to professionals. The recession also touched thousands of blue-collar workers, shattering their hopes of job security.
The recent announcement by General Motors that it will stop producing cars at its 44-year-old Van Nuys plant is a case in point. When the plant closes next summer, up to 3,500 workers will lose their jobs, many of whom have worked in the auto industry their entire adult lives and possess no other bankable skills.
Local United Auto Workers officials have long argued that the GM-Van Nuys workers have paid their dues to the company by agreeing to wage concessions, cost cutting, quality improvements and a company-sponsored “team concept” program. In exchange, these officials say, they expected a commitment from GM to keep the plant open.
“We kept our end of the bargain,” says Richard Ruppert, chairman of UAW Local 645 in Van Nuys. But now, he says, many of the workers feel betrayed. “We need industrial jobs like these for our children.”
The world of the 1990s may seem harsher, but some people are glad to bury the obsession with immediate career gratification that marked the preceding decade. They see a return to the traditional workplace values of commitment and experience.
Betsey Olenick Dougherty is living evidence that such values still pay. She worked at four architecture firms and earned a master’s degree before starting a firm with her husband in Newport Beach. Over the years, Dougherty, 40, has seen the architecture business ebb and flow with trends in the construction industry. The latest downturn, she says, “is the worst since I’ve been in the marketplace.”
Yet Dougherty says she’s relieved that the current slump may weed out those who aren’t truly committed to the profession.
“Architecture is a way an individual can realistically make a contribution to their community,” she says. “But today, for young people going into the field, they have to be keenly aware of the realities. The tough times are tough to take. If somebody’s primary motive is to make money, they shouldn’t go into architecture.”
