O.C.’s Jobless Discovering Cruel Realities of Recession : Unemployment: As the downturn drags on, job hunters find themselves competing with thousands of other applicants for low-paying work for which they are often overqualified.
When one of the student dining halls at the UC Irvine campus placed a 1-inch classified ad for a cook recently, dozens of people responded--including chefs who were graduates from culinary schools all over the world.
That despite the job’s pay of only $7.50 to $8 an hour, and night and weekend shifts.
“I was floored,” says LaVonne Morello of Service America, the company that runs the Mesa Commons dining hall for UCI. Mesa Commons, after all, isn’t exactly the Ritz; it cranks out about 2,500 unpretentious meals a day.
“We don’t pay the $12 to $13 an hour chefs usually get,” says Morello. “But there are so many people looking for work out there, and fine restaurants are really hurting.”
It’s the same story all over the county, and indeed throughout Southern California. These days employers have found that a job--almost any job--still brings anywhere from 30%-50% more applicants than it would in normal times, even though the recession is supposed to have ended in June.
It’s not difficult to see what’s behind the flood of resumes. About 67,000 people in the county are out of work; that’s out of a work force of 1.37 million, which meant that the county was running an unemployment rate in September of 4.9%.
That’s not too bad compared to the rest of the state, which had a 7.7% unemployment rate during that month, or even the nation at 6.7%. But it’s bad enough. Consider this: A year ago, the county’s unemployment rate was only 3.8%, close to what economists consider full employment, and 15,000 more people had jobs.
As the hard times wear on and people get more desperate for work, employers are finding that some of the people showing up on their doorstep looking for work are far too qualified for the jobs they seek.
Take, for instance, the people who lined up to fill out an application at the new Lucky supermarket in Dove Canyon late last month. There were 165 jobs; 2,600 people showed up.
“There were men in pin-striped suits and women in expensive business suits, obviously people who had been in management-type jobs, waiting to apply for jobs as cashiers,” said Roberta Masek, a state Employment Development Department official who screened applicants for Lucky.
“We were open for two days, and the lines were so long that people waited six hours just to fill out an application,” said Masek.
Not too far away, at the Dove Canyon Country Club in a posh, semirural enclave of southern Orange County, occasional ads for assistant managers often bring people who may have owned a restaurant or been a general manager in charge of an entire club or restaurant.
Then again, some companies find that they’re also getting more unqualified people applying for jobs.
Take Irvine’s Shiley Inc., for instance, a maker of medical devices. Sixty-five people responded to a recent classified ad for a second-shift supervisor on the assembly line. That’s about a third more applications than in normal times.
But the number of applicants who met the job’s requirements--11--was about the same as before the recession. In other words, “the quantity is up, but the quality is the same,” says Shiley spokesman Robert Fateaux.
Shiley wanted people with three years’ experience in injection molding, a method of molding plastics; one year’s management experience, and a bachelor’s degree.
Most of the people who applied had the requisite management experience and the degree. But not many had experience in injection molding.
“If you’re looking for people with supervisory experience, they’re easy to find,” Fateaux said. “What are relatively hard to get are plastics engineers or packaging engineers.”
Same story at Cimco Inc., a Costa Mesa maker of plastic products such as typewriter-ribbon cartridges. A recent ad, for what the company described as a “fairly senior executive position,” brought about 1,000 resumes.
That was actually a third more applications than came in for a similar job this summer, when the recession was supposed to have already ended. It is not a very good sign.
In September, at least 2,600 people in Orange County had been unemployed for longer than 26 weeks, exhausting their unemployment insurance. The next stop, if they don’t find a job: welfare.
“A growing number of people without jobs are giving up looking for work, convinced that there are no jobs for them right now,” says Kenneth Goldstein, an economist at the Conference Board, a national business economics group.
(The Senate on Friday sent a compromise bill to the House to extend jobless benefits. Under the measure, expected to be acted on this week, benefits in California would be extended 13 more weeks. President Bush has said he will sign the bill.) Many of the jobs that are available, meanwhile, are low-paying service jobs, things like hotel chambermaid or fast-food cook.
And high-paying employers in the county are putting people out on the street: Cuts in the defense budget mean layoffs in the county’s huge aerospace industry; a slump in the important local real estate industry means that former high-rolling development types are out looking for a job or--to use a popular euphemism--are doing “consulting.”
Dennis Duggan wasn’t a high roller. He was just a guy who worked construction as an electrician.
But more than any economist or politician pontificating about the impact of the recession, Duggan knows what it is like out there.
By his count, Duggan, 36, has filed nearly 150 applications in the nine weeks since he last worked.
He started out looking for electrician’s jobs. These days, however, the list of jobs he’ll take is a lot longer. He has applied for work as a delivery driver, fork-lift operator, warehouse helper, janitor, general laborer and fast-food restaurant worker.
Five days ago, he was turned down by the manager of a McDonald’s restaurant near his home in Fullerton. He was overqualified for a cashier’s job, the manager told him.
“The guy asked me why I wanted the job, and I told him ‘cause I was broke,” says Duggan. “Then he said he wasn’t interested, because I’d be gone as soon as construction came back.”
But construction may not come back any time soon. Duggan’s last job, for instance--wiring a supermarket in Fontana--ended in September. When it was finished, there were no new assignments; unlike some years past when Duggan and other construction workers could pick from dozens of jobs.
This year Duggan has made only $3,400 in construction, about the same as last year; compare that to 1979, the year he was married, when he earned $35,000.
So Duggan hunts for jobs by day, and in the evenings minds the children--two sons, one who’s 8 1/2 years old and one 10 months--while his wife, Danette, works as a night-shift obstetrics nurse at Placentia-Linda Community Hospital in Placentia.
Every day brings the Duggan family closer to the brink. Danette’s job “is what keeps us off the streets,” Duggan says. “We’re still making our monthly expenses--barely.” Those expenses include an $1,100 monthly lease payment on the modest Fullerton home the Duggans once had hoped to buy.
Still, the Duggans recently sold part of a coin collection that his mother had given them. And shortly after the birth of their youngest son, they had to sell one of their two cars, a 1983 Volkswagen van, to raise cash and tide them over until Danette was ready to go back to work.
How bad is it out there? A sobering fact: A good many of the 10 people a day who call Colorado investment banker Chatfield Dean’s Irvine office looking for a stockbroker’s job are unemployed. A lot of them stick around, says Personnel Director Robert Holland, even after he tells them they won’t be getting paid for a month while they study for their broker’s license.
The biggest mob scene at a hiring hall so far has been at a screening office run by the Employment Development Department for 40 stores at the Galleria at Tyler shopping mall in Riverside County.
When the new mall was nearly finished in August, the department figured that there would be about 1,000 jobs and maybe 2,000 applicants, says Joann Fraser, who ran the screening of applicants on behalf of the mall.
“So far we’ve seen more than 13,000 people,” says Fraser, who will be taking applications until Nov. 23.
About two-thirds of the applicants were unemployed. And most of them had been laid off recently, “which is really frightening,” she said, “because it means a lot of companies still are letting people go.”
While the mall is in Riverside, many of the applicants used to have jobs in better-paying malls in Orange County but live in the more affordable housing of Riverside or Moreno Valley.
And that wasn’t the only extraordinary turnout for a hiring call.
Between Nov. 2 and Wednesday, for instance, more than 2,100 people filled out applications for 170 jobs at a new Olive Garden restaurant in Laguna Hills.
Several more grocery stores and restaurants will start hiring in the next month or so, says an Employment Development Department official, and “we expect big lines at all of them.”
Eric Hill owns The Pool Cleaner in Anaheim. He ran a one-day newspaper ad recently for a $250-a-week, entry-level office assistant.
Hill got a barrage of 125 phone calls during the next two days; he invited 40 of them to come in and fill out applications.
“It was amazing,” he said. “This was an entry-level position, and many of the people who applied were way overqualified. They had skill levels they’d never use here.”
The job went to April Ames, 18, who had been working part time as an assistant in a chiropractor’s office and who wanted a full-time job. She said she felt “really lucky” to get it because of the stiff competition.
Employers with jobs to fill, obviously, are overjoyed to have a large number of applicants. But there are problems too.
Back at the campus dining hall at UCI, for instance, they’re likely to pass on all those highly trained chefs who sent in resumes. The reason: Overqualified people don’t hang around when times get better and jobs become more plentiful.
“They don’t feel happy when they’re here, and they’ll leave you when the economy improves,” says LaVonne Morello, who handled all the applications. “And you can’t blame them.”
Joan Sellers of La Palma has several years of experience in public relations work, including four years with the Ronald McDonald House in Los Angeles. Yet the mother of two says she has learned not to mention her experience on job applications because she is overqualified for the only jobs open now.
“They’re discouraging when they see my qualifications, so I don’t put them down,” she said.
“They think you are going to leave that little job,” she explained.
She’s got strong references as well. But they’re no help either.
“I’ve got letters of referral like this,” she said, holding two fingers a half an inch apart, “and they don’t help me. They hurt me.”
Then there’s this: A lot of employers, still nervous about the economy, are reluctant to hire permanent employees, says Grace King, a labor market analyst with the North Orange County Regional Occupation Program.
What’s more, the blue-collar and technical workers trained by the ROP say that when companies do hire now, many offer only the minimum wage of $4.25 with few--if any--benefits.
“This is definitely an employers’ market,” says King. And to prove it, “our surveys show that average wages are dropping.”
Tough Times in Orange County.
In September, about 67,000 people were out of work in Orange County, about 15,000 more than were idle last year when the state paid nearly $120 million in unemployment benefits.
UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS PAID BY INDUSTRY Jan. 1, 1990, through Dec. 1, 1990:
Industry Benefits Paid % of Total Manufacturing $37,533,600 31.4% Services * 22,986,105 19.2% Construction 21,942,830 18.3% Retail Trade 10,663,238 8.9% Wholesale Trade 8,912,727 7.5% Finance, Insurance, Real Estate 8,859,311 7.4% Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing 3,154,360 2.6% Utilities 2,979,919 2.5% Mining 158,965 0.1% Establishments not classified 2,548,622 2.1% TOTAL $119,739,677 100.0%
* Includes personal, business, legal, social, educational, health and public services.
A Gloomy Trend Employment in most industries in Orange County has dwindled since the recession began in the summer of 1990 The exception is lower-paying service jobs, which have shown gains for the last three years.
Construction: Percentage of Paid Benefits: General Contractors: 23.3%
Heavy Construction: 11.9%
Subcontractors: 64.8%
Number of jobs: 64,000 Manufacturing:
Percentage of Paid Benefits:
Non-Durable Goods: 24.9% Durable Goods: 75.1%
Number of jobs: 244,100 Services: Percentage of Paid Benefits
Lodging Places: 4.1%
Business: 38.9%
Auto Repair: 4.2%
Health: 8.8% Management *: 21.5% Other **: 23.5% * Includes engineering, accounting and research ** Includes legal, social, personal and private household
Number of jobs: 333,500
Retail:
Percentage of Paid Benefits
Hardware & Garden *: 8.5% Automotive **: 19.3% Furniture: 11.6% Restaurants & Bars: 22.8% Other: 37.8% * Includes mobile home dealers ** Includes service stations Number of jobs: 217,700 Source: Employment Development Department Researched by DALLAS M. JACKSON / Los Angeles Times Times staff writer Chris Woodyard contributed to this story.
