The Quest for a New Job: Profiles of 3
The Recession, a Follow-Up Report
Last May, The Times looked at the worsening economy’s effect on local workers. At the time, Xavier Rodriguez had lost his job at McDonnell Douglas and was selling off his baseball card collection to pay his bills. Jose Rubio, a laid-off forklift mechanic, was struggling to feed his wife and family. And longtime aerospace engineer Jack Voss discovered that for all his experience, he could not land work. Eight months later, in different ways, all three are still battling the recession.
Jose Rubio feels lucky. After being out of work for more than a year, he finally landed a job in September as a forklift mechanic. He is relieved, but because the job includes no health benefits and pays $2 an hour less than his previous one, he is also worried.
“I feel very grateful, very happy,” the 57-year-old Rubio said in Spanish, the language he is most comfortable speaking. “The money will be tight, but at least I have a job. I have other friends who still have no work.”
The recession drove manufacturing to its knees in Southeast cities, and when it did, it took Jose Rubio with it.
For years, his mechanic’s salary had supported his large family in a modest Bell Gardens house. After the recession took his job in November, 1990, he spent hours every day combing the classified ads section for work. He cut out each forklift ad and pasted it in a yellow notebook. The notebook soon grew fat and wrinkled, and he remained jobless. The unemployment check, which was never enough to cover minimal expenses anyway, ran out. He went on welfare.
His age, 56, seemed to be working against him. “The jobs go to the young people, not to old guys like me,” he said.
He found himself competing against newly arrived immigrants willing to work for $5 or $6 an hour, when the going rate for his type of skilled labor had been $17 or $18 an hour.
“I understand why they work for so little,” Rubio said. “Here they earn in an hour what they would in a day in Tijuana. But what about the rest of us? How do we live? We can’t support a family on $5 an hour.”
After receiving more than 200 rejections, Rubio heard about an opening at a Pico Rivera forklift company where he had worked a few years earlier. He had quit, he said, due to poor management. The management had changed and he was glad to return, even if it was for less money and no health insurance.
His youngest son, 18-year-old Robert, takes a broad view of the family’s problems. “We Hispanic people know how to get through hard times. We got through them. And now I think it’s going to be OK.”
But his father still worries.
“We have no health insurance, and my wife needs medical attention, which is very expensive, the doctors tell us,” he said. Within the next few months, he hopes to find “a good job with insurance.”
Whether the recession will let him is anyone’s guess.
Jack Voss had an annual salary of $52,000 and 30 years of experience in aerospace when Hughes Aircraft laid him off in the summer of 1990. He was five years from retiring with a guaranteed lifetime income of $1,800 a month. Instead, he got $600 a month for 10 years, and the sad realization that the field that had been his life’s work was in today’s recessionary job market a dirty word.
After spending nine months looking for a job, mailing nearly 800 resumes, conferring with two dozen employment headhunters and visiting a dozen job fairs, Voss, 56, got no offers.
Then a placement agency sent him to a Thousand Oaks pharmaceutical company and advised: “Don’t say anything about aerospace.”
“The company had bad experiences with aerospace workers,” Voss said. After being turned down at the same company three times, Voss took the advice and landed a temporary job helping construct and maintain buildings for the pharmaceutical company.
Today, as a temporary building and plant manager, he said he earns “more or less” what he did as an aerospace engineer, minus health benefits, pension and job security.
Voss said he learned an important lesson during the search: “Other industries don’t want you if you’ve worked in aerospace because managers perceive aerospace workers to have skills so specialized it would be too difficult to retrain them.”
Ironically, Voss is still doing the same work he did in aerospace--building special labs and chambers--he is simply doing it for a pharmaceutical company.
Although the company recently extended his contract, Voss still has no idea if he will ever be hired permanently. “It could be they’ll build these buildings and let us go. I’ve been running the operation since my boss went on vacation. When he gets back, I’m going to put it to him: What are my chances of getting hired? Right now I could be gone next Friday.”
The recession has taken a heavy toll on his personal life. He and his wife of 23 years recently separated. Although the split was amicable, Voss said, he wishes it were different.
“After all these years, it’s hard to start all over again at my age. Especially now around the holidays. This is not the time of year to be on your own. It can really knock the heck out of you. A lot of people do a swan dive off a bridge or overdose on sleeping pills. You wonder if you can make it.”
Voss, who lives in Westchester, said he has found support in his friends. And that has been reason enough for him to keep going. “I never realized how many true friends I have. They’ve really helped me through it. It’s a good feeling to know, that even in this chaos, they’re there to lend a hand.”
No one could accuse Xavier Rodriguez of not trying. When he was laid off because of the recession in the summer of 1990, he sent out 372 letters and resumes to various companies, met with 38 employment headhunters, attended 11 job fairs and, in a desperate attempt to make a better impression, dyed his graying hair black.
He is still out of work.
“At first, it really hurt,” said Rodriguez, a 43-year-old former aerospace budget analyst. “Then I said, to hell with it. Just do it. Get tough. Don’t dwell on the past. Look to the future.”
That attitude, as upbeat as the holiday message on Rodriguez’s answering machine, has kept him going even as the aerospace industry continues to be bludgeoned by the recession some experts thought would be over by now.
A Nevada school district recently invited him for a preliminary interview. The meeting with the personnel director went well, Rodriguez said.
“He told me he was going to do his best to get me the final interview and the job,” Rodriguez said. “It looks real good. He wined and dined me. If I hear back . . . I’ll be happy as hell.”
Before McDonnell Douglas Electronics Systems Co. laid him off, Rodriguez--who has a degree in economics and 15 years experience--was earning a salary in the high $30,000 range, he said. After the layoff, he survived on $760 a month in unemployment benefits and whatever money he could earn from selling off his collection of 30,000 baseball cards.
Were it not for Rodriguez’s family and modest lifestyle--he owns his car outright and rents a small apartment in Lakewood for $555 a month--he doubts he could have survived.
He has half his baseball cards left, with some sets worth more than $1,000. “I never thought I’d get rid of those things,” he said, choking back tears. “And I’ll never get them back.”
Then he stopped, composed himself and observed more brightly. “Whenever I feel that way, I say to myself, ‘Hell, Xavier, you’ll get more when you get a job.’ ”
The job search is long and frightening, and he struggles to keep his plight in perspective. “I tell myself not to be in the dumps. There’s 5.8 million other people like me in this country without a job. Seven percent of the people in this state ain’t got no damn job.”
