3 Struggle to Stay Afloat Amid Sea of Lowered Expectations

In a special report on the recession last May, The Times profiled several Westside residents to provide some personal glimpses of how the economic slump was hitting home. Here is an update on Ludomira Halabi, Edward Scott and Ken Leib.

Forget a career. These days, many veteran business executives are struggling to find any kind of job just to stay afloat.

Edward Scott is one of them.

The Mid-Wilshire resident’s resume is impressive: an extensive background as a financial planner, a Ph.D., 10 years of experience in accounting and a stint teaching accounting at the college level.

Last May, Scott, 45, had been out of a permanent job for more than a year--and out of work, period, for more than a month. He would stay out of work several months more, but his participation in a state-sponsored job club for unemployed professionals finally paid off.

He got a job through Accountants Overload, a temporary placement agency, and has been doing financial work at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica for the past two months. But he is making much less than he used to.

“It keeps the bills paid; that’s all I can say,” he said last week. “I’m still sending out resumes, but I’m not getting any play out of them.”

His temporary job is scheduled to end soon. He spends a lot of time wondering when the ax will fall on him next, and whether the economy will ever improve to the point where he can achieve his dream of being an executive comptroller and financial analyst.

“I certainly expected it to (improve) by now,” he says, “but nothing’s happened.”

Many economists see a permanent shrinking of the job market for Westside professionals such as Scott, and he fears he may have to change fields and start over.

“I’m in limbo,” he says. “I’d like to say something positive has happened, but I can’t. It’s been the same old grind.”

Just when things were at their darkest, good fortune smiled on Ludomira Halabi. She got a job.

But like thousands of other blue-collar workers on the Westside, the job she took has been a decidedly mixed blessing.

“I am working,” says Halabi, 55, “but I am not happy because they do not pay good.”

And the work is tough, especially for a woman her age, Halabi says. Rising at 5 a.m. every morning, she takes the bus from her Hollywood apartment to her job at the May Co. store in Eagle Rock Plaza. It takes her an hour or so to get there, and she spends most of the workday on her feet, wrapping packages and selling concert tickets.

She gets paid $5.75 an hour--well below the $8 an hour she was seeking in May. By the time she started work July 19, she had exhausted what little nest egg she had.

Still, Halabi says, she is better off than she was last spring. After losing her job as a salesclerk, she spent months scouring the want ads, making phone calls and knocking on doors from morning until night.

She competed against former executives for even the most menial of jobs, despite managerial training in her native Poland and her 11 years of experience as an inventory manager at a Los Angeles-area company.

During those jobless months, Halabi began to doubt herself and had to fight fits of depression and despair, she says. But she had to keep looking, taking the bus from interview to interview. “Even when I am weak,” she recalls that she told herself, “I must do it or I will die.”

Now, Halabi is under a different kind of stress. Her teen-age son needs food and clothes, and Halabi’s mother is sick and needs attention. It is a struggle to make ends meet.

“It is terrible,” she says of her meager paycheck. “It is not enough to live on. I don’t know how long this will last.”

She has had to forgo health insurance because she cannot afford the $80-a-month cost, and she fears getting sick. At work, there are rumors of layoffs, and she thinks she’d be among the first to go because of her age and lack of seniority.

“I am worried,” she says. “I want a better job, better pay. I don’t want to worry about tomorrow, and after.”

Timing is everything. Just ask Ken Leib.

An accountant by trade, he had watched from the sidelines while his clients got rich on Westside real estate in the mid-1980s.

So he jumped in too, with both feet. He began buying and selling houses, sometimes making a $150,000 profit on a single property.

Then the market softened. Leib, of West Los Angeles, got caught with a few houses to sell and practically lost his shirt, he said in May.

Since then, Leib has tried to resuscitate his old accounting business. But he’s finding that as the recession refuses to go away, no one has any money to pay for accountants. And there are scores of other number-crunchers gunning for the same clients.

“Business is horrible. Not good at all,” he laments. “Most businesses are barely hanging on, or are going under.”

He says that “across the board,” the few clients he does have are experiencing flat sales at best.

“I’m not a pessimist at heart, but I don’t see any signs of things getting better,” he says. “Real estate is way down; aerospace and construction have had major layoffs. So what’s going to drive the economy?

“I’m just trying to gear up for income tax preparations, and trying to develop new business,” he said last week. “I’m struggling with it. Things are bleak.”