So Many Men, So Few Jobs
I spoke with him just after the General Motors plant shut down, and even though a career had dropped out from under him, he seemed heady with the prospect of challenging the unknown.
Larry was, after all, a skilled worker, a millwright, and he was only 37 years old, both of which would work on his behalf as he ventured into the world from the safety of the only job he had ever held.
But now, 13 months later and still unemployed--and feeling older than autumn--Larry has abandoned any notion of ever returning to his original trade and is working desperately to start anew.
Struggling to subdue a feeling of embarrassment at not being able to provide for his wife and two children, he asked that his full name not be used, though he used it with pride when the GM plant went silent last year and he went marching off to economic adventure.
But that was then, and this is now.
Today, between applying for jobs throughout L.A., Larry attends class to learn new mechanical skills while simultaneously studying for a state real estate test he will take next month.
Vacations, movies and most social functions are nonexistent. Broken appliances in their Saugus tract house go unrepaired and unreplaced. Spending is kept to a bare minimum.
Not that they’re starving. Larry receives unemployment benefits from GM and from the state, unlike most of L.A.’s almost 12% unemployed who have to struggle by on state money.
But pride is at stake here too, and in Larry’s case, it lies shattered like broken glass at his feet.
*
Born in Los Angeles, Larry was raised to believe the work ethic was sacred, and economic security was second only to good health.
His parents had survived the Great Depression and knew from memories laced with misery the fragile nature of a steady salary. But this was a different time, and nothing seemed impossible for their son.
Larry took a job at GM almost right out of high school and worked hard to emerge from the assembly line into the business of equipment repair, a rise that took four years of concentrated study.
Once there, he believed it would be at the big, noisy, 71,000-square-foot Van Nuys plant that he would spend his working life, and from which he would ultimately retire into old age.
“I honest to God thought it would be forever,” he said the other day in the Newhall rib joint where we met. “I never expected this.”
The this has been an almost endless search for new employment. Where at first he sought the $20.70 an hour he earned as a millwright, now he will settle for almost anything.
He has sent out enough resumes to fill a room, has filed job applications in cities from Pasadena to Santa Monica and has taken more tests, both oral and written, than he can remember.
In one instance, he placed 19th in a test out of almost 200 applicants for a single job; in another, third out of 100.
“I get closer and closer,” he said, hunched over ribs and coffee, “but that just makes it more frustrating. The GM benefits will end soon, and then what? Existing in this kind of uncertainty is a living hell.”
*
He’s taking a real estate test, Larry says, because at least success or failure will rest upon his own ability to sell, and not on the caprice of a company’s decision to close or stay open . . . even though the real estate market is anything but robust.
Larry believes the day of the large manufacturer is over, but since the survival rate of smaller companies is questionable too, they’re probably not a good place to apply.
“I put in one application at an aircraft parts place,” he said, “and six months later it was out of business. If I’d gotten that job, I would have lost my GM benefits and been out of work.”
Larry was one of 26,000 workers laid off by General Motors when it closed the Van Nuys plant. Many, he says, are bitter because the company told them they would never lose their jobs to foreign interests, then shifted the manufacture of Chevrolet Camaros and Pontiac Firebirds to Canada.
The experience has taught him not to trust those who run companies and has raised questions about the ability of government to win over a recession that blankets the nation like storm clouds.
Larry is working hard to make it, and his wife, who works part time, has gone back to school to put herself in a better position to help.
But pride, like broken pieces of glass, is an emotion that is difficult to put back together. Especially now. Larry struggles in a world he has never known before, and looks back with a heavy heart to a world he will never know again.
