The Job Luck Club : Unemployed Professionals Trade Ideas, Find Solace

Around a rectangular table, a dozen business executives critique videotapes of job applicants interviewing with a recruiter.

“He’s playing with that pen on the desk,” one notes.

“He’s slouching, not good,” says another.

Then the interviewer asks a 60-year-old applicant the trick question: “What are your weaknesses?”

“I don’t pick up on things as quickly as I would like to,” he says.

Not the best answer--pointing out his own flaws. But he need not worry.

This was a mock interview, one that everyone around the table went through in their first week as members of the Job Club, an exclusive group of out-of-work white-collar workers from the Southeast and South Bay areas.

Members have to be professionals, by and large holding college degrees. Many of them are middle age or older. They believed they would spend their careers at their companies, but they were laid off or offered early retirement in the last several years.

Membership in the club is free, but its rules are stringent: All members must wear business clothes, including ties for the men, even though they are out of work. Each member must spend four hours a week helping to answer phones, type information into computer databases or survey prospective employers for openings at club headquarters. And who directs the out of work to this exclusive group? The state unemployment office.

The Employment Development Department launched such self-help groups for the once highly paid unemployed in the late 1960s, when aerospace cuts put highly skilled engineers and white-collar administrators out of work. The Torrance group--officially the Professional Career Assn.--was started seven years ago. Many club members are from Long Beach and other Southeast cities.

The professionals who arrive at the unemployment office have “a lot of frustration and anger,” said Agnes Dodd, manager of the Torrance office. “It is much more difficult for them to accept that they are out of work than, say, the (blue-collar) worker who already has gone through a cycle of layoffs.”

To displaced professionals--some of whom haven’t interviewed for a job in years--the club is their surrogate corporation. Here, a former nuclear arms expert teams with a former Disney Imagineer to craft a good resume.

“If this were a company, it would be the most dynamic firm,” said club President Herbert Woertler, a former Sears sales executive. “Many of the members are advanced in age, tremendously experienced. They’re the ones that brought the rockets to the moon.”

These white-collar workers, many of them former aerospace workers, previously had viewed the state employment office as the place where the down and out waited in long lines for their unemployment checks.

“You think of blue-collar workers going in and making claims,” said Marian Williams, 38, who lost her job last month as a claims adjuster with an insurance company. Williams, a Signal Hill resident, said the first day she arrived at the club she got a tip on a job and within hours was invited for an interview. The job didn’t pan out, but Williams was sold on the club.

“This is a tool for unemployed professional people to actually get a job,” she said. “The benefits you get you would pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for in the private sector.”

The club’s vice president, A.W. Hedge, decked out in a double-breasted suit with silk pocket handkerchief, is in charge of “external affairs,” spreading the word to local elected officials and corporate chiefs about this group of available professionals. He comes equipped with Professional Career Assn. business cards, which list his title and address.

Hedge was trained in marketing and public relations and worked as a management consultant in Connecticut. But he tired of the weather there and moved to Southern California five months ago, even with the dire job market.

He has not found a job, but he strolls through a bakery in downtown Torrance, schmoozing with the president of the South Bay Assn. of Chambers of Commerce. When it comes to the club, his sales pitch easily rolls off his tongue: “We act like headhunters, but for no cost.”

To promote its members, the club uses their combined brain power. If it’s sending out a cover letter, they’ve got a technical writer to help. A job database? There’s plenty of software engineers for that. Videotaping a new public service announcement to promote the club on cable TV? They have the former Disney designer.

In fact, some computer engineers have created grand plans for job database networks, and “you have to remind them that the whole reason for being here is to look for a job,” Woertler said.

The unemployment department provides the club with a room and pays phone charges, but members must raise money for other expenses by selling raffle tickets, soliciting companies to donate old computer equipment and even gathering groups to go to talk show tapings, where producers offer $200 if enough members show up to fill an audience.

In the cramped club room, members monitor the phones to get the latest tips on job openings, which are posted on a chalkboard called “The Hot Board.” Cryptic messages, such as “UPS LA citywide 30 sales positions,” urge members to call immediately before positions are filled.

Club members are encouraged to volunteer elsewhere--job contacts, after all, can be made at the local Rotary and YMCA--and to proclaim their joblessness to anyone who will listen.

“If I’m walking down the street and happen to stop to talk to somebody, I’ll tell them I’m unemployed,” said club member David Burks, 33, who recites the club’s tenets like a mantra: “Don’t be ashamed, let everyone know that you’re available and always have a resume.”

Burks worked for eight years as a manufacturing engineer at Douglas Aircraft Co. in Long Beach until he was laid off in May, 1993. His unemployment benefits expired recently, and now he relies on his savings and lives at a friend’s house in east Long Beach. He hasn’t had much luck in his job search--no interviews yet--but he is committed to the hunt.

Burks keeps a batch of resumes in his car, and sends out five to 10 a week in his job search. With the club’s help, he has also put together a brief speech he uses when he meets a potential employer. In 30 seconds, he said, he can hit the highlights of his career and describe the type of position he’s looking for.

The range and quality of the job club surprise many new members, including Burks, who admitted that when he came to inspect the organization in January he expected to find an uninspired government program consisting mainly of a counter and some job listings. Burks has also been impressed by the breadth of the club’s membership.

“The people you meet come from all different backgrounds, from banking to chemical engineering,” Burks said. “You’ve probably seen them before, but now they have faces and names, and you know what they do. You become part of a family.”

J.W. Wong, formerly a theme park attraction designer for the Walt Disney Co., is another member of the family. For years, he had thought about leaving his career to become a video producer. When Disney laid him off in August, 1992, he quickly put his goal into action. He has produced public service announcements for the club, and is at work on longer versions that can be used as infomercials.

“It’s not like I’m sitting around waiting for a job,” said Wong, 46. “I’m trying to do what I want to do on my own.”

But it has been a struggle. The value of his Torrance house is dropping, and he has dipped into savings, including his children’s college funds.

His annual salary was $67,000 at Disney, but his search for leads among theme park design firms, video production firms and other amusement companies turned up empty. He recently interviewed for a position as a sales agent at Delta Airlines, but was told he was overqualified.

“People just don’t think I’m going to transfer into a $5-an-hour position,” he said. “That’s one of the problems I am having.”

The club has averaged about 280 members this year, and about 40 have found work each month. It is better than at the depths of the recession two years ago, when only about 15 members per month were finding work. But many club members find themselves competing against hundreds of job applicants.

The Torrance unemployment office as a whole places about 150 to 250 people per month, Dodd said. The state also offers job training workshops to blue-collar workers, although the club’s services are more comprehensive, she said.

“It really is more difficult” for professionals to find work, Dodd said, citing the need to network with prospective employers.

Woertler, the club president, is entering the third year of his job search. With Sears cutting commissions to its sales force, he retired early at age 55, after 20 years with the company.

“They used to say at Sears, ‘You’re a member of the family,’ ” he said. “In my case, mom and dad got a divorce.”

Woertler began tucking away savings 15 years ago. But others did not have that foresight.

“So many were not prepared for this,” Woertler said. “We have members who have lost their cars, their homes.”

Through Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, club members get free counseling. Credit counselors also are available. But for some, the club itself is the best support system.

Cerritos resident Lawrence Shinsato said he was unprepared for the emptiness he felt when he lost his accounting job last August. The job club, he said, helped fill the void and kept him focused on the task of finding new employment.

“It was like a place to hang my hat, just to belong somewhere,” said Shinsato, 38. “When you’re working, I don’t think you appreciate that feeling.”

In April, the club’s computerized job-matching service directed Shinsato to an opening for an accountant at a dental care company in Cerritos. Shinsato was hired on a temporary basis and could become a permanent employee soon.

“I wouldn’t have found out about it without the job club,” Shinsato said.

Many club members who are refugees of the battered aerospace industry have not found the job hunt so encouraging.

Mark Smith, also a Cerritos resident, was laid off in April, 1993, after 11 years managing assembly and testing operations at Hughes Aircraft Co. in El Segundo. Though he has been searching for a new job ever since, he says he has had just one interview.

“There are times I begin to think there’s something wrong with me,” said Smith, who receives limited retirement benefits from Hughes. “Your head starts playing games with you.”

Smith’s troubles are shared by many in a job market flooded with victims of aerospace and defense cutbacks. “The common conception is that we have been overpaid and under-worked, and there is a lot of reluctance to hire people in their 50s,” said Smith, 56, who earned over $70,000 a year at Hughes.

Still, Smith visits the job club each week and continues to search for openings outside the aerospace industry that might make use of his talents.

“I’m still hopeful,” Smith said. “I don’t want to quit working.”