Recession Fading for O.C. Jobless : Economy: Many of the Newly Hired Are Making Less : Factory Worker: ‘It was a real struggle. I’m so happy that it’s over. And I think it’s starting to pick up for others, too.’

When Anaheim-based QLP Laminates started expanding its payroll last month, one of the people hired was Virginia Barnes. The 42-year-old former aerospace worker says the job didn’t come a moment too soon.

“I’d gotten so desperate I’d gone down and applied at the local Del Taco three weeks earlier,” she said, “and they didn’t call me back, either.”

Barnes, who was making $14.42 an hour as a senior electronics assembler at Rockwell International Corp.’s defense plant in Anaheim when she was laid off 2 1/2 years ago, said she has been struggling with rejection ever since.

“I can’t help but think there’s discrimination out there against people from aerospace because we made such good money,” she says. “I think that when they saw my old pay on the application, it went right to the bottom of the stack, and that’s not fair. I always put down that I was open about pay, I didn’t expect to get $14 an hour.”

The job she started on Tuesday--running a machine that imprints circuit patterns on material used in the manufacture of circuit boards--doesn’t come close. “I get $7.20 an hour,” Barnes said, “but it’s better than standing on the freeway with a sign” pleading for food or money.

The former Buena Park resident, who moved with her husband and children to Riverside when he took a job at an aerospace plant there five years ago, said she drew $232 a week in unemployment benefits for the first six months after she was laid off. She also registered with several temporary agencies that sent her out as a minimum-wage replacement worker for one- and two-day jobs at assembly plants throughout the Inland Empire.

Things got really tough in mid-1992 when her husband, Robert, was laid off, too.

Now he picks up an occasional day job through the same temporary agencies and spends the rest of the time poring over the “help wanted” sections of several newspapers looking for jobs that don’t seem to be there yet.

Barnes said she and her husband have managed to pay the $575 rent every month for their four-bedroom house in Riverside, and keep enough food on the table for themselves and the two children--14-year-old Jason and 15-year-old Tina--who still live at home. (Two adult children--Sherry, 23, and Robert Jr., 21--have their own homes and families.)

But Virginia Barnes’ car and Robert Barnes’ pickup both are 16 years old “and we don’t buy much new clothes or anything that isn’t absolutely needed,” she said. More than two years of unemployment, she said, has drained the family’s savings.

Barnes figures she filled out more than 70 job applications after being laid off and said that she was spending $100 a month or more on long-distance telephone calls as she followed up her applications with calls to personnel offices all over Southern California.

From all that, she said, she was asked to come in to three interviews. “I never got a feeling for why they didn’t want me, they never said, but I never got called back,” Barnes said. “I just think it was because of my aerospace pay.”

It was a week after applying at her neighborhood fast food place that Barnes saw QLP’s ad for assembly workers.

“I drove into Anaheim that morning and filled out an application,” she said. “And they called me three weeks later for an interview.”

The phone rang again two days after that--QLP calling to ask Barnes to come in for a physical. She was offered a job the next day, June 23, and started work last Tuesday.

“It was a real struggle,” Barnes says. “I’m so happy that it’s over. And I think it’s starting to pick up for others, too.

“I know that several friends who were laid off from Rockwell about the same time I was are finally going back to work, too.”

Not in aerospace, though.

“No,” Barnes said. “In manufacturing, at a lot less pay, just like me.”