The End of Their Rope

Miguel Mata is jobless for the second time in a year. When the 33-year-old father of three lost his job as banquet server at a hotel near LAX, he suddenly couldn’t pay the $575 rent or buy food. He lost his health insurance and managed to survive with the help of food stamps, union aid and the generosity of friends. “I looked everywhere, did everything--but business was bad and no one was hiring,” says the tall, burly Mata, who is proud that he has always been able to support his family comfortably.

Finally he was hired by a fast-food restaurant at the American Airlines terminal. His health insurance was reinstated, the loans and bills were being paid and the Matas were starting to catch up.

But on Sept. 11, that restaurant closed and he was jobless again. The health insurance is gone, and Mata is looking for work. He can’t borrow from family or friends this time because “most of them worked at the airport and have also lost their jobs. No one has money now,” says the Inglewood resident.

In a region as economically diverse as Southern California, the widening ranks of the unemployed are easily camouflaged. The roads are still packed with shiny SUVs, the malls still draw bargain hunters and there is no sudden surge of homeless people on the streets.

Some well-heeled residents believe the downturn is exaggerated. “I see no signs of it in my neighborhood. Everyone on my street is still gainfully employed,” says Sandra Rubin of Simi Valley, an investment brokerage employee.

Sadly, the unemployed remain faceless, their individual tales of suffering and perseverance lost in the statistics: California’s unemployment rose to a three-year high of 5.7% in October. L.A. County’s rate was higher, at 5.9%. The job losses occurred mostly in manufacturing, travel-related industries, film production and other services.

Even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the economy had been sputtering, but the slowdown in California mostly affected better-off, middle-income workers in high-tech. Now the unemployment ranks are swelling with workers from a variety of fields.

One respected L.A. publicist, who does not want her name used, said, “I’ve had my company since 1985, and never before have I worried where the next month’s money will come from. But I feel that way now.”

At Jerry’s Deli in Beverly Hills, manager Warren Pepper says he’s confronted daily by job seekers who are “not your usual unemployed actors looking for work. They’re professional types, like from the record companies or investment firms. Not what I’d expect to hire as hosts or cashiers. They say they’ll take anything to pay the bills and tide them over until things get back to normal again.”

For many who have lost their jobs, the terrorist attacks blurred the line between survivable downturn and disaster.

Until September, Celia Talavera and her husband “were doing OK,” supporting their four children and paying the $1,780 mortgage on their Inglewood home. Then she lost her job as a housekeeper at Loew’s hotel in Santa Monica, and her husband was laid off from an LAX courier company.

Pulling an overdue mortgage payment notice from her purse the other day, she held back tears as she explained that she earned $300 in September and $100 in October, and her husband has been unable to get work. The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union has helped her family survive so far, she says, but she is increasingly depressed.

“There’s no way we can pay for food, clothing, utilities, let alone Christmas for the kids,” she says.

Christmas also looks bleak for Carmen Carmichael’s two children, ages 11 and 4. The single mother recently lost her job as an administrative assistant at AT&T; Broadband because of cutbacks. Now she’s a regular visitor at the South Bay One Stop employment center, where she uses the phones, faxes and printers to “blanket the city with job applications. My unemployment just covers the rent, and even that is about to run out. I can’t imagine what will happen if I don’t find work soon.”

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Marquetta Bush knows what could happen. She was laid off in February after five years as a programmer at a medical software firm near her hometown of Niagara Falls, New York. When that company’s business went bad, she says she looked at her options, saw a big high-tech industry in California and decided to move West.

She’s been looking for work since June 7, when she was laid off from an Irvine software company where she thought her new job was secure. “I should have another job by now,” she says, furious that she hasn’t even been hired for the low-level data entry jobs she’s applied for out of desperation. “They have too many applicants to even acknowledge my resume,” she said recently, as she searched the Internet job listings at the Santa Monica Employee Development Department.

She is about to lose her ’99 Ford Contour, the furniture she has stored in New York, and her most important human connection: her cell phone. Bush’s life has been in a steep descent, sliding from the Irvine job as a $48,000-a-year quality assurance specialist (with hopes of buying a condo) to her current status: homeless, jobless, with no savings left.

She has been sleeping in her car, says Bush, who remains upbeat and confident because she has faith in her skills and knows what she wants to do. The problem: “There’s nowhere left to do it.” Her 10-year-old daughter is with relatives in New York, still waiting for her mother to send for her.

Kathy Davis keeps a low profile when she’s at her Marina del Rey health club, hoping no one notices that she rarely works out there anymore. She stops in just to use the showers.

Then she hops into her Honda and heads for the nearby government employment center, where she spends her days sending out electronic resumes and cover letters to which employers rarely respond.

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Later in the day, the college-educated Davis, 42, stops at a market deli, where she buys dinner with food stamps. Then she heads for the all-night Culver City Kinko’s, where she hooks her laptop to the phone lines offered free of charge. She continues her job search late into the night.

At some point she needs sleep. She parks on a particular Marina del Rey street between two large vans in which homeless families live. Then she burrows under covers in her back seat. “My car is my apartment. The passenger seat is my office, filled with papers and files. The laptop sits on the floor beneath it. The back seat is the bed. The trunk is the closet,” which she fills once a week with clothes from her larger “closet”--a small rented space at Public Storage in Venice.

Davis says she uses her government relief checks to maintain her health club membership, pay her cell phone bills and rent the storage space. It all works out well, she says. But the car needs repairs, her mental health is becoming fragile, and “if I don’t find work soon, it will be all over for me.”

Bernadette Gradney, living with relatives, has her own personal space crisis. She wants desperately to get her own place and be able to send money to her two sons, both on full college scholarships. “All they need from me is pocket money, and I can’t even give them that. Their mama has no work.”

The 52-year-old Inglewood resident was laid off in March as assistant to the general counsel for the Chicago Title Corp., which merged with Fidelity Financial National, Inc. She applied for work but, when she couldn’t find anything permanent, Gradney took a part-time job in April as a customer service representative for American Airlines, earning an hourly wage. But the UCLA graduate was laid off in September, with the promise that she’d be called back “when things return to normal.”

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Since the seminar industry tanked, Elmer Armstrong of Venice has had to be resourceful. He books hotel banquet rooms, arranging for seating, refreshments and all the other essentials and niceties that make seminars successful for audiences and speakers. His daily pay rate was $110 plus 6% of all the books and tapes he could sell at the events, he says. But when the NASDAQ started to fall, corporations “pretty much stopped shelling out to improve their employees’ skills.”

A tall, elegant man with a tenor singing voice, Armstrong has earned his only income since then by traveling with a reconstituted 1950s rhythm and blues group called the Platters. But his earnings are barely enough to pay expenses and child support.

Camille Munroe is lucky to have a working fiance, so the 25-year-old says she doesn’t worry about food or rent. The 1998 graduate of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., is a new media specialist who’s been job hunting for four months after losing two successive high-tech jobs. She worries about finding work because she needs a job to gain experience.

“Most firms where I apply say I’m too young. They want people with at least four years of experience, which I don’t have.”

For a fortunate few, being cut loose from their jobs appears invigorating. After five years in sales at a Monrovia software firm, Angie Neumann, 31, was laid off this summer when her employer did not meet its revenue targets. “I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” she said.

That’s partly because she received generous separation pay, had money in her retirement fund and wasn’t all that enamored of the software industry anyway. “I’m never going back to it,” she says. “I’ve learned that money isn’t everything; I thought it was when I was 22. I’ve changed.”

Neumann has been volunteering at the Cal Poly Pomona equine research center and the Los Angeles Zoo. Just last week she decided on her next career: “I’m going back to school to be a teacher. I want to do something satisfying that helps humanity.”