N.Y. Job Fair Draws the Displaced, Dispirited

A well-dressed crowd of at least 10,000, many brandishing resumes and business cards, descended on Madison Square Garden on Wednesday for a one-day job fair aimed at workers displaced by the World Trade Center attacks.

Police turned away thousands as the throng grew to nearly twice the expected size and encircled the landmark Midtown arena.

Richard Cameron, a Delta Air Lines flight attendant and Manhattan resident, wore a black business suit and carried a neatly tied packet of resumes as he waited near the front of the line outside the Garden.

Delta announced 13,000 job cuts in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Cameron, with low seniority, expects to either get the ax or be ordered to relocate to another city.

The former cruise director said that, in any case, the terrorist strikes convinced him it was time for a career change.

“I don’t want to be on the sea anymore, and I don’t want to be in the air,” Cameron said.

Inside the Twin Towers Job Expo, about 2,000 people at a time crowded around booths representing 200 New York-area employers, from hospitals and fashion retailers to security firms and the Metropolitan Opera. The event ran from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Faced with the overflow, New York Deputy Mayor Anthony P. Coles announced that another fair would be scheduled within two weeks. But some people went away disgruntled Wednesday after standing in the windy street for hours.

Shortly after noon, when an official with a loudspeaker told part of the crowd that the Garden was full and they would not be admitted, he was met with an old-fashioned, high-decibel Bronx cheer.

“It isn’t right,” said Allen Wright of Brooklyn, who said he had been waiting more than an hour.

Wright has been looking for work since before the terrorist attacks. “Now it’s much harder to get jobs. A lot of these people here are from the World Trade Center, and they’ll get first pick.”

Confirming Wright’s impression, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has asked employers to try to give preference to direct victims of the terrorist attacks. It was clear from interviews that many of the job seekers at the Garden fell into the broader category of victims of an already weak economy.

The mayor’s office, which sponsored the event along with the state of New York, estimated that 10,000 jobs were available through the participating firms.

A noontime survey of just 40 of the 200 firms turned up “435 likely hires,” Coles said at a news conference. Giuliani’s office said no further statistics would be released until today.

At least 50 employers who were turned away for lack of space will be invited to the next job fair, along with many of the firms that participated Wednesday, Coles said.

In some cases, the positions available didn’t match the pool of applicants streaming into the Garden. Marc Koppelman, a supervisor at the Manhattan accounting firm of Marks, Paneth & Shron, said he had received 150 to 200 resumes in the first three hours of the expo. Of those, he said, “about 12 resumes have real promise.”

Rose Marie Phillips, recruiting manager for the law firm of Proskauer Rose, said representatives received more than 100 resumes in the first two hours and then stopped counting. The firm has about 20 openings, mainly for legal secretaries and assistants and data entry workers.

Phillips said she was impressed that a large number of attorneys filled out applications and that most of the people were dressed professionally and had a good idea of what they wanted.

Not everyone was picky, however.

“A job. That’s it. A job,” said Brooklyn resident Errol Parker, who carried a box full of resumes and handed them out at one booth after another.

Parker was training for a full-time job at the city Housing Authority about a block from the trade center. But after Sept. 11, “all the new hirees were let go,” he said. “I heard two days later by registered mail.”

Parker still has a part-time job, but it’s not enough. “I’ve got full-time expenses.”

The crowd outside the arena was a captive audience for entrepreneurs both legitimate and shady. Several young men passed out leaflets touting opportunities of the “earn $5,000 a week at home” variety.

Jeffrey Vayda, accounting manager for Broadway Personnel, an office employment agency based in the Empire State Building, said it was cheaper to work the crowd in person than to advertise in newspapers.

The agency has been besieged with applicants since the terrorist attacks, he said. “I’ve got IT [information technology] people making $110,000 coming in for word-processing jobs at $15,000.”

For some workers shellshocked by the terrorist attacks, Broadway Personnel’s 11th-floor offices are 10 floors too high.

“We’ve got people who come to pick up their checks and ask us to meet them in the lobby,” Vayda said.