Double Trouble for Jobless Couples

BOLTON, Mass. -- The clock over the counter in Avril and Ed Sobolik’s kitchen gave out months ago, leaving the hands -- shaped like tiny wooden spoons -- stuck interminably at 6:30.

In fact, it’s just short of 2 p.m. on a Friday, but the economic standstill in the house on Sugar Road has turned days and weeks into a numbing blur, Avril Sobolik says.

“What we really don’t talk about is what to do differently,” she says quietly, leaning over the counter layered in bills and junk mail. She glances wearily at her husband, who is staring into a mug of this morning’s coffee microwaved anew for afternoon consumption.

“Probably because we don’t know what to do differently,” he says.

Ed Sobolik lost work as a tool-and-die maker in March 2001 when his job was eliminated in a merger and consolidation. A few months later, Avril Sobolik lost her job as an information research specialist, a casualty of corporate cost-cutting.

Since then, Ed has worked for all of eight weeks before he was sent home again. The couple, who live in an outlying Boston suburb, have burned through 80% of Ed’s individual retirement account in their struggle to cover costs.

Individually, the Soboliks are like scores of other unemployed Americans in a stagnant labor market where job searches have stretched to their longest point in 20 years. But together, they’re shouldering a double burden -- allies and fallbacks during past recessions, they’ve become each other’s constant reminder of collective economic futility.

There are no precise, current figures on the number of married couples who have lost work simultaneously, and clearly they’re a very small subset of the total unemployed population.

But the prolonged downturn has resulted in more doubly-unemployed couples like the Soboliks, say economists and those who counsel job seekers.

One driver is the fact that, in recent decades, the number of married couples who depend on two paychecks has surged.

In 1940, 67% of all U.S. families consisted of a married couple with a single wage earner, almost always the husband. Today, just 16% of families fit that description and the biggest group is two-income couples, now 42% of all households, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That gives many more families a backup source of income and health insurance when one spouse loses a job. But simultaneous job loss is a reality most have not foreseen.

For some two-paycheck couples, “they thought worse comes to worst they can lean on her or lean on him if something happens. And then they both got hit and they don’t know what to do,” said Ken Goldstein, an economist with the Conference Board, a business research group.

Cynthia Latta, an economist with the forecasting and consulting firm Global Insight, said: “Where I think you have more and more cases is where you have highly educated couples who are both in similar industries and they’ve been particularly hard-hit.”

Economists point to sectors like information technology and air travel that have many married couples.

“There definitely are folks in those circumstances and, of course, the pressure builds on them doubly quickly,” said Larry Elle, who leads some of the Boston-area WIND networking groups and has run counseling sessions for unemployed workers and their spouses.

Double job-loss can put a severe strain on relationships by putting a hex over the subject -- work -- that people build much of their identity around.

“When you were both employed and you said, ‘How was your day?’ that sparked a wonderful conversation,” says Joy Dooley, who runs a support group for job seekers in Lisle Township, Ill., and also counsels couples. “When you’re out of work and you ask, ‘How was your day?’ it has a very negative connotation. It sparks conflict.”

The Soboliks can testify to that. They say their mutual aggravation is less a source of heated arguments than of simmering, but largely unspoken, tension.

Since the couple married 26 years ago, Ed Sobolik has lost jobs to layoffs, left jobs of his own accord and found replacement work. He chalks most of it up to the gradual decline in Massachusetts’ manufacturing sector.

His last long-term job, as a mold maker for a lock manufacturer, vanished when a larger company bought out his firm and a nearby competitor, combining the two and scaling back the work force.

When he got a temporary job last summer, at a firm building plastic molds, a manager told him it could turn into a long-term position. Instead, a few weeks later, Sobolik noticed some of the molds and machines were being crated. Soon after, he and other employees were told the work was being moved to China.

In the past, Avril Sobolik was the family anchor, usually working at stable jobs that came with employer-based health insurance for the couple and their two daughters. She was at her last company for 11 years, until her job was folded into a new department dedicated to Internet commerce, then eliminated when the department’s budget was cut.

Avril, 50, is convinced her husband is not doing enough to look for work. He spends most of his days working out on exercise equipment set up in a room off their bedroom, or on the sofa reading the paper. He’s applied and been rejected for jobs doing maintenance at some of the local golf courses.

“I’ve got a routine,” he said, noting that his home workouts take 90 minutes, and that mowing the grass can take more than two hours.

“And the other 15 hours?” his wife replies.

Ed Sobolik, who is 64 and has erased 20 years of experience from his resume to better his chances, is convinced his age makes his wife the more employable of the pair. He can’t figure out why she hasn’t found something yet.

She spends hours on the basement computer searching for openings for both of them, and has joined groups including Toastmasters to get out of the house and network. She’s taken to wearing a pin -- with the word “Attitude” spelled out in tiny stones -- to boost her lagging spirits.

So far, though, nothing.

“I just can’t see why she can’t fit in some where with all that experience,” Ed Sobolik says.

“You’re so out of control in this situation. You have none whatsoever,” Avril Sobolik says. “That increases your frustration. You want to stand in front of them [employers] and shout -- I can do this!”

The frustration factor is echoed in other households with both breadwinners out of work.

In Brad and Melanie Newby’s house in West Windsor, N.J., nearly simultaneous layoffs from jobs as technology managers about two years ago launched battles for the single computer, until they broke down and bought another.

This spring, when persistent rain limited Brad Newby’s ability to pursue work building decks and fences, “he’s at home more and we tend to be more at each other’s throats,” says Melanie Newby, who recently landed a three-month temporary position.

Couples who are both out of work say sometimes it helps knowing that the other understands firsthand what it’s like to be out of a job and to have few prospects.

“He knows my bad points and I know his bad points and we’ve learned to work with those. Yeah, sometimes we yell at each other, but it’s not very often,” says Elaine Mele, an out-of-work computer systems administrator. Her layoff at the same time that husband Paul Svensson lost his job has made their marriage stronger, she says.

But it hasn’t been easy. The Yardville, N.J., couple has struggled to do without the little luxuries that highlighted life together. They stopped going out for sushi and eliminated the season pass to the Great Adventure amusement park.

They negotiated with one child’s private school to do volunteer work in exchange for a break on tuition, and offered a piano teacher a piece of family jewelry in exchange for continued lessons.

“Every time we do a budget, my stomach starts churning and I start getting upset,” she said. They’re upbeat that a temporary job Svensson just started and Mele’s chance to teach a computer course once a week will ease their situation.

But many couples who are both out of work say they find themselves questioning long-term plans that once seemed certain.

It’s been six months since Aaron Sonnenschein, of Naperville, Ill., had to close the faltering beauty-supply business where he and his wife, Jamie, first met and worked together. On the first week of their children’s summer vacation, he went to five networking meetings and spent hours cleaning his mother’s house, to avoid having to explain to himself why he was home at the same time as the kids.

He mulls starting another business or trying a new career, even as he helps Jamie, who is picking up assignments as a party planner. Working side-by-side again is reassuring, he says.

“We seem to know what each other needs, what to do,” he says, describing their cell phone dialogue on a recent weekend when she ran ahead to a party while he watched dishes in the oven at home.

“I even said to her we should start a catering business,” he says. “But she said, ‘Not now. You need to find a job.’ ”