April 2009
Did you ever wonder how Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer of Seinfeld manage to pay Manhattan rents with those flaky jobs of theirs?
I met a group of four single New Yorkers who had worked at unglamorous office jobs and devoted their incomes—one earned $48,000 a year, one earned $52,000, and I’m guessing that the others earned around the same (they didn’t say)—to maintaining themselves, supporting their church, and experiencing the city.
Even before they lost their jobs, the four friends were constantly in and out of Geraldine’s, or Gerri’s, condominium near Lincoln Center. When Gerri mentioned to the congregation that she was now unemployed, her friend Elaine, who’d already been out of work for two months, said, “We ought to start a Pink Slip Club.”
The idea was to keep each other’s spirits up and to enjoy inexpensive outings around the city. “We might as well make something positive out of having free time during the day—while it lasts,” Elaine had said optimistically.
In the first couple of weeks they’d gone to a museum and to an afternoon concert, and Elaine had come over to Gerri’s to play Scrabble.
“Let’s do it again,” Gerri said.
“It was fun,” Elaine agreed. “But it felt strange in the middle of the day.”
Our Elaine is tall, blond, and more overtly glamorous than her Seinfeld namesake. Like Seinfeld’s Elaine, she can be a bit prickly, but that’s only when she senses disapproval or misunderstanding of her intentions. And unlike Seinfeld’s Elaine, she’s spontaneously generous. The job she lost involved processing accounts payable for a broadcasting conglomerate.
Gerri is short, dark, and quiet. When she speaks, it’s often to encourage others to express what they mean more fully or to point out the basic agreement that underlies seeming differences. I could tell how good she makes others feel by the way the doorman smiled when I asked for her and how he sang into the intercom, “Gerri, you have company.” For over twenty years Gerri had worked as an insurance adjuster at an office a short walk from her apartment.
Gerri and Elaine are suitable names for the two women, but it would raise constant misleading mental images to call the men George and Kramer. So I’m going to call them Kevin and Feldman from the Seinfeld episode where Elaine starts hanging out with three alternate buddies who turn out to be just too nice for her. It won’t throw you far off if you think of the Pink Slip men as agreeable Seinfeld avatars.
Kevin is slim, well-groomed, and precise. He frequently restates what the others say with just a small editorial tweak. Perhaps that’s because I’m there and he wants to make sure that the historical record is correct. But it may also be because Kevin was an editor at a trade journal. Despite the tendency to edit his friends, he’s attentive to them in matters like holding doors, locating things they’ve carelessly set down, collecting information they can use, offering refreshments around, and similar thoughtfulness.
Feldman, the second Pink Slip Club male, is a solidly built guy who practices kung fu, rides a motorcycle, plays in a drumming circle, and has a tendency to take the last two cookies on the plate. (But he’ll put one back if he notices.) Feldman did graphics—text layout—at a textbook company.
Before we met, Gerri had told me on the phone about the day she lost her job. “I was paralyzed. Or not paralyzed but jelly, because somehow I could move. I got my stuff together like a zombie. Six other people in our department got laid off that day, so I know it wasn’t me. But it’s like a divorce. You see your co-workers as much as your family. More, because the whole time in the office you’re pretty much awake; a big part of the time at home you’re asleep.”
A colleague from another department called to ask Gerri out for dinner that evening. “She does that every time one of her friends gets laid off.” I have since met the woman, and she reports that Gerri appeared to move through the rest of the day with her usual quiet purposefulness. But that’s not how it felt to the victim.
“For the next three days I had migraine headaches. Then I got a cold. It had to be from the stress. I’m slowly pulling out of it. I’m getting my résumé together.”
Our phone conversation took place less than two weeks after the blow. Despite apologies that she was still sleepwalking, Gerri e-mailed her Pink Slip Club comrades and got back to me with a meeting date for early the next week. By the time I met her in person, a plan of action was taking shape.
Gerri is active in a national civic organization whose name you’d almost certainly recognize. The New York chapter is large enough to have a local president paid $50,000. That’s only a couple of thousand less than Gerri’s salary as an insurance adjuster, and Gerri had thought about pursuing it in the past. But despite encouragement from other members of the board of directors, she’d always hesitated to quit a permanent job for one that would only last one or two years. Besides, the local presidency isn’t available for the asking; you have to run. But now, she says, “I’m unemployed, I might as well go for it. Maybe the Goddess is telling me this happened to me for a reason.” (The four Pink Slip Club members happen to be Wiccans and their congregation a coven. Hence, the “Goddess.”)
We had a few minutes to talk about the idea before the others arrived.
Elaine came to Gerri’s place straight from visiting a friend in Queens who’d lost her job in the same round of cuts at the broadcasting company.
“We worked in different buildings, so first we told each other our stories, then we had lunch in this wonderful Greek restaurant. It was crowded, but from the talk I heard, nobody was having a business lunch. I wondered, what do all these people do? It’s like they’re on a holiday in Florida. My friend was going to have a pedicure afterward. ‘Bring a book, just read and sit there and have a pedicure.’ She said we’ll do that together next time I go out there. Just relax and have a pedicure.”
“You just have to treat yourself every now and then when you’re on unemployment,” Gerri said approvingly.
“And she’s going to Yellowstone next week. She’s always wanted to go to Yellowstone.”
I wrecked Elaine’s mood by asking her to describe what happened on the day she was fired.
“The word is not ‘fired’!”
“I’m sorry, I just meant …”
“Someone is fired when they do something bad. I was laid off because they found a computer program to do the invoicing.”
I apologized, stammering that to me a layoff meant something temporary, like a seasonal layoff at a factory. If they weren’t going to call you back, then “layoff” was a euphemism.
Feldman explained the term’s functional significance for him. “ ‘Laid off’ means you can still collect your severance and unemployment. You didn’t get fired for cause.”
Though still annoyed, Elaine brought herself back to that day. “We got an e-mail that morning from the head of the whole company saying there were going to be some changes and layoffs. As soon as I finished reading that e-mail, we got one from the head of X [one of their big stations] saying, ‘Oh, it’s hard to say good-bye to people.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, shut up!’ Then my phone rang, and the division head’s assistant said, ‘Les wants to see you in the office in five minutes.’ And I knew what it was.
“When I got to his office, he was just getting there, and I said, ‘Oh, am I the first?’ And he said, ‘You know it’s not performance, Elaine.’ He was just being so condescending.
“I said, ‘I know it’s not performance. I don’t need to hear it.’ ”
Les asked Elaine to stay on for several weeks because the new computer system wasn’t up yet. “ ‘Your final day will be February 27 … We know you’ll be professional to the very …’
“I said, ‘I’ll just go and talk to HR.’ I didn’t let him finish.”
In HR, Elaine saw the woman assigned to present each person’s severance package and to make sure that everyone eventually signed a release freeing the company from any further obligation. “She said if I wanted to, I could take the rest of the day off.
“I said, ‘I can’t do that! This is the day we’re closing the month and the year for payrolls. [It was the beginning of December.] I have work to do!’ Later I told her, ‘I’ll take tomorrow and Friday off.’ Friday would count as one of my entitled free days, so it wouldn’t come out of my severance package.
“Of course I was going to remain professional till the end. There are people I worked with who need answers from me to get their jobs done. That’s what I was there for. It’s not their fault.” Elaine was proud that throughout nine years of mergers, buyouts, and other corporate discombobulations, she had kept those paychecks coming to the network’s celebrities, behind-the-camera employees, and vendors.
Elaine continued the story to the final moments of her final day when someone from human resources came down with her severance agreement.
“She said, ‘Do you want to sign it right here?’ I said no.” (Elaine knew that she had forty-five days to get the agreement back to the company and had already hired a lawyer to look at it.)
“I asked, ‘Do I have to go see anybody else before I leave?’ She said, ‘Nobody’s going to walk you out.’ So I went up to the shredder, I took my ID, I put it in the shredder, and then I walked out the door. It was a fairly nice day out. That night I went to the ballet and had a nice time.”
Isolated details from the moment of being fired (or laid off) have a way of becoming embedded in our minds. (Some wounded soldiers remember the bullet approaching in agonizing slow motion.) Fortunately, most of us soon encapsulate or neutralize the painful details by arranging them into a story that protects our dignity.
Elaine’s story shows her to be loyal to her colleagues and to her professional duties while treating the corporate types with the caustic but dignified disdain they deserved. As an added fillip, she enjoyed herself at the ballet that night. Not only that, but “the first day I wasn’t working it was a really big snowstorm and I was just delighted that I didn’t have to go anywhere.” I guess we know whose side the gods are on.
Kevin’s integrity had come into play years before his actual layoff from a finance-related professional organization, and that’s where he started his account when I asked what happened.
“With the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, our members had a lot to learn and relearn. At that point the editor in chief [Kevin worked on the organization’s journal], who started around the same time that I did, realized that we could not only provide information on the new rules to our members; we could become the voice of our industry speaking to the regulators and standard setters in Washington, D.C. He was very much a visionary.”
According to Kevin, the publication did, indeed, gain stature. But eventually the editor moved on. “It took me a while to realize that the new editor was not a visionary. The only question for her was how to maintain the status quo. So I found another position within the organization. But when the economic downturn came, several people were let go. I had kind of lost respect for the organization on account of the magazine becoming so status quo. I have no regrets really.”
In Kevin’s story, professional integrity dictated that he transfer from a secure position to one where he had insufficient seniority. This is as close as he got to describing the painful moment to me. But he liked to talk about the adventuresome decade before.
Ten years earlier Kevin had sold his house in Chicago, moved to New York without a job, and bought an apartment on Christopher Street. “I remade myself,” he said.
In New York he volunteered on weekends for a charity venture that raises considerable money for people with AIDS and for the homeless. Now he’d added a weekday shift. “I made a conscious decision to volunteer more because it would give me more of a structure and sense of purpose.
“I’m economical.” (Kevin’s friends confirmed that with fond laughs.) “I’m collecting unemployment. I probably have enough savings to survive until I start collecting Social Security. So I don’t have the urgency that Feldman has. But in some ways I wish I did because … the older I get the harder it’s going to be to find another job. I almost wouldn’t mind feeling a little more anxious. My biggest fear is that this will turn into, you know, the beginning of my retirement. I don’t want that.” Kevin is fifty-four.
I hadn’t yet asked these four unemployed New Yorkers how they were supporting themselves. But it didn’t seem to be an immediate concern to anyone except Feldman.
When he got out of college, Feldman had a girlfriend who acted as a subcontractor, hiring freelancers to do graphics for textbooks and magazines. As a recent and unemployed grad, Feldman hung around her apartment and noticed that she could never find enough reliable, skilled hands. He decided that he would master the craft. He even paid her for a few lessons on the most advanced programs.
Feldman soon had all the work he needed. In fact, his first job was a marathon of twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. “I went from earning nothing to making thirty grand in three months. It’s the most I ever earned in that industry.” All Feldman wanted was enough work to support himself, his rent-stabilized apartment in Inwood in northern Manhattan, and his motorcycle and his hobbies.
Over the years jobs got a bit scarcer, and Feldman sometimes had to take $25 an hour instead of $30. The more distressing development was that contractors took to paying freelancers forty-five, sixty, or even ninety days after the work was delivered. If they went out of business or if a client defaulted (and those things seemed to be happening more and more often), they “stiffed the guy at the bottom of the totem pole,” Feldman said.
“Yes, there’s a lot of freelancers getting stiffed,” Kevin confirmed.
“Sorry, our client didn’t pay us, so we can’t pay you—boo-hoo-hoo,” Feldman japed. “One time it made me so angry that I went up to the office, and I didn’t physically threaten the guy in charge, but I did intimidate. And of all the people who got paid, I wound up getting paid first.”
After thirteen years as a freelancer, “I couldn’t take the insecurity anymore,” Feldman confessed.
It seemed to me that just as he had once slipped casually into freelancing, so Feldman had slipped casually into adulthood. Financial insecurity was more stressful to him in his late thirties than it had been in his mid-twenties. But Feldman presented it less in terms of personal evolution and more in terms of changing business practices. “In order to play as a freelancer these days, you have to have a five- to six-thousand-dollar stake. You need a prudent reserve of like three months.”
It took him six months to find the staff job that he’d held for two and a half years before the recession started. Then the textbook company fired twenty people. The way Feldman describes the day, his immediate response had been hard and cool.
“First they sent us in in groups, like cattle going to the slaughter. Then they brought us in one by one to explain the terms of the severance. My boss’s boss and someone higher than her, they’re smiling, saying how nice we’re going to treat you, and I’m sitting there like daggers coming out of my eyes.
“Some people just got the hell out of there, like they were in shock. But I stayed because I had stuff of my own on the computer that wasn’t backed up.”
“At least they didn’t cut off your access,” I said. I told him about a group of engineers who’d been brought to a hotel, ostensibly for a meeting, only to be told that all computer codes were being changed and that they would all be accompanied while they cleaned out their desks.
“Yeah, we had a guy, had a breakdown in the office. They said, ‘Okay, you’re being escorted off.’ But with this mass layoff they said, ‘You’ll have till two o’clock to get your stuff together.’ Since it started about ten, eleven in the morning, it gave me like three hours to back up my files and wipe every trace of myself off that computer.”
“You weren’t paralyzed like I would be,” I said.
“Not then and there. But when I got home, I was a basket case. Then I went into panic mode. I said I better redo my résumé before the weekend. And I did. But there were a couple of openings I could have applied for the next day—before everyone else got into the mad rush of the job hunt. One of them went to someone I worked with who may have already worked for that company on a freelance basis, so she may have had the job locked up. But I don’t know what would have happened if I applied.”
In normal times, starting your job hunt a day or a week later can change your fate in that unknowable way that crossing a street at a certain moment puts you on the path to encounter the love of your life. Cross a moment later, and you’ll meet another love and have a different life. But that’s not how fate worked during the Great Recession.
“That was in November [2008], and this is February [2009],” Feldman reminded us. “I haven’t come across any other staff positions since those two. Actually, one of them was a temp job. But it could have been ongoing, and it was thirty bucks an hour. I would like to have got that. I would like to have at least applied so I don’t have this what-if thing now.”
If there were no steady jobs, what about one-night stands? I wondered. Even temp work was hard to find, Feldman said. Besides, he had to be careful about that. If he worked more than two days, he’d lose all his unemployment money for that week, yet he couldn’t expect to receive his freelance pay for at least forty-five days. “That’s one and a half months. Who can survive?”
“So you’re living on unemployment?”
“Yes. The regular unemployment is twenty-six weeks, but now, because of the economy, they’ve added thirty-three weeks, so it’s like over a year.”
“And you plan to go on collecting for the full year?”
“Not if I have anything to say about it. I’m looking for work every day. On what unemployment pays, I come out a couple of hundred bucks a month short. And I’ve only got $1,600 of the severance left.”
“And when that’s gone?” I asked.
He couldn’t stop eating or paying the landlord. The only significant expense Feldman could think of cutting was the insurance on his motorcycle. Even as we spoke, the Suzuki 1250 was waiting faithfully downstairs. The idea of putting it in storage was almost unbearable. He just had to find a job.
“I looked yesterday but not this morning. I use twenty, thirty Web sites. Most I found on my own. When you go to unemployment, they actually have a list of Web sites they give you. Some are really crappy, but some are decent.”
“And some are better for certain types of jobs than others,” Kevin explained to me.
“I use three key words,” Feldman said. “I’ll do ‘production artist,’ ‘Quark,’ and ‘art and design’ because those are the primary things that will bring me work.”
“Have you tried Mediabistro.com?” Kevin asked.
“Yeah, I go there. I pretty much have all the bases covered. My problem is the companies out there are combining jobs. They say, ’Oh, well, since this is such an economic crisis, we can get the cream of the crop. So let’s not just hire production artists; let’s hire somebody who has a design degree, is a production artist, and does HTML, CSS, Java … They want designer and production in one. Not just production.”
Gerri showed me the church’s fund-raising calendar that Feldman designs, lays out, and does everything else on. It was good-looking. His friends even thought he might try making it a commercial venture. He seemed to have a variety of graphics skills.
“I have the technical skills, but they want somebody who also has a four-year degree in design, which I don’t have.”
“Have you thought about enrolling toward a degree while you’re unemployed?” I asked.
“I don’t know how I could afford it. For a four-year degree, who’d cover me financially?”
Kevin offered encouragement. “It wouldn’t take you four years, because you already have a background. Also, there might be some kind of certificate.”
“But are they going to hire someone with a certificate compared to someone with a degree?” Feldman said, defending his unmarketability.
“But you have experience that an entry-level person does not and …”
Not to be consoled, Feldman told us about a friend who had both a degree and design awards but still couldn’t find a job.
“How old is he?” Kevin asked. “Mid- to late forties? Older people face different challenges.” Kevin said that companies wanted to hire recent grads rather than people in their fifties.
“I don’t think they’re looking to hire somebody fresh out of school,” Feldman contradicted Kevin. “I just think they’re looking for people who have more skills.”
Neither of the two seemed willing to grant the other the comfort of believing that his situation was hopeless.
“So what will you do if your severance money runs out before you find a job?” I asked.
“I would probably ask a friend to borrow money. But it probably won’t come to that. And it will be friends with jobs,” he assured the others.
Feldman got to his bottom line. “I have a motorcycle I have to protect and insure. So it’s either get employed or get a wife real fast.”
“A working wife,” Gerri tossed in.
“She doesn’t have to have a job,” Feldman replied. “Two unemployments would cover things.”
Just how desperate are these folks? Feldman had mentioned that his mother pays for his health insurance and that he had recently earned some money painting her apartment while she was wintering in Florida. I also know that he doesn’t get along with his stepfather, who has the money in the family. From all of that I surmise that, horrible as it would feel, Feldman could count on some kind of contribution from his family if he were about to lose his apartment.
Elaine has an inheritance from an aunt. It came up when she complained about a snafu at the unemployment office because her investment manager labeled some investment income in a way that triggered alarm bells. From her telling of the story, she seems to have handled the unemployment office bureaucrats with the same caustic control she’d used on the flunkies who fired her. She’d straightened the matter out, and her benefits were restored.
I couldn’t ask Elaine exactly how much money she had inherited, but she probably wasn’t about to be pushed onto the street either. And Kevin had volunteered that he could survive till he started collecting Social Security.
Of the four, Gerri’s finances seemed the most finite, dependent on her own earnings, that is.
She’d complained that the maintenance fees on her condominium had gone up by 30 percent since she bought the place. The obvious financial recourse for someone with such a desirable apartment was to take a roommate. But Gerri had already resorted to that after an earlier life crisis. “I love this apartment, and I wanted to keep it after I was divorced.” So she already had a roommate for the past few years. (That explained the man who padded silently up the hallway, opened the refrigerator, and slipped back down the hallway a couple of times during our get-together.)
I know that Gerri’s mother was a legal secretary who hadn’t worked in twenty years and lives in special-care housing of some kind. Gerri hadn’t told her mother about the divorce for almost three years. “She’s bipolar, and she’d blow everything out of proportion. I tell my mother things on a need-to-know basis.” Gerri had eventually mentioned her divorce to her mother as a way to explain why she didn’t have money to give to her sister who was pursuing an acting career.
“But I had to tell her about the job right away because she used to call me at work every day. If I didn’t say something, I’d come home and find ten phone calls.”
I deduce, then, that Gerri can’t expect financial help from her immediate family nor inheritances from her extended family in Mexico. As a first-generation American, a first-generation college graduate, and the levelheaded one in the family, she’d be expected to give, not receive, the help.
Though she didn’t have a middle-class family behind her, Gerri surely had more savings than Feldman. Through its 401(k) plan, her employer of twenty-one years had matched any investment she made up to 5 percent of her salary. “For my first two years there I had a real pension [a traditional, defined-benefit plan]. Then they switched to a 401(k). Mine was down $30,000 when I lost my job.” On the advice of a friend in finance, she rolled over the 401(k) and bought an annuity after her layoff. “I felt at least I’ll have something that’s guaranteed.”
How large, then, are Gerri’s savings? At the height of the financial crisis, the kinds of prudent, diversified portfolios that employer-selected brokerages offered investors like Gerri went down between 25 and 40 percent. Gerri had lost $30,000 at that point. So she probably had somewhere between $75,000 and $120,000 of pretax savings to invest in that annuity.
When I asked directly how she’s holding up, she told me, “Maintenance [on the condo] is up to fourteen hundred something, and then there’s the mortgage. When you need $2,000 a month just to pay for housing, $400 [her weekly unemployment benefit] doesn’t go that far. I better get into find-a-job mode.”
When it came to lifestyle changes, “I never made that much, and I don’t spend that much. I wear sweatshirts and jeans in the winter, T-shirts and jeans in the summer. But I can get dressed up if I have to,” she assured me. “I went to a show once or twice a year; I’ll cut that. I always wanted to try facials, and I finally bought six of them, prepaid, right before. So I’ll use them up.”
“It’s all relative,” Gerri philosophized. “If you’re used to going to Per Se [a bizarrely expensive Manhattan restaurant] once a week and spending four, five hundred dollars for dinner, having to go across the street to Josephina and only spending $200 is the same thing as me not being able to go to a concert.”
The Pink Slippers certainly worried about their finances and compared notes on practical matters. Elaine, for instance, was taking all the medical tests she could—“mammogram, bone density”—while she still had free time and the company health coverage. “But you can only do a couple of tests a week. I had a colonoscopy last Friday and a CAT scan the Friday before.”
We all had something to say about that disgusting colonoscopy prep. But no one knew how to evaluate a more serious argument against taking all the medical tests you can. What if they find something? Would that mean you had put a preexisting condition on your medical chart just as the company coverage expired and you had to find a policy on your own?
Feldman reminded us that “under some part of the stimulus, the government covers part of your COBRA payments. That’s only for nine months; I have six left.”
“I really hope I’m not fooling around looking for a job by then,” Elaine said.
Though the four friends were thinking about some lifestyle adjustments, no one was scrimping on food or taking coffee with them in a thermos. As Gerri pointed out, “It’s all relative.”
Elaine summed up her mood by quoting John Lennon: “Time that you enjoy wasting is not wasted.”
Gerri quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: “A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water.”
Feldman said he was depressed despite many evening activities. But he had been mildly depressed before—“chronic dysthymia,” he called it. His immediate psychological need was to fill that “nine-to-five hole.”
Before we split up, the friends firmed up some plans. Elaine and Feldman arranged a time to rehearse a scene. “We’re taking an acting class. We have to learn to play off each other,” Feldman explained.
He also proposed a movie day. “Terminator 4 is coming out in a week.” He’d check with a friend who could sometimes get them invited to screenings. “She’s press,” he told me.
Finally, they went over their responsibilities for upcoming church events and invited me to a public ceremony on May 1.
“It’s called Beltane,” Kevin explained. “It’s to welcome the spring.”
“It’s all right to come just out of curiosity,” Gerri assured me.
“Bring fifteen feet of colored ribbon,” Feldman said.
“Huh?”
“Maypole ribbon.”
“Wow, I never did a real maypole.”
Spring Ritual 2009
The Beltane ceremony was held in Central Park, and I didn’t need to bring my own maypole ribbon.
A member set up a traditional pole still displaying the ribbons that had been woven by dancers the preceding spring. Another member taught us—there were about seventy-five attendees—to dance around it with joy sufficiently tempered that we crossed over and under leaving more neatly woven ribbon on the pole. I also learned how to braid flower garlands that stay together. Elaine’s wreath fit with real flair and matched her flower-print skirt.
“Beltane” is Gaelic for the month of May and for this festival. The rite has to do with bringing the sheep back to pasture. The heart of the ceremony as practiced in Central Park consisted in calling up individual gods and goddesses of antiquity and the Middle Ages. As we faced outward in a circle, I wondered what the people next to me actually believed about the divinities they welcomed. When I read The Iliad and The Odyssey, I take those talks with Athena literally. I also take the Nativity story literally when I attend midnight Mass.
Feldman, who led part of the ceremony as a bare-chested woodland spirit, said that his religion affords him a way to communicate with the male and female forces of the universe. Kevin, a Catholic, had found his way to paganism while he still lived in Chicago. He feels that he’s calling to the divine power or spirit that resides in everything in creation. I wondered if Gerri (in her usual sweatshirt, jeans, and baseball cap) was consulting Astarte about the run for chapter president.
It was a beautiful spring day, and that may have influenced everyone’s mood. All four of the Pink Slip Club members were still jobless, as were others among the participants I heard. But I don’t think anyone strolling past us would have detected any recessionary pall over the spring ceremony.
September 2010
Sixteen months after I first met the group, Gerri organized a second Pink Slip get-together for my benefit. By that time she had run for the New York chapter presidency and lost. Her roommate had moved in with his girlfriend. This visit a young woman slipped down the hallway and out the front door.
“She’s the only person I know of who quit a job,” Gerri said. “She couldn’t take her boss anymore.”
“It must have been pretty bad to quit in this environment,” Kevin remarked.
“Maybe her parents have money,” Gerri speculated.
“Anything else new?” I asked. “I really could use to hear something hopeful.” (By that time I’d been interviewing people outside New York where the recession hit harder and things had been worse to begin with.)
“I have my first job interview Wednesday,” Gerri said. “It’s with a New York liquidation bureau.” We all laughed. “I know it sounds ironic,” she acknowledged. “These people audit bankrupt insurance companies.”
“Is that the one your friend saw on their Web site?” Kevin asked.
“Yeah,” Gerri answered. A friend had spotted the quasi-public job listing while researching a mystery novel. “I applied four months ago. I was asleep when they called, and I said, ‘Liquidators? I don’t owe anybody any money.’ Then it clicked. It took them all that time to get back to me—well, it’s a government agency.”
“You applied online?” I asked.
“Everything is online now. I have yet to see an actual person. Nobody wants to talk to anybody.”
“But these people want to talk to you!” I said. The job involved estimating pending claims obligations of faltering or defunct insurers, and Gerri had been an insurance adjuster handling just such claims. Key words on her résumé must have rung dozens of electronic bells. “It sounds like a perfect match.”
“And it’s a government agency,” Kevin said, adding his enthusiasm.
“Yes, good benefits.” Gerri allowed herself a moment of optimism. “The only place you could get a real pension these days.”
“Just about,” Kevin said. “Yeah.”
My superstitious fear of the evil eye dictated that we drop the subject. The only other member with job action to talk about was Elaine. She’d even had one and a half days of paid work.
“In July somebody called me from an agency and said, ‘Hi, I saw your résumé on Monster.’ He said, ‘Our agency has a client. I’d like you to come in and talk to a colleague who’ll be your friend on the inside.’ I filled out a long form online, then went there and finished up on their computer.” Someone named Mark told Elaine about a job involving accounts payable and took her payroll information.
“Then he didn’t get back to me, and I said, ‘Okay, I’m not surprised.’ Then all of a sudden he called. He said, ‘Hi, this is Mark.’ I said, ‘Who?’ He said, ‘Ah, how soon they forget.’ This time he said, ‘I have something lined up with an advertising company, and I want to send you the job description.’ ”
Several potential permanent jobs later, “Mark called and asked, ‘Are you interested in doing some temping?’ I said, ‘Why, of course.’ He said they needed some people to work on problem invoices downtown at M—— [another company whose name you’d know].
“I said, ‘Great, I always have fun getting lost way down there. And by the way, what happened to L—— [the last full-time job Elaine was told she was up for]?’ He said, ‘Oh, they passed.’ Then he said, ‘This one is business casual, and it will last two weeks.’ I had just bought some nice corporate-looking clothes, so fine. He sent four of us women up there on Friday.”
The four temps had a longish wait before they met the woman they were supposed to report to. “She was very, I don’t know, standoffish. So was the woman who was supposed to be giving us the work. The regular workers were very quiet, almost like robots. The girl who was supposed to help me with something, I complimented her on her bracelet, and it was almost like she was afraid to talk.”
Elaine told of being moved from task to task—“Kathy has something for you to do on Excel” or “Okay, just continue with the purchase orders”—until quitting time.
“I stopped in her office to see if they had signed my time sheet, and she says, ‘Oh, I won’t need you girls on Monday.’ ”
“All four of you?” I asked.
“Yes, apparently, we all did such a good job. So we called Mark, and he said, ‘Yeah, I heard.’ So I went to pick up my check from the agency.”
“How much did they pay you?” I asked.
“They paid me thirteen an hour. I think they paid the others less because one of the women said to me, ‘I’m going to check with my agency; this is only eleven an hour.’ ”
I assumed that the experience had been frustrating. So I was surprised when Elaine said, “You know it was nice to be sitting in an office. To know that I still know how to walk into an office and sit down and turn on the computer. It was nice.”
Elaine had had one other bit of work. “I have a friend who works for a doctor, and her colleague was going to be out for a funeral. I happened to have an interview with an agency in the afternoon, but I worked in the morning for several hours, and the doctor handed me the cash.”
That was all the paid work that anyone had to report.
Feldman, who’d been the most depressed at the first get-together, skipped this one because his new girlfriend was visiting from out of town. She wasn’t unemployed and she hadn’t moved in with him, so she didn’t bring the dowry of a second unemployment check that he’d wished for. Still, I assumed I’d find him a little less depressed when we got together.
But Gerri, Kevin, and Elaine, the members who’d thought of their Pink Slip Club as a way to make the most of a few free days or weeks, had grown more sober. By now they understood that this bout of unemployment was different from others they’d lived through.
Elaine remembered when a publishing conglomerate she’d worked for in past years went under. “I was talking to the woman in HR who handled benefits, and I said, ‘You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to continue with accounts payable but in television.’ I thought of that because we had a cable office in San Francisco. My boss didn’t want anything to do with television, because it was totally different from accounts payable in publishing. So I was the liaison. Then I met all the girls from that S.F. office when they came to New York. They liked to tell me all the things they were seeing around the city.
“I only just mentioned that to the HR woman, and she said, ‘A friend of mine just started working at HR at [the original channel of Elaine’s now huge broadcasting network].’ She said, ‘When you’re ready, give me your résumé, and I’ll fax it to her.’ I got the résumé ready in the office while I was still working; I sent it two days later, and I got the job. I loved that I didn’t have to ask my exboss if I could use him as a reference. What I love about that job is the way it just came to me.”
“I guess that’s what you have to do now,” I said. “Just talk, talk, talk to everyone.”
“But who doesn’t know ten people who are looking?” Kevin said.
“Exactly,” Gerri said, seconding him.
Elaine is the one who least needed the advice to talk to people. “My dentist has my résumé; he wanted a hard copy. My chiropractor has my résumé. My friend Linda that I’ve known for a hundred years, she has it on her computer at work.”
“I also had my last job fall in my lap,” Gerri said. Her first job out of college was at an insurance company. After a brief stint her whole department was transferred to Florida. But living in New York is a great deal of what Gerri’s life is about. Fortunately, she didn’t have to consider the move. “My new job materialized before my last day on the old job.”
“You were perfect for it,” Kevin said.
“It was perfect timing,” Gerri countered modestly. “I wasn’t ever unemployed like for a minute.”
“And now you have so much experience,” I said. There couldn’t be a better match for that insurance liquidating job, I was thinking. But I didn’t want to jinx it by saying anything.
“But there are just so many people unemployed now,” Gerri said.
“And we are not young.” Kevin sounded his leitmotif.
Resentment rather than resignation was Elaine’s fallback emotion. She had begun to notice how insensitive some of her friends are to the feelings of the jobless.
“Yesterday I went to stand out with, you know, my friend Rosalie, who does that kitten-rescue thing in front of the bank on Hudson Street. Well, she complained about her Pilates class, and I said that I liked Bonnie’s class. She says”—here Elaine shifts into a gloriously callow whine—“ ‘Well, I can’t take that because I work full-time.’ ”
“People like to complain,” said Kevin. “I’m unemployed, but I still have my health.”
“That little bit of work was such a nice break,” Elaine said, shifting moods, “that I actually went out and bought myself another little jacket to wear with a black dress. I have several black blazers, but I wanted a colorful one that you could put over a black dress so you wouldn’t have to wear a suit for interviews. A lot of people are doing that—a plain dress with a colorful jacket. I don’t like suits at all.”
Kevin and Elaine itemized Elaine’s wardrobe until Kevin concluded, “So you’re ready for short-term jobs and you’re ready for interviews and you’re ready for a full-time job when that comes around.”
Elaine was indeed ready. I mentioned that I had interviewed a couple of wealthy people who panicked when the market dropped because they had to “dip into capital.” Then they remembered those shares they got from Grandpa at the wedding, or some gold in a vault, or a brokerage account they thought they’d closed out …
“Those people should hire me as a personal assistant. I’d keep track of things,” Elaine volunteered.
“I think a lot of people like that do have personal assistants,” Gerri said.
“Handlers!” Elaine remembered the word. Many of the personalities she used to pay had handlers.
“I have two résumés,” Gerri said. “One for straight insurance and one to get into the nonprofit world.” Gerri’s second résumé had been inspired by a listing for a six-month job as an “event planner” for an educational system. Gerri had done that sort of thing on a fairly large scale for the civic organization. So she’d translated her volunteer experience into résumé terms and applied.
“There are some people that say ‘Change your résumé,’ ” Elaine declared. “I’ve already had people make sure my résumé looks like it should. The only way I could change it would be to totally lie and say I’ve done things that I haven’t done. And that would be stupid.”
It’s possible that Elaine would have liked one of her friends to argue that changing one’s résumé is not necessarily stupid. If I said it, she would surely have snapped at me. But with or without an enhanced résumé, Elaine is amazingly open to new careers.
————
“There’s a little place on Seventy-second Street that will convert a vinyl record to a CD,” she said. “They have a machine and there’s an old man who sits there and they have some wild classical music that’s playing so loud that I can hardly hear when I’m in there. I’ve come in and the old man is behind the desk and I’m standing there with a vinyl record in my hand and nobody asks, ‘What do you want?’ I’m not sure they even have a cash register.
“And I’ve often thought, maybe I’ll walk in there someday and say, ‘By the way, do you need anybody to help?’ I like the place; I’m good at organizing. When I was working, a lot of people came to my desk because I was always happy to help them or to find someone who had that information. Everyone knew my name. When I called and said, ‘Hi, this is Elaine,’ they didn’t have to ask my account number.”
“So you think that store needs to get a little organized?” Kevin said.
“I don’t know, maybe they like it that way. But just go in and if nothing else, ask people if they need help when they walk in. If they want to pay me a little something, that’s okay, but just to go in and do something.”
I asked Kevin if he was applying for jobs other than magazine editor. After all, that field had been declining even before the recession.
“Yes. Ideally, I would love to work for an arts organization, a museum. I know that I can live comfortably on less than I was making, and for something that I personally love and enjoy, it would be a good trade-off, as opposed to working on something that is just a paycheck. But I also know that the arts and that sector have taken a big hit too. The Metropolitan Museum with its huge budget has just laid off people. The big auction houses cut their staffs. So I’m not expecting what I was just describing for myself to happen quickly or easily. It would be a kind of dream job.”
Gerri harked back to her dream job in events planning. “If I did it for six months, then I would have ‘corporate experience.’ ”
“Did they ever get back to you?” Kevin asked.
“No, but they took four months to get back to me on this one,” meaning the liquidator. “And once you’re in the university system for six months, then …” She drifted off.
Elaine’s far-ranging what-ifs made her all the more ready to seize the moment, and Kevin, as he mentioned, could live on his savings. But I began to worry about the way unemployment was incapacitating Gerri. Sixteen months earlier I’d said, offhandedly, that I’d like to talk to that office mate who took her out to dinner the day she lost her job. Gerri dialed her friend on the spot, made a useful introduction, and handed me the phone to firm up the appointment. Her special strain of “levelheadedness” consists in focusing clearly on the here and now and attending to the tasks necessary to move things one step forward. It wasn’t a good sign for Gerri to be dwelling on a can’t-do-anything-about-it matter. And besides, do people get back to you about a six-month job three months later?
Unlikely.
Autumn Equinox 2010
If a straight thinker like Gerri can’t contemplate her prospects logically, maybe the prospects are too disturbing to face with mere logic.
Other people in her church must have been feeling the same way, for the coven decided to add a “prosperity ritual” to the fall equinox ceremony. Kevin was to be the special facilitator. Though it was a closed ceremony, he invited a couple of sympathetic outsiders, including me and Feldman’s new sweetheart, to the sunset event in Central Park.
We welcomed the four winds and other divine powers as usual. But the special honoree was the goddess Fortuna. First, though, we gave small gifts to appease her sister Nemesis so that she wouldn’t counteract the benefits that Fortuna might grant.
Kevin had printed enlarged $100 bills for us to burn. He’d also dug up a money chant written by the very Benjamin Franklin whose face appears on those bills. The words came from a drinking song in a play Franklin co-wrote. A coven member created a tune, and we circled around the burning money pyre singing:
Then let us get money like bees lay in honey.
We’ll build us new hives and we’ll store each cell.
The sight of our treasure shall yield us great pleasure.
We’ll count it and chink it and jingle it well.
So our multifaceted forefather didn’t do everything well. After a few choruses the group spontaneously abandoned the Franklin chant and shifted into:
They say the best things in life are free
Well, you can tell that to the birds and bees
And they bellowed out versions of the song’s various titles:
“I need money!” “I want money!” “Just give me money!”
Then a witch with a good voice sang:
Won’t somebody buy me a Mercedes-Benz
My friends all have Jaguars, I must make amends.
Our individual communications with the goddess were private, of course. But toward the end of the ceremony everyone was given a chance to say what he would do with the wealth that Fortuna was going to bestow.
One woman said she’d build an animal shelter with a special section for small horses. Feldman was going to build a kung fu studio with an attached garage large enough to store all the motorcycles he’d buy. Gerri said she would bring her aunt from South Carolina to live in New York. Kevin told us that the Whitney Museum was planning to build an annex downtown. “Yes, right in our neighborhood,” he said, nodding to me. “Well, there’s going to be a Kevin M. Graham Room in that building.” I wish I’d heard Elaine’s prosperity plan, but she celebrated the equinox with another congregation.
And On It Goes
I like a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But between the spring and the fall rituals that should book-end this tale, the four members of the Pink Slip Club had morphed into “the long-term unemployed.” They didn’t retire, and they didn’t find jobs. Their stories just dragged on.
I waited a decent couple of weeks after the ceremony to phone Gerri about her job interview with the liquidator. “The people in the office seemed to relate to each other in a good way,” she reported. “Having nice people to work with is very important.”
“So, um, what happened? Did they …?”
“It took them four months to get to me,” she said. “Maybe they’ll get back to me.”
I visited Feldman soon after his new girlfriend left town. She’d filled his freezer with casseroles so he knew where his next meal was coming from. As for work, “I had two weeks of employment since this began—around March last year. One week I made $600, the other week something less. It was like $50 more than my unemployment, that’s after taxes.”
His most immediate source of insecurity was his unemployment insurance.
“The pressure is high right now because in five weeks I’m going to become a 99er.” That was the term for people who had used up their full ninety-nine weeks of extended unemployment benefits. Actually, it was ninety-three weeks in New York at that point because the state had a lower rate of unemployment than other parts of the country. Though this had started as a financial crisis, the rapid recovery on Wall Street brought the state’s employment rate up. The unemployment extension was in the news because the 2010 congressional elections were coming up and there was a lot of acrimonious debate about stimuli like unemployment benefits versus deficit cutting through austerity.
“Right now there’s a Democratic majority, and they’re not doing anything about extending benefits,” Feldman said. “In November there could be a Republican majority. That’s just when the 99ers will be coming on in full swing because that’s when people started getting laid off—November of two years ago.
“If this country doesn’t get it together, they’re going to storm the White House,” Feldman predicted. “It will probably turn into anarchy, and then it will turn into martial law, and the government will be forced to, you know, use their own military against their own people. That would be sad because they have much better weapons than the people.”
“It’s funny, but I don’t hear any rumblings of things like that,” I said.
“Maybe they turn down the publicity on them. I don’t even watch the news anymore. Most of the news is propaganda.”
I felt certain that I would detect hints of a movement to storm the White House for unemployment benefits. The only thing then scheduled for D.C. was a march for moderation organized by two comedians. Admittedly, a group of loosely organized 99ers had demonstrated in front of the unemployment office on Varick Street in Manhattan in November 2010. They handed out a leaflet calling for unemployment benefits extensions and for a federal jobs program like those the Roosevelt administration created in the 1930s. As part of planned civil disobedience, they briefly blocked traffic. Four of about twenty demonstrators were arrested, handcuffed, and held about ninety minutes before being released. Their spokesmen urged other 99ers to take up the protest with or without civil disobedience. It got minimal media coverage, but eventually veterans of this and other barely noticed protests would heed an online call and come together at a square in downtown Manhattan to become the Occupy Wall Street movement. So maybe Feldman had a better sense of the national mood than I did.
“That Obama is not really as behind the people as he sounded like,” Feldman said. “As far as I can tell, he’s just another puppet in office.”
A month later the Obama administration negotiated to continue extended unemployment benefits. It was done not in response to protests but as part of a legislative compromise that extended the Bush tax cuts. But the deal wouldn’t mean any more money for Feldman. Earning the title 99er means you’ve graduated from the unemployment system. Feldman could only collect further benefits if he found a job, worked for the required period, lost the job, and qualified like any newly laid off worker. The tax-cut-for-benefits trade involved allocating money so that new people coming into the unemployment system could also get extensions beyond the normal twenty-six weeks if they qualified.
By the fall of 2010 there were fourteen million officially unemployed Americans—40 percent of them classified as the long-term unemployed. An additional ten million were working part-time but said they wanted full-time jobs. Fifteen million more had dropped out of the labor force since this recession began.
But bright, educated, unemployed people will surely drift into some kind of work eventually—won’t they? Maybe Gerri will pick up freelance event-planning gigs through contacts at organizations where she’s volunteered. Maybe Elaine will walk into a smart women’s clothing store where she’s shopped and ask for a job.
At the rate at which full-time staff jobs are being phased out, the older long-term unemployed of this recession probably have less than a fifty-fifty chance of finding permanent, full-time jobs.
But that’s statistics. All any individual needs is one job.
Our Pink Slip Club protagonists are college graduates. They prepared themselves for the “symbolic manipulation” that was supposed to replace industrial work in our new knowledge economy, and they kept up their skills.
None of the four friends are world-beaters who start in the mail room and end up in the CEO’s office. (How many of those do we need?) They were content to remain in their mid-level positions giving a little more than a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. Beyond that fair day’s pay, the reward they most cherished was appreciation for helping to make work go smoothly for the people around them. Aren’t these the workers companies need by the tens of millions?
I guess the reason I can’t quite end this story is that for all my intellectual grasp of the downward trends for American workers, I just can’t believe that these four generous/selfish, mellow/excitable, unique/ordinary, and highly employable individuals will simply remain the long-term unemployed. Even though they might.