Down the Up Escalator (3 page)

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.”