Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 2, 1992 TAG: 9201020129
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Medium
UNDEREMPLOYED START AT BOTTOM
Three months ago, A.L. Putman was a $35,000-a-year steamship line manager. Lately, the best job he could get was as a department-store Santa Claus in Virginia Beach.Putman belongs to the legion of the underemployed.
Since the recession began, millions of Americans have been thrown out of work completely. They're outside looking in at the labor market.
But among the ranks of working people, all around the edges, stand millions more.
They're people like Putman. For one reason or another, though they're working, they're not making it like they used to.
They were laid off from good jobs and now they're trying to scratch their way back. That's Putman's story. Or they left the labor market voluntarily for a while, to raise children or to relocate, and the only way they could break back in was a notch or two lower. Some are recent college graduates. Others are retirees who found out they couldn't make it on their pensions alone.
Unable to find anything better, they're forced into low-paying jobs with few or no benefits.
It's a problem in any recession, says Chris Tilly, an economist at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. "What you see when unemployment is high is a lot of people making compromises that they wouldn't otherwise make," he says.
But even when the economy expands again, underemployment will remain a big problem, says Audrey Freedman, an economist for the Conference Board, a New York-based business-research group. That's one thing that will distinguish the next recovery from past expansions, she says.
"For a lot of reasons, jobs aren't as secure as they used to be," Freedman says. "What we've got are a lot more transient employment relationships than we ever had before."
Get a job. Lose a job. Get a job again - but not as good a job as you had before.
That's underemployment.
And it's sowing a lot of bitterness, confusion and embarrassment among working people.
Putman, 47, has struggled with all those feelings since his position as Norfolk traffic manager for Lykes Brothers Steamship Co. was eliminated in August.
"They just called me in one day and said, `Your job is no longer needed,' " he recalls. "It was about 11 in the morning, on a Thursday. . . . Bye. I got two weeks' severance pay and two weeks' vacation." He cleaned out his desk, went home and started calling other shipping companies right away.
That was the first of many days of fruitless job-hunting. Now, after more than 20 years in shipping, having worked his way up from clerk to salesman to manager, putting in 70-hour weeks and dragging himself in when he was dog sick, he thinks the only way he can break back into the industry is at an entry level.
Like everywhere else, the supervisory ranks in shipping are thinning.
"You don't want people to know you have management experience," he says. "You don't even want to breathe it." He's rewritten his resume six times, each time making it briefer and eliminating references to his supervisory background.
The emphasis now: hands on.
The irony's not lost on Putman. "I'm sure you've heard the old saying: Once a man, twice a child," he says. "Well, this is kind of like once a manager, twice a clerk. It's just a cycle that comes around."
Putman was back in the fold of working men and women this season only because a neighbor's son looked out for him.
The fellow is a manager at Wal-Mart in Virginia Beach. Several weeks before Christmas he called Putman at his Norfolk home and offered him the Santa job.