Lessons Learned From the Great Recession

A spotlight on skills

If you've been laid off, going back to school isn't the only option. In recent years, reemployment experts have put increased emphasis on assessing workers’ skills. The reason: The capabilities many workers have accumulated throughout their lives can often be transferred to other jobs and other fields, notes Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “When someone loses a job, it's painful, but it's not the end of the game. With patience and persistence, doors will open for workers who have transferable talents.”

That's why it's important to take stock of all of a person's capabilities. The laid-off Whirlpool workers were helped by elaborate assessments. “We had a special software system that took the knowledge, skills and abilities of an assembler and shone light on what skills they don't necessarily realize they have,” recalls Sara Worstell, executive director of the Grow Southwest Indiana Workforce Board. Laid-off workers today can get such assessments through the government-backed American Job Centers network; its website, careeronestop.org, has a section that walks you through how to assess your job skills.

Jobless workers can quickly increase their employability by obtaining additional credentials, says New York state's labor commissioner, Roberta Reardon. “You can take a six-week or semester course and get a nationally recognized credential that makes you highly employable,” she points out. But such certificates aren't always necessary. According to Michael Lang, director of employment services for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, employers are growing more flexible about accepting experience as a substitute for a specific diploma or certificate. “It's not necessarily true that they're only looking for the person with the exact education and training you traditionally expect,” says Lang. “They are now much more open to considering transferable skills from your previous experience."

For Tyrone Garnett, now 54, that's how it worked. At Whirlpool, he was Mr. Versatility, filling in at a dozen different mechanical jobs. When the plant closed, he explains, “it felt like the world was pulled out from under my feet.” For seven months he searched for work. Then he heard of openings at Accuride, a bus-, truck- and tractor-wheel manufacturer with a facility in Henderson, Kentucky, about 11 miles south of Evansville.
 

"My interview went very well,” Garnett remembers. “They saw that I'm a man who keeps himself fairly fit and probably wouldn't miss a lot of work.” Accuride valued the versatility he demonstrated at Whirlpool, he says. He currently oversees seven robot welders and has to know how to fix them when they get stuck. Additionally, he drives a forklift, inspects the truck wheels and repairs faulty ones. “I'm actually making more money now than I did at Whirlpool,” he adds. “I have been blessed.”

'Lifeboat’ jobs

Marsha Luttrell, now 57, had worked at Whirlpool for 19 years when the plant closed. She plunged into a retraining course for hospital jobs but, as she puts it, “I couldn't wrap my mind around this subject.” Instead, she switched into classes to become a heavy-equipment operator, a job much in demand at the time, including at nearby coal mines. But after she earned her certificate, she was passed over for jobs time and again.

"I applied to every coal mine within 100 miles,” she says. “I didn't hear from any of them. But there were some men in their 20s in my class. They didn't even finish the class because the coal mines swept them up so fast.” How could she not suspect age and sex bias?

Discrimination was certainly an issue for older job seekers in 2010 — and it still is. In a recent nationwide study, researchers sent out more than 40,000 applications posing as young (ages 29 to 31), middle-aged (49 to 51) or older (64 to 66) workers. The applications for people in their 60s got far fewer responses than did those for the youngest workers, the study found, and the magnitude of bias against women was much larger than against men.

A different survey, released in March 2020, asked employers their views on older workers. According to one of that survey's authors, Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, the employers said older workers were more expensive. But studies show that age and experience lead to increased productivity that offsets any increased labor costs. And a study of a Mercedes-Benz truck assembly plant in

Germany showed that, on average, worker productivity rose steadily from age 25 to age 60. Teresa Ghilarducci, an economics professor at the New School in New York City who focuses on older employees, tells me that employers are seeing that “older workers do what it takes to get the job done.”

Still, none of that helped Luttrell get a call back from a coal mine. Instead, she accepted what Michael Bernick, former director of California's Employment Development Department, calls a lifeboat job. “Get whatever job you can,” Bernick advises laid-off workers. “You're helped by the immediate income, and you're always more attractive to employers if you're working.” Luttrell's lifeboat was a job as a $10-an-hour dietary aide at a local hospital — earning her far less than her $17.35-an-hour wage at Whirlpool. After five years at the hospital, she took an $11.50-an-hour job at a Walmart deli and bakery. Because she was earning so little, she and her husband were forced to file for bankruptcy.

"I came home from work one day and sat on the couch and cried,” she recalls. That's when the couple decided it was time for her to try again to use her heavy-equipment training. They discovered that the logistics company her husband had retired from was hiring, and she got a job there as a forklift operator. Luttrell loves her new position, even though she still makes $1.35 an hour less than she did at Whirlpool 10 years ago.

Another Whirlpool worker who took a lifeboat job is Michael “Billie” Strickland. Now 57, he pursued training in industrial maintenance, a highly skilled specialty that involves repairing, maintaining and modifying elaborate factory machinery. When Whirlpool laid him off, it was an especially difficult time for his family — his wife was disabled due to a severe back ailment, and his oldest daughter and her two kids had moved in with them. “There was a lot of scraping, clawing, but we made it through,” he says.

At an Ivy Tech jobs fair, he learned that a factory in town, Pittsburgh Glass Works, had a large industrial-maintenance crew, so he applied there. At the time, however, the factory had no openings in that field. So, in a sizable step backward, Strickland took a $13-an-hour production job at Pittsburgh Glass Works that was far below his $18-an-hour Whirlpool wage. After six months, Strickland got a break: An industrial-maintenance job opened up. He transferred into that department, and his pay jumped to $19 an hour. After nearly seven years in industrial maintenance, he was earning $26 an hour (about $54,000 annually), 44 per-cent more than his wages at Whirlpool. But a few months ago he received some bad news. In late May, Pittsburgh Glass Works announced it would close its Evansville plant at the end of December and lay off about 360 workers.

Having rebounded from a layoff once before, Strickland is optimistic. “I can sell myself with things I've learned,” he notes. “I've got valuable skills."

Ready for change

After the Whirlpool factory closed, some workers found themselves unexpectedly retired. For Nick Pope, this was no great hardship. A quality-control auditor who had worked at Whirlpool for 44 years, he was 62 when the plant closed, and he didn't find another job he liked. He is now happily retired, helped by his union pension of nearly $2,000 a month, plus Social Security. “I'm comfortable. We're doing good,” he says, pointing out that his wife recently retired from Bristol Myers Squibb. “We've got three kids and eight grandkids. They keep me busy."

Jean Mayberry, on the other hand, was just 52 when the plant closed and is more of an involuntary retiree. “I was too young to retire and too old to find a job,” she says. After losing her assembly-line job — she had helped to make refrigerator doors — she studied for an associate's degree in business administration and “applied to 75 different places,” everything from banks to TV stations. She rarely heard back. Finally, she landed a low-level position with a bank in Evansville, for just $10 an hour, $8 an hour less than she had been making at Whirlpool. “It was a drastic pay cut,” she adds. She quit after a year, bored with the job and dismayed with the low pay. Pessimistic about finding another spot, Mayberry retired; she lives on Social Security plus $1,500 a month from her pension and her ex-husband's pension. She'd like to have worked longer, but she has one consolation: She gets to spend lots of time with her seven grandchildren.

Tamra Bottoms, who was 51 when she was laid off from her production-coordinator position, took a different tack. She studied for a “hot” field: power plant operations. When she finished her associate's degree, she applied for dozens of jobs, but nothing came through. “I was either overqualified or they would tell me they'd find someone more qualified,” she says.

One day Bottoms saw that a craft brewery was looking for someone to manage its operations. She applied for and landed the job. She enjoyed “every single minute” of her five years there, she notes. She didn't like the pay, though: $10 an hour, plus whatever tips she could hustle by, for instance, giving tours of the brewery. The total was well below her $17.33-an-hour Whirlpool wage. “I found out that many people see an associate degree as nothing more than a glorified high school diploma,” she explains. “It wasn't enough. I felt I had to go further.”

She took a slew of online courses while working at the brewery. Wanting a job that helped others, she quit to work at Easterseals Rehabilitation Center and later for the Indiana state government, where she, until recently, helped low-income workers find childcare so they could keep their jobs. “The people I served are the people busting their tails right now,” says Bottoms. “They are the essential workers.” Laid off from that position in the spring, she accepted a job in a local hospital's access and logistics department.

Decades ago, Bottoms had turned down a college scholarship after high school and gone straight to Whirlpool because of its good wages. After getting laid off, she became serious about studying, earning a bachelor's degree and then two master's degrees — in nonprofit management and strategic management. Her advice for those who confront a sudden layoff after age 50: “You change. You have to or you won't succeed. You have to be a chameleon. You have to absorb your surroundings and learn to adjust."

 

10 Years Later: A Shock, Then a Call to Action

The refrigerator factory in Evansville, Indiana, was long a source of solid union jobs. When the plant closed, older laid-off workers faced a particular challenge: how to earn a living without starting over from scratch. Here's how six of them did it.

 

Tamra Bottoms, 62

Her layoff spurred her to earn two master’s degrees.

Then: Production coordinator

Now: Hospital staffer

 

Nick Pope, 72

His pension made him a better offer.

Then: Quality-control auditor

Now: Retiree

 

Jean Mayberry, 63

She retrained and landed work, then chose to resign.

Then: Refrigerator-door assembler

Now: Retiree

 

Marsha Luttrell, 57

It took lots of persistence to find the right post.

Then: Refrigerator-parts assembler

Now: Forklift operator

 

Tyrone Garnett, 54

His versatility at Whirlpool was a selling point later.

Then: Excess head operator

Now: Production technician at a wheel manufacturer

 

Kathy Duncan, 62

She helps others make it through tough times.

Then: Ice-maker assembler

Now: Foreclosure-prevention housing counselor

Labor writer Steven Greenhouse is the author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor.