Photos by Tom Bamberger
Flowers. For years, Mike Dolan made a tidy living delivering flowers.
“Back in the middle ’70s, flower shops were as plentiful as bars in Milwaukee,” he recalls. “But a lot were small and didn’t want to hire their own driver. So they contracted with a service.”
Dolan ran his own company, delivering bouquets all across the South Side. As business grew, he hired two or three other drivers. “At holiday times I’d have, like, half a dozen.”
Then grocery stores started adding flower departments. At funerals, more and more survivors asked for donations to charity “in lieu of flowers.” The little florists started closing their doors.
But Dolan had meanwhile branched out. Spotting some poorly attended vending machines, he’d called the absentee owner and offered to service them. He got hired to do just that, cleaning them up, making sure they were filled. He ran the vending route for seven years while still delivering flowers, doubling up shops where he could. “They kind of worked together,” he says.
But flower shops kept dying. As did some of the vending machine stops. Larger florists formed their own cooperative delivery service, cutting out Dolan. Finally, Dolan’s business went under.
With 20 years of running deliveries, the next logical step was truck driving. Beginning in 1996, Dolan started hauling generators from Briggs & Stratton. But when generator sales fell, Dolan got laid off from that job. Next came delivering meat for Peck Foods, but when food conglomerate Cargill bought Peck, it switched truckers, and Dolan was on the street again.
So Dolan changed gears entirely, to an office job. At the Hire Milwaukee Center on National Avenue, a federally funded job counseling agency, Dolan entered a one-year training program in 2002 to work in computers. CoakleyTech, a document management firm, then hired him to oversee quality control – testing software, documenting production, overseeing the copying of CDs. He handled a two-year project organizing and modernizing data files for a big customer.
But last year, an Illinois company bought CoakleyTech. Dolan was laid off. He was back at Hire Milwaukee this year, one of hundreds there looking for a new career. But this time, he says, things are far different.
“I’m six years older. I’m 57.” Most of those getting hired now are in their 30s. And it’s a much tougher economy, tougher than he’s ever faced. “It’s at the point where I almost have to create my own job,” he says quietly, his voice trailing off.
Dolan would blend easily into a crowd. Slender, neatly dressed in slacks and a yellow, button-down, short-sleeved shirt, he has well-trimmed, sandy hair and a work-ready, professional appearance. He has been the eager, ever-adaptive worker, with a resumé that personifies the changing Milwaukee economy. But now, there’s a stoical air about him. He’s not licked yet, but he’s worried by an economy spiraling downward. And he’s not alone.
It is, nearly everyone from President Barack Obama on down says, the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Unemployment exceeds 9 percent in Wisconsin, slightly higher than the national average, and hit 11 percent this spring in Milwaukee. Companies are dumping workers and cutting pay or hours for remaining employees. Entire industries – automobile manufacturing, newspapers – are on the edge of collapse. Governments face huge deficits and are furloughing workers.
At Hire Milwaukee, the backlog of jobless people is so deep, it can take more than a month to get an appointment with a counselor. In Kenosha, after Chrysler decided to shut its engine factory and move the work to Michigan and Mexico, the Kenosha County Job Center’s quarterly job fair drew hundreds of displaced workers. But few employers showed up – and most weren’t hiring: They were schools and colleges hunting for students.
And the speed of all this change is breathtaking. “Things just fell off the cliff,” says Sue Marks, a longtime human resources consultant whose firm handles recruitment and hiring.
Veterans of the last three downturns – 2002, 1991, the early ’80s – say this one is palpably different. In the past, the layoffs were mainly in manufacturing. “Now, you name it, we see them,” says Pat Elizondo, a Hire Milwaukee job counselor. “It’s much more difficult to place folks, whether they’re higher-skilled or lower-skilled.”
She gets calls from jobseekers who are increasingly demoralized. “There used to be a time when I could give them some ideas. Now I just can’t.”
The 1980s recession made a certain sense: It was partly caused by federal fiscal policies to drive up interest rates and tighten credit to choke off the spiraling inflation of the late 1970s, notes UW-Milwaukee labor economist John Heywood. But now, the collapse of the banks has made credit more than tight; lending is virtually nonexistent. “This,” says Heywood, “is terra incognita.”
David Riemer, who worked in the administrations of former Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist and Gov. Jim Doyle, and has worked on issues related to jobs and poverty for decades, thinks the downturn dramatizes a deeper, longer-term problem: a permanent job gap, a shortfall so huge that large numbers of Americans will always be out of work. That terra incognita, he seems to suggest, could be a kind of perpetual recession.
For nearly a year, Andres Rondan has been looking for “any kind of job.” The 59-year-old Latin American immigrant was last laid off by a Green Bay meatpacking company. But he’s done many other kinds of jobs as well.
“I can be a driver, a forklift driver, a machine operator, work on the assembly line.” But no takers. “I’ve never had the trouble I’ve had now. I’ve worked all my life.”
Dale Patella, 48, was laid off in December. That job had lasted eight months, but before that, he’d been a truck driver for the same company for six years. He’s trained as a heavy equipment operator and worked as a warehouse employee. Conditions today are the worst he’s ever seen. “In the 1980s, you could lose a job and have one pretty easily in a couple of weeks. This one here, you lose a job, you’re going to be out for a while.”
Patella is still working hard to find something. “I’m a member of five different temp agencies. But people are being very, very selective.”
At 44, Denise Johnson is old enough to have lived through the last three recessions, but they were never on her radar screen. Disabled by rheumatoid arthritis and raising a son on her own – he’s now 28 – Johnson didn’t focus on a career until early this decade, when she decided to train as a paralegal. She loved the law and believed she could do the work despite her infirmity. First, the Cudahy resident got a two-year degree from Milwaukee Area Technical College, then finished a bachelor’s degree from Carroll University in 2007. She’s been looking since then, focusing her job hunt on smaller law firms.
“I did not know how to job hunt, how to sell myself,” she admits. She didn’t rely on help-wanted ads. Instead, she pored over Yellow Pages listings, making cold calls to prospects, and posted her resumé at online job-search sites. She estimates she’s sent out some 75 resumés with virtually no response. Now she’s broadening her hunt, considering part-time work helping the homebound.
Linda Yarrington, 21, moved to Milwaukee from Chicago, where she had worked as a cashier in department stores and restaurants. With family here, she moved because the cost of living is lower and the pay for her kind of work is better – if she can find it. “I don’t think a job alone is going to take care of you. Most people will have to work two jobs or get a higher degree.” She’s tried that, but dropped out of college four times because, she admits, she’s had trouble staying motivated.
Dave Ihrcke, 34, has been looking for work for seven months after being laid off from his job of eight years doing building restorations. “That market just, like, crashed,” he says. The housing market collapse has killed the construction industry. “People are getting laid off left and right. It’s really hard out there. There’s no buildings being erected. People don’t have any money because their stocks have crashed.”
After high school, Ihrcke completed a one-year automotive course, but soon lost interest in that work and gravitated toward construction. It was the early 1990s and building restoration work was plentiful and paid well. “I didn’t wake up and worry about not having a job.”
With three kids to support, “it’s been rough,” he says. “I’ve been getting odd jobs with staffing companies.” But these jobs – in manufacturing, packaging and the like – pay little more than minimum wage, and even those have been downsized.
Howard Hill, 53, of Greendale, was let go as a construction manager in February. “I’ve never suffered a layoff since 1980,” he says. That earlier job loss had a silver lining: It spurred him to leave his hometown of Sheboygan and move to Milwaukee. He got a job selling lumber, then worked his way through the building field: selling fireplaces, then running a fireplace store, then into homebuilding sales and later management. But now, with the real estate crash, “it just seems like there’s nothing available at all.”
He’s broadened his search, hoping to find work in allied fields, like remodeling. His children are grown and out of the house, so Hill’s concern is simply providing for himself and his wife. “I don’t have any goals to retire,” he says. “I’m looking for something to carry me the next 10 to 15 years.”
Hill remains upbeat. “Jobs are out there. You just have to work hard to find them and not get discouraged.” But he has no illusions about a quick upturn. “Things are going to be tight for a good, long period of time.”
He’s seen the impact on his daughter, who has trained as a school counselor. “She’s a college graduate, has her master’s, and is currently working at Panera.”
Fred Schnook grew up in West Allis in the 1960s, where the future seemed assured, stamped indelibly into the lives of his generation and their parents before they entered high school. “I had no aspirations to do anything more than work in a factory,” he says. “I was trained for that.” The tools in the school’s metal shop were surplus machines from Allis-Chalmers, left over from World War II. Boys went to metal shop, girls to home economics.
“They gave you a big piece of sheet steel in seventh grade,” says Schnook. “You bent it, blued it, pop-riveted it, you made yourself a little toolbox. By the time you were in 10th or 11th grade, you had a heck of a tool set. And you went to work for Allis-Chalmers.”
A graduate of West Allis Central High, Schnook rebelled in a small way. “I refused to work at Allis-Chalmers, because everybody else did,” he says, laughing at the memory. “So I worked right across the street at Federal Castings – because I wouldn’t be a drone like all the others.
“It was a beautiful ductile iron factory. It’s a parking lot now.”
Times were good. Wages, at $6 an hour, were more than twice the minimum wage then. He married and fathered two children. Then industrial Milwaukee began to implode. Federal laid him off, so Schnook enrolled in an apprenticeship program at Falk Corp. “Halfway through I got laid off.” More factory jobs, more layoffs followed.
By now it was the early 1980s, and Milwaukee had plunged into the recession that bestowed the Rust Belt nickname on the nation’s northern manufacturing cities. Schnook was one of some 15,000 people who showed up at State Fair Park to apply for 200 job openings advertised at A.O. Smith Corp. “It was sub-zero temperatures. People stood in line, myself included, overnight.”
Schnook got a job welding for the truck frame manufacturer and became active in the plant union. But in the late ’80s, some 2,000 were laid off from the company. He was one. Schnook survived: He helped set up a special program for dislocated workers and became a job-search counselor.
The downsizing at A.O. Smith – and the plant’s subsequent sale to new owners, who later closed it – was part of a massive change in the local economy that still reverberates underneath the current recession. Especially devastated were African-Americans who lived in the central city neighborhoods around factories like A.O. Smith, Master Lock and others that shrank or closed in that era. “These jobs have never returned,” Schnook says. “Milwaukee was witnessing the last of the high-wage, low-skill manufacturing jobs and a lifestyle that had been part of our community for 80 years.”
After welfare was transformed into W-2 in the 1990s, the idea was that this would provide those without jobs the skills they needed to get hired. They would pick up hard skills, such as getting a driver’s license or learning a trade, but also work-readiness skills – how to dress appropriately for a job, show up on time, make child care arrangements and the like.
At UMOS, a South Side social service agency, its W-2 clients are largely unskilled people with little work experience. “Most have been out of the job market for some time,” says Rod Ritcherson, the agency’s director of corporate relations. “That alone puts them at a disadvantage.”
But now it’s gotten worse. “They’re now competing against higher-skilled, more-educated jobseekers,” he says. So when UMOS clients upgrade their skills, “there’s nowhere to place them.” Instead, they find themselves up against men and women with longer work histories for whom the jobless rolls are an unfamiliar place.
Riemer, who now directs policy and planning at the Milwaukee anti-poverty agency Community Advocates, sees an even bigger problem at work. Simply put, even in the best of times, there are no longer enough jobs for everyone.
Riemer has spent years watching the numbers: not just official unemployment data – which underreports the total jobless population because those who’ve given up looking aren’t counted by most measures – but also the number of job vacancies employers report. Using what he says are “the most conservative numbers,” Riemer estimates as many as 6 to 12 million people nationally won’t have jobs even if every single current vacancy is filled. This “job gap” may include as many as 160,000 people in Wisconsin and 50,000 in the Milwaukee area.
“Even in the late ’90s, when we were massively creating jobs, we also were destroying more jobs,” says Riemer. He compares conditions then to the Hindu legend of a god alternately blessing the universe and annihilating it: “We had a sort of Shiva economy, where things were being destroyed and created simultaneously.”
The current slowdown, though, is exposing the job gap more clearly. And because it will persist indefinitely, Riemer believes the best short-term solution for the economy and for reducing poverty is for the government to create transitional jobs – like those devised by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.
Riemer is well aware these programs were attacked in their day, but says “most historians give pretty high marks” to how they were run. “There’s no reason why we can’t manage this well. To say that there could be a problem isn’t to say we shouldn’t do it. In that case, we wouldn’t have an Army, Navy, Air Force or anything. The left is as wrong in saying the government is the answer to everything, as the right is wrong in saying government can’t do anything right. Those are both just idiotic clichés.”
At a spring job fairat UW-Milwaukee, graduating senior Kyle Gillman, 22, is angling for a job in the financial industry. With his pinstriped suit, blue shirt and natty tie, he certainly looks the part. “It’s kind of nerve-wracking. I don’t have a job when I graduate in May. So I’m just trying to get my name out there and take whatever position I can to get some experience.”
Gillman isn’t second-guessing his career choice, even amid one of the worst bear markets in memory. “I was always interested in stocks. I’ve always wanted to be a trader,” he says. “If you had the money, right now is the best time to invest. Everything’s going to go up eventually.”
Lisa Neumann, 23, is less certain. She’s a sophomore criminal justice major who took time off from college and plans to return next spring. With a 4-year-old son at home, she’s only been a part-time student. At UWM, she held a clerical job in one of the student services offices, and more recently, she had worked for a social service agency. Now she’s jobless. “I’m scared. McDonald’s aren’t hiring, they’re full of high school students. I have to provide for my family.”
Another senior, Dan Meyer, showed up for the job fair in a blazer, tie and close-cropped haircut. The 22-year-old marketing major from Appleton contemplates how the world has turned upside down in just the two years since he picked a concentration in real estate. “At that time, it seemed like a good way to make money, and then it just turned into utter chaos,” he says, with a hint of rueful amusement. “Now it isn’t quite as appetizing to get into.”
In one of his classes, Meyer says, a presenter predicted that graduates on average would have some 15 jobs over their work lifetime. “For me to think I’m going to one company and end up staying there – even to think I would be in Milwaukee my whole life – is a long shot.”
Still he tries to stay hopeful. “You can look at it as a really scary time or you can look at it as, like, an opportune time. There’s going to be, in the next few years, jobs that didn’t exist that are going to open up.”
What sort of jobs? “As certain things are falling apart, it’s going to be someone’s job to make sure this doesn’t happen again…”
ZThere are hints a turnaround is beginning.
Christian Bartley at the Wisconsin World Trade Center points to a forecast from economist Lakshman Achuthan at the Economic Cycle Research Institute that the recession will end this summer. “There are companies out there making money, growing, investing,” he notes. “Those companies that are investing in their marketing and strategic planning now, rather than simply taking a defensive position and making decisions based on fear rather than facts, are the ones that will come out stronger than their competitors, well-poised to dominate their markets.”
Some segments of the economy have been far less affected. CareerBuilder.com, an online job-listing service, tells us where workers are being added: business services; the tourism, hotel and restaurant industry; and mining, including oil and gas extraction. Ditto for the federal government. One reason? The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is hiring hundreds to help manage the burgeoning number of bank failures across the country.
At MilwaukeeJobs.com, another online job-listing service, there are signs of an upturn. “We’re seeing more demand than you would expect in manufacturing,” says Andy Vogel, director of sales. That includes big companies like Johnson Controls and P&H Mining (part of Joy Global, successor to the old Milwaukee stalwart Harnischfeger Industries), and smaller ones, too.
Hospitals and other health care providers still need workers. (“Medical College of Wisconsin is pretty constant in hiring,” Vogel says.) So do health care industry manufacturers, firms such as Triad Group in Hartland.
Retailers like Kohl’s, Roundy’s and Batteries Plus are hiring. Even some insurers and banks are doing so – notwithstanding the collapse of some financial giants. “There’s still a lot of small banks that really have solid practices, good capitalization and are great places to work,” says Vogel.
School districts across Wisconsin have trimmed staffs as voters turned down their requests to hike school property taxes. Yet at the same time, federal stimulus money is now flowing to schools, and Vogel says some are hiring as a result. Gov. Doyle has already warned that job cuts and wage cuts are coming – along with reductions in state aid that might force more furloughs or layoffs at local governments.
But as Vogel surveys the job market, he still sees new jobs popping up. “We’re finding little pockets all over,” he says. “A year ago, there might have been one company with 200 openings. Today, there might be five companies with 20 openings.”
Sue Marks calls herself a serial entrepreneur. Nearly three decades ago, she founded an independent temp firm, ProStaff, that grew exponentially and then sold out to Kelly Services. Today, she’s got a new business, Pinstripe Inc., which contracts with employers to recruit and hire new workers. “We become the employment department for large companies. We manage their talent acquisition and management,” she says.
Marks has never seen an economy that declined so broadly or with such astonishing speed. “Markets have disappeared so quickly, customers have disappeared so quickly,” she says. “We’re in such a different world in terms of global interconnectedness, technology and the pace of change.
“We’ll continue to see large job losses for the next several months,” Marks predicts.
Yet she, too, sees cause for optimism. “In many cases, organizations are laying people off in one group or business unit and hiring in another one.” While overall there are more jobless, that also means there’s lots of talent on the market – and in that, Marks believes, are the seeds of an economic revival. “When it comes back, it’s going to come back quickly, so that organizations are going to have to be very agile. This is a great time for innovation.”
Indeed, both companies and workers may have no choice but to change and innovate. This downturn, says Marks, may reshape the entire economy. “This is a whole resetting, a reorganizing going on, more than a recession,” she continues.
After the huge A.O. Smith layoff had unwound, Fred Schnook, his bachelor’s degree in hand, was hired to direct a 10-county workforce development agency based in Ashland in northwest Wisconsin. He promoted school-to-work programs and, in 2002, ran for mayor, winning on a platform of sustainable development and “triple-bottom-line” accounting that doesn’t just look at financial results, but also the impact of operations on the environment and society.
In 2006, after one term as mayor, the well-traveled Schnook joined Foth, an engineering company in Green Bay where he advises communities interested in green development. “We’re in a global economy, whether you like it or not. You don’t have any choice but to play. Rote work will get off-shored. So it’s a matter of constantly keeping your skills up to date. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is.”
What government needs to focus on, he says – and he worries it’s getting too little attention – is raising the average working person’s purchasing power, which has been largely stagnant since the early 1970s. That means focusing on education and the creation of better jobs.
In the days after the 1982 recession, he says, business made major advances in two areas: expanding opportunity for women and African-Americans, and technology. Data became decentralized. Authority drove downward.
“What I think we’re going to see now is the things that companies have been experimenting with – sustainability, triple-bottom-line thinking – are going to get ramped up really fast. Those companies that don’t do it are dead.”
Individual Americans mayalso have to transform their ways of doing things. The mindset of the last two decades, spending money we didn’t have on products our country didn’t make to give us things we didn’t need, may have to change.
“The free-spending of two or three years ago, I think those days are over,” says Mike Dolan. “For every baby boomer my age who gets laid off, they’re going to really tighten the belt. For most of us we’re going to be retiring, but we can’t retire.”
Dolan is ahead of that trend. He first sniffed a downturn on the horizon years ago and took steps to tighten up his family’s finances. “For the last six years, I’ve lived like I’m still on unemployment. I never bought the new car; I’m still driving the old ’94 van. And we still have the old furniture.”
Even before that – back when he became a truck driver in the mid-’90s – he and his wife downsized because he didn’t have time for the upkeep of the family’s ranch home in Franklin. “So we just sold it and moved to an apartment,” Dolan says. It was a block from the high school where the couple’s daughter attended.
Today, their daughter is married to a data analyst and, after she’d originally trained to be a pastor, is returning to school to learn pharmacy. “They have a house on the South Side they can’t sell. They’ll just stay put,” Dolan says.
Dolan still can’t believe the world he now confronts. “Who would think that General Motors or Chrysler would go bankrupt?” Then there’s his apartment building. “A quarter of the building is now empty – all of a sudden, this year. How long will it take before we get a foreclosure sign?”
When Karen Hamilton, another out-of-work Milwaukeean, tries to describe this strange new world, she reaches back to the opening words of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Hamilton has certainly seen both kinds of times: She’s owned a restaurant, taught elementary school music, published a health and wellness magazine for 10 years, and worked in a social services agency. Most recently, she worked as a sales assistant in a manufacturing firm. At 56, she’s been through several recessions.
Hamilton hasn’t done the research that Riemer has, but she worries that there aren’t enough jobs for everyone. Yet she, too, sees rays of hope amid all the changes. “Most jobs or professions of the future haven’t even been thought of yet,” she says. “It’s like plants starting to grow, ideas starting to grow. I think we’re going to have to completely re-look at life, at how we make our money. Life is making us do that.” n
Erik Gunn, a regular contributor to Milwaukee Magazine, is a former labor reporter for the Milwaukee Journal. Write to him at letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.
