Redundant white-collar men in United States

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32554, 13 March 1971, Page 12

Redundant white-collar men in United States

(Newsweek Feature Service)

Two years ago, Murray Rosner was the happy product of his prosperous times. He was only 28, had a job with one of the better Wall Street brokerage houses and a solid fivefigure annual income. Under normal circumstances, he was about as upwardly mobile a young m an as American society produces.

But the circumstances were not normal. Came the recession, and Rosner was out of work, out of prospects and out of his income bracket. For a time he drove a taxi to support his wife and child. Finally, he found a job selling industrial carton openers for $lB5 a week and commissions.

“Driving the cab was the real ego comedown,” he says. “This new job is a step up. I get a station waggon and expenses up to $lOO a month. I’m dressed in a nice suit and doing clean work. I guess you would say it has dignity.” Dignity, in fact, is about ail that is left these days for one stricken segment of the United States work force—the white-collar casualties of the recent recession.

It’s a group that includes thousands of men who, like Rosner, have been forced to step down the economic ladder to jobs with lower pay and lower status. But even more poignantly, of course, it includes some 1.4 million other executives, skilled technicians and professional men whom the United States Labour Department classes as the “white-collar unemployed.” They have had to adjust to the stark fact than no-one needs their hard-learned skills anymore. Bitter experience It’s all a new and bitter experience for people who, until recently, have been the economy’s most favoured group. White-collar personnel largely avoided the firings and layoffs that hit blue-collar workers in the “dip” years of 1957 and 1961. But by last year, the shortage of management and skilled technicians which had plagued industry since World War n was a thing of the past.

“For years, companies had gone all-out in a desperate rush to stockpile executives,” says a New York executive recruiter, Mr David North. “In many cases, these employees were promoted and given raises far above their ability or their companies’ basic needs. Now the companies are lopping off and weeding out to get back to a point of reality.” But for those who are being weeded out, reality is a painful process. It means living on unemployment insurance and savings while frantically hunting for jobs that have simply stopped existing.

For men who have spent years in industries and job situations where the emphasis was on rising in status and income, the next inevitable step is difficult, indeed. They must gear their hopes—and their salary scale —downward. Inevitably, most do, hoping to land “interim” work until their old fields open up again, or perhaps resigning themselves to the proposition that they, like unsuccessful politicians, have “peaked too soon.”

One result is a run on what many of the new white-collar unemployed formerly considered “second

choice” jobs. High-salaried engineers or administrators all around the country are moving—or trying to move —into city government, into teaching or into the kinds of industries that have not had a history of attracting the most ambitious employees. One of luckier The wisest try to be philosophical about the change in their lives. “I’m just a plain engineer now,” says Nathan Volz, aged 44, who recently joined the New York Telephone Company’s engineering department. He is considered fortunate in having to take only a 20 per cent salary cut from what he made at his former post with Hazeltine Corporation, a Long Island defence contractor.

“I’m much happier here,” Mr Volz insists. “In my old job there were so many gvrations going on, first one thing, then another, and you had to keep on handling situations. Here there’s less overtime and less pressure. And my wife is happier, too. We see so much more of each other.” Mr Volz is one of the luckier ones. Many other engineers have taken desperation jobs in fields quite alien to their backgrounds. Sales jobs the kind that pay off mostly in commissions rather than in guaranteed salary provide a haven, if not always a good living. Mr Richara Kleiner, aged 50, a former engineer at the Lockheed Aircraft Corporaation, who is now a real estate salesman in San Jose, California. He claims that “everything is great, except the pay cheque.” And he says he will stay in his new profession, “if I can make $lO,OOO a year steady—that is, 75 per cent of what I used to make.”

Though he realises he was laid off through no fault of his own, Mr Kleiner still feels rebuffed. “I just don’t like it,” he says. “Even though you know it’s the hard times, you still can’t help feeling basically that you did something wrong. Other people are still working, you think, so how come not me?” ' Califo nia real estate has also provided an occupation

for Mr Bert Blum, aged 39, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in physics and has since worked for several defence plants. Like many in his predicament, Mr Blum has not quite adjusted to the image of himself as a salesman. “I always had that blue suede shoe picture of a salesman they’re out to get you,” he says. “Doing it for a while gives you a different outlook, of course. But I used to look down on them and sometimes it still bothers me.” Advantage for some For some employers, however, the swollen ranks of high - quality unemployed comes as a blessing. The city of Los Angeles, for example, has never had so many talented people lining up for jobs. And it has all come about at just the right time—when the great numbers of similarly talented people who were absorbed by the Civil Service in the 1930 s are ready for retirement. “We had been wondering how we would get replacements for them,” says Muriel Morse, general manager of the Los Angeles city personnel department. “But suddenly- we’ve had all these capable people coming in. We’re finding a quality and experience in people that just wasn’t there a few years ago. We’ve had hundreds of people with very technical skills applying for Civil Service jobs as low as maintenance man and meter reader.”

Mr Richard M. DeVos, president of Michigan’s thriving Amway Corporation, which sells cosmetics door-to-door, is equally jubilant. “Our business is picking up a whole new breed of salesman,” he boasts. “Professionals and middlemanagement people are able to reach an entirely new class of customers.” All across the country, thus, former professionals and middle - management people are providing a study in grace under pressure. “You get used to things,” says, the former Wall Street broker, Mr Rosner. “You adjust to anything but starvation.”

(To be continued)