This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Dec. 27, 2009 - When it comes to weathering a layoff, Russ Signorino can speak from both personal and professional experience.
The longtime expert on the St. Louis labor market lost his own job in June when the United Way of Greater St. Louis eliminated its research department. Signorino has just landed a new post: as executive director of the Gateway EITC Community Coalition, a nonprofit that he helped establish while at the United Way. The group does free tax preparation for low- and moderate-income families.
The United Way downsizing came as a surprise, said Signorino, 57, who acknowledged, "It's really happening everywhere."
And he's been through this before. In the 1970s -- before he was hired as a labor market analyst for the state of Missouri -- he lost his job in the insurance industry, his first "regular job" after college.
"I was out of work for nine months, and our first child was born while I was out of work,'' Signorino said. "It taught me a lot, and I've never forgotten what it was like. We really struggled for a long time.''
During a recent interview, Signorino shared his thoughts on unemployment -- currently at 9.8 percent in the St. Louis area -- and what it will take for the region to recover. Here are excerpts:
There seems to be a lot of discussion these days about underemployment -- laid-off workers who take full-time or part-time positions just to put food on the table. Is this recession different from past downturns in terms of underemployment?
Signorino: In a way it is, but we have to keep in mind that the biggest difference from recession to recession is not just the number of people who are affected but the type of people who are affected.
Underemployment has been a problem in past recessions -- and during the early stages of recoveries -- for as long as I'm aware.
In past recessions, though, manufacturing workers were the majority of people losing their jobs. When the recession was over, they went back to work, and that was a good thing. But that started to change in the middle to late '70s as some of those manufacturing jobs didn't come back. Those workers had to find other employment, and they ended up working in jobs that they would consider below their training or experience. The difference now is that most of those types of jobs are no longer even in the economy.
So when a recession hits and companies cut back, it's white-collar workers -- those of us who have professional and managerial positions -- who are losing our jobs. Where else are you going to cut nowadays? If you look at most manufacturing industries, there are relatively few production workers who are actually making something now. You probably have more white-collar staff in a lot of manufacturing facilities than you do blue-collar staff.
When the economy starts to come back, the creation of new kinds of jobs that can replace positions lost during a recession don't just sprout up and grow. It takes some time for the economy to adjust and the economy to grow employment.
A lot of us may be employed during the early part of a recovery or even while going into an economic expansion, but, unfortunately, we may be working in positions that are not really suited to our education and experience. We may be making less money, we may be doing something we don't really want to do, but we're employed so we're no longer counted as unemployed. If you work one hour for pay during the week the government surveys unemployment every month, you're counted as employed.
So, is this recession harsher -- or does it just seem that way because, as you point out, it has affected both white- and blue-collar workers?
Signorino: It appears to be tougher because, for most of us, it is completely unexpected, especially for those of us who are a little bit older. Our parents sent us off to college because, we were told, 'If you go to college you'll never have to worry about being unemployed. You'll always have a job.' We got that drummed into our heads.
But that's not what work is like in the 21th century and even in the later years of the 20th century. All kinds of positions and all kinds of industries nowadays are impacted by economic adjustments.
Take a person my age who didn't go to college but went into the auto industry and became an assembly worker. There was an expectation -- because of the way cars were manufactured -- that the plants would shut down at times: In the summer for retooling and there were also cycles in the economy; we all buy cars at the same time. There was an expectation that these workers were going to lose their jobs from time to time.
If you look at union contracts, they were set up with that expectation. The workers were covered during these shutdowns, compared to other workers. But that's not the expectation when you talk about these other industries and these other occupations. So it seems harder, but in reality, the experience is the same: You don't have a job.
The difference goes back to what we were talking about earlier. If you were a manufacturing worker, you knew there was an expectation when the economy improved, or demand picked up, that your job was going to be there. So you went back to that job. But these jobs that we're losing now -- there really is no expectation that those jobs will be returning, so you have to find something else or you have to create something else.
So what are the prospects tomorrow for these white-collar workers who are being bought-out or laid-off today?
Signorino: A lot of these workers will create the new opportunities. The problem is, it takes a long time.
We saw it as recently as the early 1990s when McDonnell Douglas was laying off thousands of workers. They went from 32,000 workers down to 18,000 workers in a relatively short period of time, and many of those employees were engineers or highly trained assembly workers. When the realization was kicking in that those positions were gone for good, a lot of people went out and started their own businesses, and they were able to do that better than some of the workers affected by recessions in the past because of their background and experience and education.
We tend to forget that when we're going through the educational process, it's not only what we're majoring in, but a lot of other things are being taught. We can use that knowledge -- whether it's in business or something else -- to create our own opportunities. But it's a long process. You can't all of a sudden create 14,000 jobs to make up that loss.
Economists say that recovery is just around the corner. What should St. Louis be doing now to help create jobs in the aftermath of this recession?
Signorino: I see two things. And I don't have the answers as far as how you do it, but this is based on what I see here and what has happened in other parts of the country that seem to handle these things better than the St. Louis area has.
The first is education, and I'm not just talking about four-year colleges but from the elementary system on up: Making sure that the educators and educational institutions are keeping up with what is really demanded and needed in the labor market.
When I'm talking to employers, they tell me that a lot of the people they see have done well and are well trained to do well in education but not necessarily trained to do well in the work world. The world of work is different than education, and there are skills needed that are not necessarily taught in school.
For example, one of the most important skills to be a successful apprentice and then become a journeyman is to have good observation skills. We don't teach observation skills in school; we assume people can pick that up. We teach students how to read, but in some of these occupations the reading skill required is not to sit down and read a novel or a book. If you're a plumber, you have to be able to read building code. Did you ever try to read building code? Lawyers have problems reading building code.
The other thing we haven't done a good job of addressing is making the region more open and available for new opportunities and new businesses and people who are trying new things. There just doesn't seem to be the sense of that in the St. Louis area like you would find in some other parts of the country.
We don't seem to have that mentality here, and I don't know how you nurture that. I don't know how you grow that, but I think we need to find that and we need to do a good job of implementing it. Without it we're going to continue to have these discussions.
Two successful examples of this here are World Wide Technology and Express Scripts. We need more World Wide Technologies. We need more Express Scripts. We need more small- and medium-sized businesses being created and grown by people from St. Louis. It's not going to come from the outside.
