Suffering From The Sidelines
The impact of mass layoffs and rising unemployment goes well beyond those immediately affected. Support professionals at all levels — from mental health providers to social workers to career coaches — all suffer tremendous indirect stress from the economic travails of clients.
In that vein, today’s guest post is a slice of life from a NYC author of career development books who keenly describes the waves of bad job news she finds crashing around her everywhere she turns these days.
Every time I pick up a newspaper it seems as if the job forecast becomes more dismal. First, news pundits inform us that it’s the worst market since 1991. Then, a few weeks later, that estimate is revised and we hear that it’s the worst market since 1974. Soon it will look like the worst job market since the Great Depression.
The panic is palpable. Here in Manhattan it feels like every person I know was spared the ax last week, and is still reeling from the Hatchet Man’s sinister specter.
I was on a conference call in the middle of the week when one of the attendees informed the group that a few short hours earlier, there had been massive layoffs at his company. Spared, he was begging off the call, in desperate need of a glass of white wine to untangle jangled nerves.
Two days earlier, I asked a young protege who sits on the board of one of the charities with which I am involved if she would help me throw an event in April. As the event is four months away, truly fun, plus prestigious, I anticipated that she would be thrilled. “I can’t,” she said. “Due to all of the layoffs at work, I can barely keep up with my new responsibilities.”
By week’s end, a friend that I’ve had since I was fifteen years old called me for advice even though she’s a highly paid image consultant. “All of my clients are cutting back on the types of seminars I give,” she said. “Any suggestions?”
Readers I haven’t heard from since the publication of my first book were back in touch with me last week, many of them laid off from the jobs they secured back then. And if those candidates happened to be over fifty years old, that was the first fact they lobbed at me over the transom.
“I’m 55 years old, Vicky. What the hell am I going to do with my life?”
Mostly I just listened and tried to be a sounding board for people’s pain. I didn’t think it would help anyone over fifty to hear that I don’t believe the situation is radically different for young people looking for a job today. In the past few months, I’ve heard the telltale cries of despair coming just as plaintively from college grads now entering this dismal market; many have been trampling the tarmac since June.
On Facebook, a friend mourned that she felt “helpless” as she watched all of her work friends being cut.
While I was reading her post, another friend rang me up to ask me what the employment situation was with a mutual friend of ours. “Do you know?” she said, a tremble rising in her voice. “I’m too scared to ask him myself.”
“It’s perfectly okay to talk to him about it,” I said, trying to strike a note of flimsy reassurance. “He’s still got a job.”
And, just as I thought it was safe to call it a bleak week last Friday and go catch a drink myself, a buddy at what once was a prestigious financial firm wrote to say that it was his last day.
As Bette Davis once said, “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”
