Shut out by recovery

Until November 2003, Steve Bruns made $75,000 a year at Wilsonville-based Mentor Graphics, helping customers navigate sophisticated software used to design semiconductors.

These days, he’s pushing a vacuum at Southwest Christian School in Beaverton, grateful for the $15 an hour he’s paid for custodial work and managing a rudimentary computer lab.

Mark Sawin isn’t feeling so fortunate. The Southeast Portland resident was accustomed to making $12 to $18 an hour as a factory maintenance technician before the recession. Today, he says he’s lucky to find a temporary job that pays $8 an hour.

“You gotta prove it to me that the economy has come back,” Sawin said. “I haven’t seen any such thing.”

Statistics say Oregon has recovered from a recession that hit harder here than anywhere else in the nation. Unemployment is down. The state’s overall job count is back to pre-recession highs.

But the surveys and formulas that economists use don’t account for those who fell through the cracks in Oregon’s economic foundation. Raw job counts ignore factors such as the continued in-migration of workers from other states, which increases the number of jobs the state needs to create just to tread water.

Moreover, unemployment statistics don’t track workers who have become frustrated, stopped looking for work and dropped off the rolls.

Nor do they track job quality. And for many Oregonians who lost their jobs, the dark side of recovery is a world of reduced wages and benefits, decreased job security and diminished prospects.

Oregon’s employment recovery has been fueled in large part by low-wage industries, according to data from the Oregon Employment Department. Nearly half the jobs created in Oregon between the second half of 2003 and the same period in 2004 were in industry sectors with an average annual wage of less than $30,000. Hot employers included restaurants and bars, social assistance agencies and temporary employment services.

Many of the industries hardest hit by the economic downturn, including manufacturing and high tech, are recovering but are still deep in the hole in terms of overall job counts. That hits Portland’s Achilles’ heel — and the state’s tax coffers — because the associated jobs are concentrated in the metro area and are some of the best paid blue- and white-collar positions available in the state.

While the employment picture is improving, those who keep their finger on the pulse of the job market say the economy’s heartbeat is still irregular and a little weak.

“What I see is that companies are still hunkered down,” said Jean Erickson Walker , executive vice president in the Portland office of the career management firm Pathways//OI Partners. “They’re dealing with the immediate, hiring doers, not thinkers, people focused on a task, not overall outcomes.

“Companies are not positioning themselves for growth, which is not the sign of a confident economy.”

In a high-tech bind

Paul Chirdon used to be the director of information technology for Hillsboro-based TriQuint Semiconductor. He managed a team of 40 employees and made more than $100,000 a year before TriQuint went through a merger and his counterpart at the merged company got the top IT job.

Rather than take a demotion, Chirdon figured he could find another job. He left the company. He soon suspected he’d made a mistake.

Tech was one of the hardest-hit industries in Oregon, as elsewhere. The highest paid industry sector in the Oregon’s economy, with an average annual wage of more than $70,000, it lost 22 percent of its jobs between late 2000 and the same period in 2003.

Part of that loss was a backlash from the pre-recession splurge on Y2K and Internet infrastructure. But there are more fundamental changes at work. Even as demand has returned, profit pressures have pushed most tech companies to focus on their core business and outsource any support services they can.

Tech companies also are looking for more flexibility with their manufacturing and engineering teams. While they used to offer signing bonuses and other perks to lure workers from competitors, many now start workers in temporary jobs. That diminishes benefit costs and makes it easier for companies to trim payroll if demand falls off.

Chirdon spent $8,500 to hire an executive recruiting firm for placement assistance, to no avail. He networked, polished his resume and zapped it off for any job that looked halfway suitable. But he said employers often told him they’d received hundreds of resumes for the positions.

“What’s the chance your resume is going to bubble up?” he asks.

When he managed to wangle an interview, he says, he was often far more experienced than the manager interviewing him. Other times, he suspected age discrimination. He was overqualified. Too experienced. They were looking for a “high-energy” person — code words, he said, for someone younger.

In two years looking for a permanent position, Chirdon says, he found not a single company that was aggressively increasing its in-house IT staff. The best employment he found was a five-month gig with Electro Scientific Industries Inc., an electronics manufacturer in unincorporated Washington County. The position paid 40 percent of his pre-downturn salary, and Chirdon was grateful to have it. But it didn’t last.

“Once you’re in the unemployment stream, you get into the oscillating wave of temporary positions that come and go based on the latest quarterly report from Intel,” Chirdon said.

Now he and his wife are packing to move. They were forced to sell their home in Cedar Mill. On April 1, they’ll move into a rental nearby.

The good news is that he’s found a job. Starting April 4, he’ll be working as an IT site manager for the international consulting firm Cap Gemini SA, helping service a local company that has outsourced its IT department.

Pay, opportunity shrink

Portia LeBlue spent 10 years at Frito Lay’s Beaverton plant, operating machines that made Grandma’s Cookies and Rold Gold Pretzels. The company closed the plant in September 2004, after the state’s recession officially had ended, eliminating 134 jobs.

The company provided good severance and outplacement assistance, and LeBlue, who had earned more than $16 an hour, was able to fall back on her moonlighting position selling real estate. But that’s essentially being self-employed, she said, and she needs benefits.

LeBlue has good prospects with three companies. But few of the positions she sees pay what she made at Frito Lay.

“It’s not out there,” she said. “With everything you find, you’re having to take a $3 to $4 dollar an hour cut and work your way back up.”

Andrew McGough, chief operating officer with Worksystems Inc., says LeBlue’s figures are right on the money. Worksystems funnels federal money to organizations that offer job placement and retraining services to dislocated workers in the region. The organization kept detailed statistics on the placement of about 6,700 in 2004.

Federal performance standards assume a successful placement if a dislocated worker is able to achieve 85 percent of his prior income in a new job. Right now, Worksystems numbers hover at about a 75 percent replacement wage.

“If you invest in training, the presumption is that the worker should be able to go out and earn higher wages,” McGough said. “But the reality is, that’s difficult to do.”

It has been particularly hard in Oregon because of the types of jobs lost.

Oregon’s manufacturers shed 30,000 workers between 2000 and 2003. The average annual wage in the manufacturing sector in 2003 was $45,000 — one of the principal reasons that the state was hit harder than most by the recession. Many industrial employers are in hiring mode again, and the sector has added back 8,000 employees since 2003, but there’s a long way to go.

“It’s still an employers’ market,” said Bob Tackett, who was laid off in 2000 when Reynolds Metals closed its Troutdale aluminum smelter and now manages a manufacturing workers support group for the dislocated workers program at Mt. Hood Community College. Many of the new jobs are non-union. And employers can afford to be far pickier about whom they hire.

McGough suggests that what Oregonians are experiencing is a long-term stratification of the labor market. The region’s economy is able to produce many low-wage jobs and a goodly number of relatively well-paid jobs for skilled workers. What’s missing is the middle-wage positions for semi- and low-skilled workers.

“Those opportunities are rapidly going away in our economy, he said.

Determined to stay Oregon retains its strong lifestyle draw, which inevitably figures into its employment picture. People move here without jobs, and those who are here don’t want to leave when they lose one.

Last month, Richard Garber flew to Austin, Texas, and then Atlanta for job interviews — two of the few he’s landed since January, when his job was whittled away in cost-cutting measures at the Portland engineering firm MEI-Charlton.

A 54-year-old with a doctorate and 25 years of experience in metallurgical engineering, Garber admits he’d sacrifice some career advancement to stay in Portland. But he has begun to worry no niche exists here for his specialized field.

He’s canvassed local firms, checked with past colleagues and considered independent consulting, a suggestion he’s heard a few times at the two support groups he attends weekly with a few dozen other displaced workers.

“I don’t know if it’s a matter of what I want anymore,” he said. “It’s a matter of reality.”

Steve Bruns has no intention of leaving. When he’s not changing light bulbs or trying to coax a computer out of retirement for Southwest Christian School’s computer lab, he’s looking for better work. He networks aggressively. He sends out three resumes a week.

But in 16 months on the market, he hasn’t had one formal job interview. He’s able to support his family of seven and hold onto his house only with significant support from his retired parents

And when he reads that the state has surpassed its pre-recession employment levels, putting its four-year downturn in the rearview mirror, he’s understandably skeptical.

“I’m just looking for something that’s paying $40,000 a year and benefits,” he said, “something so I don’t have to tell my kids they can’t go out for track and soccer.”

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