Shaw Capital Working Management Tips & Articles: For Delaware’s jobless, emotional capital can also take a hit

http://shaw-capitalworkingmanagement.com/2011/03/07/shaw-capital-working-management-tips-2/

MAR7


http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20110306/BUSINESS/103060372/0/NEWS02/For-jobless-emotional-capital-can-take-hit?odyssey=nav|head


Beth Miller

6:00 PM, Mar. 5, 2011

Almost two years have passed since a human-resources worker came up to Gayle Larson while she was at work in a lab. Could they talk for a minute?

They walked to a conference room, where a few career advisers were waiting. Larson understood then what was happening. A colleague already had been laid off. And soon, she was cleaning out her desk as the woman from human resources stood by.

That tap on the shoulder in May 2009 ended Larson’s job with AET Films, formerly Hercules, where she had worked as a technical research associate for eight years. She was one of about 250 employees trimmed from AET’s payroll as it emerged from bankruptcy.

Larson, 57, has had plenty of company at the unemployment office, where she says she sometimes has waited up to seven hours and never less than two. And plenty of people are in her shoes across the country, too. She was among 14.8 million U.S. residents — 36,100 in Delaware — who were unemployed in 2010.

Now, she’s getting her house ready to sell. It was her parents’ home and she bought and renovated it after her mother died, but she needs to sell it now.

“Before, I always sat down on the first of the month and paid all my bills,” she said. “Now, I sometimes have to call people and say, ‘I can’t pay this week, but when I get my next check, I’ll be able to.’ ”

The stress of unemployment can be excruciating, experts say, making the loss of a job even tougher.

“We’ve got people choosing between car insurance, food, medicine — what do you choose?” said the Rev. Dale Brown, pastor of Union United Methodist Church in Bridgeville, who called for a community prayer meeting after Invista announced a few years ago that it would lay off hundreds at its Seaford plant. That meeting produced a network of church leaders and community volunteers who set up a Job Loss Response Team that for the past two years has offered workshops and other support for job seekers, who have shown up by the hundreds.


“It’s affecting people we used to think of as very stable, those who had really good jobs at one point.”