Boston Globe Magazine, June 15, 2003 Middle Class and Out of Work
When white-collar professionals get the pink slip, they face a reality they never expected: Getting back into the work force is a full-time – and often futile – job.
By Carlene Hempel, 6/15/2003
Tracy Vachon is standing in the dinky, cluttered apartment of a woman who is hosting a Tupperware party. Vachon's flustered, because there's a pet parrot squawking in a cage next to where she has to set up. And there's no place other than a stained ottoman for her to stack her multicolored canisters.
It's a Sunday night - a gorgeous, warm Sunday night in spring. Yet Vachon, who has been out of work for 19 months now, had to leave her home on a lake in Westford to hawk plastic in Dracut. In Ann Taylor silk and pressed black slacks, she makes small talk with her host, a hotel housekeeper wearing a USA T-shirt and pink slippers.
"This is my favorite line," Vachon chirps as she tries to stack four FridgeSmart produce containers on the uneven cushion. It's a half-hour after the party was supposed to begin, and almost no one is there yet. But she's a professional. She keeps her cool. Finally, five women show, and over the course of the evening they order about $80 worth of Tupperware each.
Later, as Vachon loads her bags of sample kits and freebies into her car, she stops to calculate. Not just the $400 in orders, but the psychological toll her reluctant career as a top-selling Tupperware agent is taking. The air is still warm, but someone is hollering in the distance, perhaps in the next apartment complex, and it gives the night an unsettled edge. "A year of this?" she asks no one in particular, standing under a flickering light that makes everything an unnatural peach color.
For Vachon, a 35-year-old MBA-packing professional, this is life in a faltering economy. In Massachusetts alone, nearly 6 percent of the work force, or 195,000 people, are looking for jobs. And while everyone from young dot-commers to aging CEOs have taken a hit, one in three of the casualties in this recession are middle-class professionals - the high-achieving, well-educated, and well-kempt set whose comfy homes and roomy cars are at stake if they don't soon get a job.
"This is probably the first time many of them have ever seen unemployment," says Northeastern University economist Barry Bluestone. So they're in shock, he says, not to mention in debt with hefty mortgages, and kids in school, their roots dug in. They don't want to pick up and move; they never thought this would happen to them.
Sure, many of these white-collar unemployed still have 401(k)s to borrow on, even college funds they can dip into as a last resort. Even so, the pressure is building. Their husbands or wives are breathing down their necks to find work, their kids don't want to hear that a C-note is too much for a pair of new party shoes. And what will the neighbors think?
So they search for leads at their gyms, on the Little League field, in churches, coffee shops, and while they work stopgap jobs. They live a twisted version of 9-to-5, a working life defined by their relentless search for a regular paycheck.
Vachon was making six figures as a manager of products for global markets for Lucent Technologies when she got cut. Now, she sells about $4,000 worth of glorified plastic a month, because she and her husband, a print technician in Haverhill, need the cash to buy food. Beyond the money, she sees the work as another way to make connections. Maybe the next Tupperware host might know someone who is hiring in her field.
A few weeks earlier, at her house on a snowy Saturday morning, Vachon gets up from the kitchen table, goes to a cabinet, and pulls out some of the Tupperware she's won as a perk for selling so much in such a short time. It amuses her that she's so good at it. "It's something I never thought I would be doing. But so what?" she says. "It's working."
Still, it's just a bridge job, a way to stay afloat. She spends 15 hours a week selling, more than 35 hours a week looking for a job. "Here I am with all this education," she says, "and it doesn't seem to be helping."
full: http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2003/0615/coverstory.htm --
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