Worries grow as job market shrinks

When Don Grillet lost his job in the mortgage industry in October, he went through many of the standard stages of unemployment.

There was the "whew, I need a break period."

There was the "sitting looking at the television period," in which he was too depressed and too worried to move.

Now Grillet, 30, is in the "omigod, my unemployment insurance runs out in two months phase."

Today, the closely watched federal monthly jobs numbers will come out to let analysts and economists know what people like Grillet already know - it's getting harder to find work, especially for people in financial services, a sector that has been shedding jobs for months as the extent of the subprime-mortgage crisis widens.

The monthly U.S. Labor Department report tracks two sets of data. The government surveys households to find out the employment history of their members. It tracks employment by age, race, sex and education, and it follows trends in how long it takes unemployed people to find work.

More data come from a survey of companies' payroll activities. In January, national payrolls declined by 17,000 jobs from December, one of the first drops in months.

Part of what observers will be looking for in the February report is whether the January number is revised upward. Often, the survey initially underreports the number of jobs created.

Even so, it is a rotten time for someone like Grillet, who spent a few hours earlier this week at the state of Pennsylvania-run CareerLink office near his home in South Philadelphia checking out job leads and polishing his resume.

People who watch these numbers say we may still be in the calm before the storm.

For example, Lisa Derrickson, the main administrator at the South Philadelphia CareerLink office, said she had seen an increase in job seekers - 1,668 visitors stopped by in the third quarter, compared with 1,319 in the third quarter a year earlier - but there has yet to be much of a slowdown in employers seeking help.

"Employers are still hiring," she said. The biggest challenge she sees is trying to let employers know about CareerLink, where they can post job openings for free.

Employment, in general, "is a lagging indicator," said John Dodd, who heads the Philadelphia Unemployment Project. Dodd's main focus these days is helping people caught up in the subprime-mortgage crisis to keep their homes. He said he had yet to see an increase in job seekers.

In fact, the number of people signing up for unemployment benefits fell sharply last week, the Labor Department reported yesterday. New applications filed for unemployment insurance fell a seasonally adjusted 24,000, to 351,000, for the week ended March 1.

So, although many companies are announcing layoffs, "job-cut activity is still well below levels we would expect in a recession," said John Challenger, president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., the Chicago-based global outplacement-consulting firm.

"The relatively mild 2001 recession resulted in monthly job cuts that averaged about 140,000," he said. "With companies currently cutting at half that level, it appears that they do not expect this slowdown to be deep or prolonged."

That is not all that much comfort to someone like Jonathan Quinet, 36, of South Philadelphia, who, like Grillet, spent some time earlier this week looking for jobs at CareerLink.

Indeed, Quinet's situation may portend a problem for the economy.

Quinet's specialty is transportation and logistics. He has worked for trucking companies and for shipping companies routing containers. He lost his job in September.

At first, he did not worry. He took a little break, because when he had been out of a job in the past, he never had a problem finding another.

"I used to have a big network of transportation workers," he said. "Now I'm networking with a lot of people. Everyone is slow."

To him, that means that stores are not ordering merchandise and that there will be a trickle-down effect of more layoffs as existing inventories are depleted and nothing new is manufactured to replace the goods.

"If you aren't moving stuff today, then that means it is not going to be in the stores tomorrow," he said. Meanwhile, he is living off savings, which also are becoming depleted. And he has no health insurance.

"Be careful when I'm riding my bike," he said, with the barest hint of a laugh.

Grillet still has health insurance from his last job, but with the end of his unemployment-compensation benefits in sight, he is redoubling his efforts to get work.

His goal is to find a bartending job as quickly as possible and earn money while he figures out what to do with his life.

Confused about his career, Grillet drifted into teaching high school when he graduated from college. "I was burned out after two years," he said. He hung on for little while, until he resigned in June 2006.

In October 2006, a childhood friend asked him to join his mortgage company as a loan processor.

Grillet was not too impressed with the work, but he liked working for his friend and the money was decent, about $42,000 a year with bonuses.

Last March, mortgage companies began to go out of business.

"All the writing was on the wall that it was going to collapse," he said.

Soon, his friend's four-person company was down to two people; in October, Grillet was laid off.

He turned to an old standby, bartending, but could not get work. "My interview skills were terrible," he said. "Maybe I was overconfident - a little too cocky."

Compounding his problem now is real confusion about what his future should be. He has managed to scrape together some money to go to a psychologist/career counselor and is working on his resume.

"Before I was worrying without doing anything about it," he said. "Now it's time for me to stop worrying and start acting."