http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/09/AR2009050900913.html?hpid=topnewsn Toledo, Downturn Empties Offices
White-Collar Workers Coping With Layoffs
In Toledo, Ohio, white collar workers watch in despair as their comfortable lives ebb away. They must now rethink their expectations and their options in an area where the unemployment rate has reached 14.3 percent.
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 10, 2009
TOLEDO -- Rob Noonan's friends think he's a sucker. Laid off from his $140,000-a-year construction management job when the credit markets froze, he still shows up at work, one man working without pay in a cluster of vacant cubicles, trying to make something out of nothing.
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More than 1,200 people attended a Toledo Zoo job fair designed to fill about 200 minimum-wage summer jobs running the carousel or selling hot dogs. Another 500 dropped off résumés.
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Rick Anteau made more than $250,000 a year as a mortgage broker during the housing boom. After he lost his job, he moved his family into a condo, then to a rental. All of his wealth is gone, and he owes the IRS $40,000.
"I trusted my skills. I thought it would never end," said Anteau, 59. "I've been on job interviews that took every ounce of my humility to go on, and didn't get hired. I was so overqualified, it was absurd."
At last, he found a lifeline when a Jacksonville, Fla., credit card company saw his résumé on the Internet and hired him. As he prepared to move, he said: "I don't see how and when Toledo's going to come back. Me going to Florida, thank God, I do have a way out."
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"When fear starts, bitterness kicks in," said Noonan, whose neighbor, a radiologist, was rejected for a job at Home Depot. He described laid-off former colleagues as "mad at life. They're at home, they're mailing out résumés, and they're miserable."
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