Faces beyond the numbers of long-term unemployed

J.R. Childress is up before the sun, bustling about in the French colonial brick house he built. He helps pack his wife's lunch, downs some eggs or cereal for breakfast, pores over online and newspaper job listings and hopes — even prays — this will be the day when his fortunes turn around.

Childress has been laid off twice since late 2009, most recently for 10 months.

"Every day is a struggle," he says in a soft drawl. "The struggle is the unknown. You've worked your way up the ladder and you get to a point in life and a position in work where you're comfortable … then all of a sudden everything goes away. It's like being thrown into a hole and you're climbing to get up, but it's greased. There's no way of getting out."

The frustrations of one 53-year-old North Carolina man are multiplied millions of times over across time zones and generations in a country still gripped by economic anxiety, despite increasing signs of recovery.

Unemployment in January was at its lowest level in three years — 8.3 percent — and 1.8 million jobs were added last year, compared with about 1 million in 2010. But there's still a long way to go: There are 5.6 million fewer jobs than there were when the recession began in late 2007.

About 12.8 million people are out of work, and what's especially troubling, according to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, is the large number of long-term unemployed — more than 40 percent have been jobless more than six months.

The long-term unemployed don't fit into any neat category. They're young and old. They have high school diplomas and master's degrees. Some become so discouraged, they stop looking for a time or become mid-life college students. Others find temporary jobs, then return to the jobless rolls for long stretches. In 2011, the average length of being out of work was 39 weeks — about nine months.

But statistics tell only part of the story. They don't gauge the despair of a thirtysomething office manager who has stopped counting how many résumés he's sent out. Or the apprehension of a 60-ish tool-and-die maker who lost his job, returned to school, but still can't find work — and doubts he ever will again.

Or the rejection Childress feels, declaring that unemployment "makes you feel you're not a part of society because you're not earning your way."

Childress started working after high school, first in factories, then in construction, eventually earning a six-figure salary as vice president of operations at a company.

In October 2009, he was laid off when road construction and building projects came to a near halt. After a year without work, Childress took a huge pay cut to be a construction foreman, but that job ended last April. He's convinced he has two strikes against him: his age and lack of college degree.

"I'm putting out résumés, but they're going into a black hole," he says. Prospective employees, he says "want 33, not 53. … They say, 'We really like you, but if we spend our time training you, when construction comes back, you're going to leave.' " He pauses, and adds: "That's not paying my bills."

Childress' wife works and their 24-year-old twins are out of college so that eases their financial burden, but he says he asks himself: "'Am I going to be 75 or 80 and not be able to retire? … What did I do to deserve this? When is it going to turn around for me?' "

The memory stings even now for Jon Creek, all these years after the job interview.

He'd applied to be a bookkeeper at a property management company when one of the owners caught him off guard: "He said, 'You've been out of work for a year now. You can only clean the garage so many times. Why can't you get a job?' " Creek recalls.

"My answer was, 'I'm trying to get a job now,' " he says.

Creek, who lives in Mason, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, was a construction company office manager until he and almost everyone else at the firm were laid off in December 2007. He'd known the business was in trouble and says he actually turned down another better-paying job earlier, out of loyalty.

It took 18 months to land part-time work as an insurance agent's assistant at $240 a week — a dollar less than his unemployment checks.

A year later, Creek was stunned when a certified letter arrived with his final paycheck and notice that his job was over. Again, it was the economy. To add to the injury, his boss had posted the news on her Facebook page before telling him. And since she hadn't done the proper paperwork, he couldn't file for unemployment.

That was August 2010. Creek — who holds a bachelor's degree in business administration — has been looking since, worried that as time passes, someone unemployed for, say, six months may seem more appealing.

Being unemployed not only hurts financially — Creek, 35, has an $11,000-plus student loan — it leaves emotional scars, too. "The only people I talk to during the day are my wife, my dogs and service people," he says. "It's very isolating, very lonely."

Jean Coyle knows it's ironic that long ago, she taught college classes about retirement planning.

As a tenured professor at universities in Illinois and New Mexico, she lectured on gerontology, age discrimination and women's issues. When she was 52, she made a life-changing move, entering the seminary and leaving with two masters' degrees. In 2002, she was ordained as a Presbyterian minister.

As an associate pastor at a Presbyterian church in Washington, Coyle did crisis work, visiting homes and hospitals, counseling and preaching, conducting funerals. She expected a long career but in 2007, she lost her job in a church budget cut.

At 62, Coyle — who holds five degrees — thought she had much to offer. She applied to hundreds of churches and organizations around the country.

Coyle found a temporary staff job with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) but after three years of looking for a pastoral position, she reluctantly retired in 2010.

"I know I'm never going to be interviewed again. This is a major thing for me. It's hard to say."

Dennis Hansen sometimes wonders whether all his schooling was worth it.

An aquatics biologist, Hansen has taught college, had his research published in scientific journals and spoken at conferences from New York to Hawaii, but in recent years, he's bounced from no job to temporary job to taking any job for a paycheck.

In late 2009, the Duluth, Minn., lab where he worked as operations manager, testing the toxicity of chemicals (and the impact on fish and water), closed because of declining business. Much of its work had come from Department of Defense contracts.

After a year without work, Hansen, 32, was hired to monitor Lake Michigan and Lake Superior water for the state and federal governments over two summers. He also had short stints as a census worker and as an extra post office hand during one holiday crush.

It hasn't been enough: Hansen says he has a $13,000 credit card debt and that's just for basics — his $600 monthly mortgage, heat and food.

"It's definitely a roller coaster," Hansen says, with the ups coming when he's done well in a job interview and the downs when there's a rejection: "That's when I'm frustrated, angry and wondering why I went to college for 10 years."

In North Carolina, Childress spends Thursday nights at his group, Professionals in Transition, where the underemployed and the jobless meet to share tips, review résumés and support one another. Childress is casting a wide net in his job search, and having learned to live on a quarter of his former salary, he says, if a new position offered "half or better, I'd consider that a bonus."

He recently had promising news — he was interviewed to be a contractor selling state license plates.

"You hope that just around the next corner or the next person you talk to is going to have something," he says. "I pray. I say show me the way."