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Jobless seek fresh start at Valley One-Stop office
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TIME FOR A CHANGE: Debbie James, 45, of Champion, waits at the Trumbull One-Stop Center. She hopes federal retraining funding will pay for her to complete her bachelor's of business administration at Kent State University. The wife and mother of three has been laid off from the accounting department at Severstal Warren since August 2009.
By Ed Runyan
Severstal Workers Look For Help
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Two laid off Severstal workers from Warren, OH tell how they are hoping to re-invent their careers with help from the Trade Adjustment Act and the Trumbull County One-Stop Workforce Center.
The Trumbull County center has received $2.3 million to assist the unemployed with retraining.
WARREN — Lory Patrick’s personal job recession has lasted four to five years, not just the 18 months that the country has been in economic recession.
For Patrick, 51, of Niles, a college graduate who has never had to apply for food stamps, welfare or any other type of government assistance before, it was a new experience to recently find her way to the Trumbull County Department of Job and Family Services on North Park Avenue.
There, she talked to a counselor in the agency’s One-Stop Workforce Center to see whether she qualified for tuition assistance to attend the Hannah Mullins School of Practical Nursing in Salem, where she hopes to earn a degree to become a licensed practical nurse.
If she can, she hopes she can leave behind the life of “hopping” from one odd job to another and finally have a stable career.
Patrick did several things as a young woman to secure her future, such as getting a bachelor’s degree in psychology and working toward a master’s degree at Youngstown State University. She also spent some time in nursing school.
But marriage and child-rearing entered the picture, and she discovered that even though she had good grades in college, she wasn’t going to be able to get a job in psychology, so she started working for an attorney, tended bar and worked in a juvenile-diversion program at the Rebecca Williams Community Center in Warren.
About five years ago, divorced and in her middle 40s, those jobs disappeared: the attorney retired, the bar hired younger bartenders, and the grant funds paying for the diversion program dried up.
“Within two years, I was out of all of the jobs I had all those years,” she said.
Despite her experience in the legal field, it was clear she lacked the necessary knowledge of computer software, such as PowerPoint and Microsoft Word to work for an attorney. And she started to realize that bars want 20-year-old bartenders, not 45-year-olds.
She resorted to working odd jobs, such as hotel clerk, residential painter, tile-floor installer and cleaning person.
She’s been searching the last couple of years for a training program that might put her back on track.
“At 51, I want to have something that brings back my self-purpose,” she said. “I want a job, a real job.”
Warren native Mike Stack, 46, left the area four years ago and found work in Jacksonville, Fla., in the custom cabinet-making business. In August 2008, the market for his skills disappeared.
“One day we couldn’t make them [cabinets] fast enough. The next day, we couldn’t get an order. The bottom just fell out of it,” said Stack, father of three grown children, checking recently on tuition assistance at the Warren One-Stop office.
He began taking classes to be an accountant in August at Trumbull Business College in Howland Township.
“I figured there are no jobs, so I’d better change my career field,” Stack said. “They say there will be jobs in accounting.”
Stack returned to Warren about 18 months ago, and has worked as a handyman. But over the last six months, he hasn’t found much work in that field either.
Stack says he believes that is because people have lost confidence in the economy to such a degree that they won’t even spend money on their homes.
“I think people are really getting scared. Some people I know are calling their 401Ks their 101Ks,” he said, adding that the loss of health- care benefits for many retirees is also limiting their spending.
Bill Turner, administrator of the Trumbull County One Stop, said he knows as well as anyone that there are no simple answers for those without a good job.
“They say ‘get another job,’ but where is the job? And you can’t go to another place in the country anymore to find one,” Turner said.
The good news is that the Trumbull County One-Stop has received almost $2.3 million in stimulus money since April 2009 for worker-training services, much of it available for tuition assistance. As a result, retraining money is more plentiful than it has been in at least 10 to 12 years, Turner said.
”What we’ve been telling people is take this time to prepare yourself” for another job, Turner said. “When things do loosen up, they won’t have to sit on the sideline. They’ll have the skills to compete for jobs.”
Turner said it is especially a good time for anyone who has worked in a field that has up-and-down cycles of employment to train himself or herself for a “now” type of job.
For example, it’s a good time for a machinist to update his or her training to more high-tech skills or for a nurse’s aide to train up to a physician’s assistant or nurse.
Debbie James, 45, of Champion, is one of many laid-off employees of the Severstal Warren steel mill who came to the One-Stop last week to learn more about the federal Trade Adjustment Assistance available to them because of their jobs being lost to increased imports or shifts in production out of the U.S.
James worked for the mill for 20 years and was an administrative assistant in the accounting department when she was laid off Aug. 1, 2009. She is about half finished with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and finance at Kent State University and believes the TAA assistance will pay for her to complete the degree.
“I’m looking to reinvent myself to get back into the labor market because I don’t think I will be called back,” she said.
James said she’s hoping that when she’s finished with her degree, the economy will have rebounded, and she will find work as a personal financial adviser.
“I can still work 20 more years,” James said. “I’m not ready to retire.”
Kim Paternchak, 51, of Champion, said she lost her human resources job of 12 years at Cleveland Steel Container in Niles in March 2009 and came to the One-Stop last week to see if she could get tuition assistance for retraining. “I have 15 to 20 years left to work,” she said.
The past nine months without a job could have been worse, she said, if she hadn’t found ways to keep herself positive, such as volunteering and exercising. “Helping out is the best, and networking everyplace I go,” she said.
She is part of a sizeable group of unemployed people working out at Global Fitness on Elm Road in Warren. They support each other while staying active, she said.
“You have to be mentally and physically active” while unemployed, she said.
“You can’t let yourself get down or you could end up in a deep hole. People have been really nice because we’re all in the same boat — It’s a ship really.”
runyan@vindy.com
Many people have the misconception that the One-Stop office within the Trumbull County Department of Job and Family Services on North Park Avenue in Warren is the place to file for unemployment compensation. In reality, those are handled by telephone or online, One-Stop officials say.
FILING FOR UNEMPLOYMENT: One of the best ways to file for unemployment compensation is by visiting the Web site www.unemployment.ohio.gov.
LOOKING FOR HELP: One of the best ways to learn about One-Stop services, including help with financial assistance through the Trade Adjustment Assistance Reform Act, is to visit the Web site www.onestopohio.org.
LOOKING FOR JOBS: To look at job postings, go to www.ohiomeansjobs.com/omj.
Source: Trumbull One-Stop