More jobless are first-timers

Behind the latest unemployment figures showing another 500,000-plus Americans lost their jobs is a sad truth: The deeper the recession becomes, the more it touches people whose livelihoods have never been threatened by dark financial times.

Now the employment line includes workers who've never lost a job before and always believed experience and hard work would protect them.

Many of them are shocked and depressed — or stuck in denial. And they must confront the worst job market since the end of World War II.

Some say they will take any kind of work, no matter what it pays or where it is. Others hope they can somehow squeak by on unemployment insurance.

Julie Banner had parted ways with Avnet Electronics several times over the last two decades — always for a new experience or a better opportunity. But one December morning, after she had just printed a stack of orders at the North Carolina distributor of computer components, the tables turned for the first time in her working life.

"I was just hoping that I wasn't going to be one of the people affected," she said, bracing herself against a bitter wind outside a state unemployment office in Cary, a Raleigh suburb. Earlier this week, in her first foray into the world of joblessness, she arrived to find that a rush of unemployment applicants had crashed the state's computer system.

"I'm still in the crying stage," she said. "My sense of security is gone."

Martin Feves lost his job just after Thanksgiving. The Portland metal purchaser had maneuvered through multiple downturns in the high-tech and aerospace industries for nearly 30 years.

His luck ran out Nov. 30, when he and 19 others were let go from Davis Tool, where he worked as a buyer of airplane materials. He lost a job paying $60,000 a year.

He and his wife survived December on his unemployment check, her disability payments for a bipolar disorder and their savings account.

The 49-year-old Feves will consider anything to get another job — work for less, change careers, sell his house or move to another state. He sits at a table outside an Oregon unemployment office, where a line of some 20 people waits inside to fill out forms and file claims.

Losing his job for the first time in his life, and through no fault of his own, leaves Feves feeling much the same as he did when his mother died in 1981.

"You know, in my mind, both times it was like, 'Crap. Now what?' " he said. "It sucks."

Steve Pashko had always made a good living.

Now he feels like a failure.

"You start to feel desperate. Every time you hear a report that more people are getting laid off, you think, 'That's just more people you have to compete with,"' said the 51-year-old from Abington, Pa.

Now his wife — a physical therapist — provides the family's sole support.

Pashko blames himself. He spent his entire career as a purchasing manager. But as the economy began to falter last year, he took a job in sales, thinking he was staying one step ahead of troubling times.

Pashko had no sales experience, and companies became increasingly reluctant to purchase the expensive business reports his company sold.

"It was trying to sell something that cost $50,000 at a time when the economy was starting to fail," Pashko said.

To make matters worse, Pashko became seriously ill and ended up in the hospital, causing him to miss a crucial training session.

So when his boss called him into the office in August to hand him a pink slip, Pashko wasn't totally surprised. But that didn't make it any easier.

"I felt totally useless. I was in a huge depression over that, feeling like I can't support my family," Pashko said. "You just feel it's never going to change."

Then he snapped out of it. He had 15-year-old daughters to think of.

The new year has brought new hope. Pashko has been offered a six-month temp job.

Associated Press reporters Allen G. Breed in North Carolina, Mary Hudetz in Oregon and Michael Rubinkam in Pennsylvania contributed to this article.