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The grim face of recovery: Competition stiff even for jobs that offer little

By David Finkel
The Washington Post

	DAVID FINKEL / THE WASHINGTON POST Chris Hill cleans the showroom floor at Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, the culmination of her yearlong effort to land a job.
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FRANKENMUTH, Mich. — The economic recovery has arrived. The proof is at Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, the largest Christmas store in the world.

"Hi. I'm Chris Hill, and I'm in the Sparkle Department," Bronner's newest hire is saying, and if she can't contain her smile it's because she has been waiting for this moment for more than a year.

First, Kmart said no. Then Old Navy. Then Fashion Bug. On it went, month after month, as companies kept shedding workers. Then, in November, when the economy added 57,000 jobs, Bronner's said yes.

In comes the personnel director, who says to Hill and 13 other new hires that Bronner's received 2,000 applications this year. "You are definitely the cream of the crop," she says.

In comes the marketing director to emphasize what's expected of them. "All of you are walking, talking commercials for Bronner's," she says. "Are the bathrooms clean? Is the building clean? Whatever they see, that's their impression of Bronner's."

In comes the president and CEO, who continues the cleanliness theme. "What's the No. 1 question people ask when they come in the store? Keep in mind they've been driving to get here. 'Where's the nearest restroom?' Have you been to the restrooms yet? Pretty nice, huh? I'm going to venture to say that our restrooms are nicer and cleaner than most people's restrooms at home."

In comes Wally Bronner, the founder, who says, "How many of you are in the Sparkle Department?"

Everyone turns to look at Hill, the only one with a hand in the air, and her status suddenly is clear. They will lose their jobs by the end of December. She will still be working in January. They are seasonal. She is permanent. They are Sales. She is Sparkle.

"Well, I hope everyone considers themselves members of Sparkle, that you sparkle with your faces," Bronner tells the other 13. "Let's make this place sparkle," he then says, and with that Hill heads out of the conference room, down the stairs, and through a doorway marked Men.

Adding Sparkle

She puts on her gloves. She pulls out her disinfectant. She inventories the four urinals.

"Three of the four need to be flushed," she says.

Time for the Sparkle Department to get to work.

As the year comes to an end, these are the facts about the recovering economy: The unemployment rate in November was back below 6 percent after hitting a high of 6.4 percent in June. The number of people working is on the rise — 138.6 million in November, up from 137.5 million in January. The number of jobs is on the rise, as well — up 328,000 since July.

"The American economy is strong" was President Bush's reaction last week when the November employment figures were released, "and it is getting stronger."

But just as "sparkle" can be a euphemism for housekeeping, "recovering" can gloss over the reality of what for millions of Americans having a job has come to mean.

More people are working part time than ever: Last month, for the first time, the number exceeded 25 million.

More are classified as "involuntary" part time, meaning they would rather be working full time: 4.9 million in November, an increase of 600,000 from a year ago and 1.6 million since the recession began in March 2001.

In addition, more people are cobbling together a working life of two or three part-time jobs to keep up with bills. More jobs come without benefits, the chance for mobility and the security of long-term stability. Wages for most aren't keeping up with inflation.

Number of jobs lags

The number of manufacturing jobs has declined 40 months in a row. The average time spent looking for work is now more than 20 weeks. And many people remain jobless. Even with the addition of those 328,000 jobs, the total number of jobs is still 2.35 million less than before the recession.

Hill, 51, is a perfect reflection of this reality. She has been, over the course of her life, a housewife, a seamstress, a nurse's aide, a bank teller, and was working in a mall card-and-gift shop, thinking about management, when she quit to take care of her aging parents.

That was just before the recession. She put them into assisted living last year, and as 2003 began — her savings gone, her furnace broken, her house so cold she had to move in with relatives — the time had come to go back to work.

She'd never had difficulty finding a job and started hopefully. By midyear, after so many rejections, she had become one of America's 450,000 "discouraged" workers, which is a euphemism for giving up, and by year's end she finds herself — just like the economy — recovering. Slowly.

She wanted full time. She got part time. She wanted a wage high enough to have her furnace fixed this winter. She got $7 an hour, which means 5½ hours of work just to pay back the $38 she borrowed to buy work shoes. She wanted sales. She got cleaning.

But it is a job nonetheless, and as a Thursday gets under way, Bronner's newest permanent employee is enthusiastic. Before going to work she painted her fingernails red so they would match her Bronner's shirt. "Whatever's dirty, we clean it up," explains Karen Cooper, 59, seven years on the job. "When there are bloody noses, we have to wear double gloves."

"Kids throw up," warns Bonnie Barker, 63. "A lot."

"We have to protect ourselves," Cooper says. "I worked in the motels, they gave you nothing. A pair of Playtex gloves. One pair."

"Poop on the floor," Barker says. "And the walls."

"If we have 15,000 people in one day, and one throw-up job, that's not bad," Cooper says.

"Oh, I imagine," Hill says. "I imagine."

They head into the cubicle area to empty trash cans. Next come the offices, including an especially large one where a pair of red loafers rests on the carpet. These belong to Wally Bronner, 76.

"Wally, he wants everything kept spiffy," Cooper says. They are back in the bathrooms now. Hill is wiping stall walls with disinfectant, and Cooper is cleaning faucet handles with a toothbrush, explaining that Bronner sometimes sets traps, putting a piece of trash in a hidden-away corner to see how long it takes to be cleaned up.

"Spiffy," she repeats, but in eight years she has come to understand why. "I mean, we have people who want their pictures taken in the bathrooms. 'Will you take my picture please?' So I take them. Foreigners. They must not have that kind of beauty in their country. So they take the pictures back to their homeland and say, 'Look at this beautiful place.' "

Now they are on the showroom floor.

Acres to be cleaned

It is 2.1 acres of sales space. It is 50,000 different items. It is 500 Nativity sets, 800 Hummels, 700 animated Santas and snowmen, 350 decorated trees. It is Christmas lights, everywhere. It is a two-minute-long snowfall of soap flakes every half-hour by the main entrance where the tour buses are lined up before the doors even open, and Christmas music, nothing but Christmas music, 361 days a year.

This is what Hill has been hired into: 361 opportunities a year to work. The 2.1 acres have to be vacuumed. The soap flakes occasionally leave carpet stains. The tour buses are jammed with people — 2 million a year — who make beelines for the bathrooms, and then seem to think the way to dispose of toilet tissue is to leave it on the floor. But at this moment, as she looks around, that's not what Hill is seeing.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" she says.

Friday morning now. But Hill's concern this morning is her 87-year-old mother, who is being given a surprise birthday party Saturday afternoon. Hill and her sisters began planning it weeks ago. Then Hill got this job. Then she got her work schedule. The party is at 1. She's working till 2. "Can't you get time off?" one of her sisters asked.

"I said, 'I'm a new employee. I don't think I can ask,' " Hill says as she pushes a vacuum cleaner across the showroom floor. Her sister seemed surprised. How many times does a mother turn 87? How many surprise parties are left?

But how could Hill ask for time off when she's so new that she couldn't even answer Cooper's opening question to her this morning?

"You know the first thing we do, don't you?"

"Toilets?"

"No. Refrigerators. Always refrigerators."

So she did refrigerators. And then cleaned the break area where, yesterday, clocked out for lunch, she had hurried through a peanut-butter sandwich while another Sparkle worker, Betty Stedry, talked about how much getting this job meant to her, that she had been out of work six months since being laid off, that she was at the point "when I was cutting back on my food," that when she got a callback from Bronner's "I came running, I mean it, running," that "I'm just so happy to be working."

"Me, too," Hill had said, and now, as her sisters prepare for a party, she is moving a vacuum cleaner across 2.1 acres, 14 inches at a time, thinking about how complicated the notion of work has become with each succeeding generation in her family.

First came her father — 47 years at General Motors, from high school to retirement.

Then she herself — married at 20, a baby boy when she was 24, a baby girl when she was 28, a divorce when she was 38, a patchwork of jobs after that, the constant in her life being a place she can't imagine leaving, no matter how hard she has to scramble to stay.

Then her children — now 27 and 23 and gone. The daughter, unemployed, left a few weeks ago. The son, unemployed also, followed a few days ago. Both left for West Virginia and their father's trailer, hoping the opportunities for work would be better there.

She vacuums her way toward the personnel office, where this year's 2,000 job applications — including one from a woman named Bonnie Sherman and one from a man named Jason Slatton — are stacked in folders and file cabinets.

It was two weeks ago when Hill first went into those offices to be interviewed, and her timing could not have been better. Sparkle was ready to hire, and rather than go back through applications, she was given the job.

Some still looking

Meanwhile, 10 miles to the south, Bonnie Sherman, 49, laid off two years ago and still unemployed, wonders if Bronner is going to call.

"I mean it's not a lifelong dream, cleaning," Sherman says. But she needs a job and says, "If I didn't have somebody to help me, I wouldn't have made it."

That would be a boyfriend, who makes $9 an hour putting brake fluid in gallon containers. The job she was laid off from, examining boxes of automobile parts for defects, paid $6 an hour. Fifteen dollars an hour meant an OK life, she says; $9 means they're trying to sell one of their vehicles, a truck whose engine gave out. What kind of job has Sherman been looking for?

"Anything," she says.

Not far away, Jason Slatton, another of the 2,000 applicants, also unemployed, is celebrating his 22nd birthday. It is near sundown now, and Slatton is preparing a birthday dinner for himself and his fianceé, Kari Tyner, a Bronner's seasonal employee who will lose her job by Dec. 31.

They are in the living room of his parents' townhouse, which is where they live now. He has been looking for work steadily since June 25, when he got out of the Army after a tour that took him to South Korea and taught him "outrageous computer skills" — all of which have added up to nothing back in the real world.

"Newspapers. Temp agencies. Driving down the road. Keeping an eye peeled. Word of mouth. Asking friends. Relatives. Anything I can think of, with no luck," he says.

"I'm just looking for anything right now. If I could make six bucks an hour doing factory work, 40 hours a week, I'd jump all over it. ... I don't even care if it has benefits. Just a weekly paycheck so we can get our own place and settle in. I figure if I have a full-time job, doing whatever, and she has a part-time job, we'll be able to make it."

"It's hard living with his parents," Tyner says, remaining in the living room, quiet enough for him not to hear. "It's stressful. We can't really get out on our own. The car's messed up, and we can't afford to get it fixed. And I'm going to lose my job."

"I'm running out of places to apply," Slatton says, still in the kitchen.

Meanwhile, the one who did get the job is up till 1 a.m. finishing a cake for her mother, and now, Saturday morning, is back at work before sunup, getting Bronner's ready for one of its busiest days of the year.

Refrigerators. Vacuuming. Bathrooms. Chrome. Tile. Nine a.m.: "OK, girls, I gotta open," announces the woman in charge of opening the doors, outside of which are four idling tour buses, and in swarm the customers, straight through the cascading soap flakes to the bathrooms.

"Very nice!" says Donna, from Windsor, Ontario, as she emerges.

"Very clean!" says a woman from France.

"It's very good," says Fabrizio Bruno of Italy, emerging from the men's room. "It's very impressive."

Five hours later, toward 2 o'clock, as Bronner's nears gridlock, Hill, Cooper and Barker take on the bathrooms again, and this time they supply the reviews:

"Immaculate!" says Cooper.

"Magnificent!" says Barker.

"It's ... sparkling!" Hill says, starting to laugh, and soon after is in her car, on her way to the party.

Late for the surprise

She arrives an hour after the surprise. She is still in her red work shirt as she walks into a church basement. There are her parents, both in wheelchairs, surrounded by several dozen people, all of whom arrived on time.

"Was she surprised?" she asks.

"Yes. She was," says one of her sisters. "They rolled Mom in first, then Dad, and we all yelled 'Surprise,' and everybody clapped, and Mom about cried. She had tears in her eyes."

She kisses her mother, who still has tears in her eyes. She kisses her father who, as the afternoon goes on, reminisces about a life at General Motors. "The day I hired in, there were so many men looking for a job they pushed the wall in in the employment office, surging back and forth," he says.

It was 1934, the midst of the Depression. "I was a small man," he continues. "I had to crawl through the legs of bigger men. The man hiring said, 'You don't look big enough.' I said, 'I can lift my weight in wildcats.' He said, 'Come in.' And I got hired."

He looks across the room at his daughter now. "That was real good," he says of the cake.

"Well, thank you, Dad," she says, and suddenly she finds herself missing her own children.

She spoke to them last night, on the phone, when she was waiting for the cake to cool. Her daughter said she had found a job in a package-processing center, third shift, $9.75 an hour, and asked how things were going back in Michigan. "Everything's going fine," Hill said.

Then her son came on and said he had gotten a job, too, $12 an hour pouring concrete, and she, in turn, told him about getting her first paycheck. It was for $108.71.

This, then, is how recovery occurs:

"You have to work tomorrow?" one of Hill's sisters asks.

"Yes," Hill says. "I do."

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company