One year later: Still rough going for some of the jobless

UP UNTIL last year, Marcy Maki kept a blue-and-white vase full of fresh-cut flowers in the living room of her rental home overlooking Lake Washington near Renton.

Every morning she'd heap strawberries and blueberries on her bran cereal, and every night she could make meals with the bounty of local vegetables she kept in the fridge.

"That was my life then," she says, looking at the vase one day this summer. Maki once had a $70,000-a-year job and could afford to take simple indulgences for granted.

But when she was laid off from her position as a school administrator 20 months ago, the routines made possible by gainful employment ground to a halt.

The toughest recession since the Great Depression has completely upended the lives of millions of workers like Maki, many of whom have found themselves marking their time on the jobless rolls in years, rather than months. Just like that, Maki went from having a cushy savings account to buffer her against hard times to being so hard-up for cash she had to return a $32 item to Target just to make a recent rent payment.

"It's humiliating," Maki says. "I feel like I'm living in limbo."

Like a lot of people who've been unlucky finding good-paying jobs in the nation's anemic economic recovery, she's weathered the doldrums by relying on unemployment-benefit extensions to make ends meet.

For her and millions like her, now is a time to reset and reinvent, if they can only get by.

Pacific Northwest magazine first profiled Maki, along with five other professionals laid off in the current recession, last summer.

Wendy Lin, laid off by a data-storage company earlier that spring, was pursuing a dream of starting her own yoga studio. But since then, she decided to set aside her plans because the start-up costs are more than she can afford right now. This summer, she's been working part-time caring for pets and teaching yoga at a studio in Renton. Lin was hoping to leave the corporate world behind for good, but she still sent out resumes to companies that were hiring. In more than a year, though, she's been able to secure only one in-person interview.

"It's still a transitional period," Lin says. "I still don't want to go back to an office job, but I will if I have to."

Deek Carpenter, laid off from his job at an engineering firm in fall 2008, planned to start a small-business consulting project.

He reluctantly leaned on relatives last fall to make it through the worst period of his financial woes and took in a housemate to help pay his mortgage.

In the meantime, he started building a base of clients who need advice on running their small businesses, with a focus on eye doctors in private practices.

"I'm not eating top ramen" anymore, he jokes. "But it's probably still macaroni."

Maura Donaghey, who was laid off from the travel company Expedia, and her partner, Jeff Mak, laid off in the collapse of Washington Mutual, hoped to re-enter the corporate world in new positions.

Around the end of last year, Mak says, the jobs picture brightened for them as more employers in their fields started calling for interviews.

"The pressure was on to cash in on one of those opportunities, because you didn't know when it was going to happen again," Mak says. He started a new project-manager job at AT&T Wireless in June. Donaghey went to work for a mobile-device manufacturer in Everett this past December.

"I was looking all over the country, even outside of the country," for jobs, Donaghey says. Ultimately, she found a job where she feels she's making a big contribution much closer to home.

Audrey Lincoff, also laid off from Expedia, where she held an executive position, hopes that by using her nest egg and occasional freelance public-relations jobs she can avoid returning to the corporate rat race.

But for the vast majority of the jobless, going back to work is not a choice — it's an urgent necessity.

THE EMPTY vase in Maki's living room is just one reminder of how joblessness can cut short the life you thought you were entitled to lead at this stage of your career.

"I think I miss that more than anything," Maki says one day as she talks about her job prospects.

She has sent out some 150 resumes for education and other jobs since the layoff, and gone to several in-person interviews. Mostly, though, there's silence.

"I'd say that with three-fourths of the jobs that I apply for, I'm sure they're going to call me for an interview," Maki says. "I'm shocked that they're not going to hire me. More often than not these days, you don't hear anything. You just don't hear anything, ever. It's scary."

There's something romantic about Maki's yearning for an American Dream that seems more and more out of reach. Who can blame a person for clinging to the old rules?

You work hard, play fairly and get rewarded with career and financial security. Put your best foot forward and surely the job offers will come.

Here's just one major glitch. The nation's top 500 nonfinancial companies have stashed away a staggering $1.8 trillion to cushion themselves since the financial meltdown began, according to the Fed. But most are not using that money to hire people as the economy rebounds. "Jobs are not going to fall into your lap anymore," says Mak.

For decades, the rules for advancement ushered millions into the middle class and offered a chance at upward mobility beyond that.

But the idea of going back to square one and paying your dues all over again is something entirely different. And it doesn't sit well.

Instead of picking up where they left off and working for the future, many jobseekers find themselves "circling the airport," to use Maki's expression, unsure what course to take.

Maki resists settling for jobs that aren't related to her psychology degree and education background. "I'm not a settler," she was saying this spring. "God has planned good things for me."

But if you've been bumping along for more than a year and half, at some point that little voice in your head starts saying what any casual observer is already thinking: "This isn't about dreams and grand expectations; this is about survival. Get a job, any job."

Adding to the pressure is Congress' hesitance to keep extending unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless.

Guided by her religious faith, and bolstered by support from friends and the churches she's attended, Maki has managed to become a master at the crazy arithmetic of optimism in the face of grim odds.

She calls herself a prayer warrior and offers choice Bible verses during conversation to drive home her belief that things will turn out all right.

She's fond of Jeremiah 29:11 ... "I know the plans I have for you," says the Lord. "Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

But with an economy this bad, not even this devout Christian is taking any chances. During church services one day, she submitted a written request for a member of the congregation to "Please pray that I get a job."

Most people would have left it at that, but after months out of work, Maki thought she needed to be specific.

"Great pay, good benefits, a supervisor that I respect, doing work that I love," she added.

"In my heart, I believe that by July, I'm gonna be working," Maki predicted in early April. "By Independence Day, I'll be free."

Maki recalls that back in May 2009, she interviewed at a nonprofit in Kent that paid $25,000 to $30,000 less per year than her old job, an enormous pay cut. She would have said no if offered the job.

" 'I'm not that desperate yet,' " she recalls thinking back then.

In hindsight, "with my unemployment running out, I'm thinking maybe I should've taken it because I'd have my foot in the door," she says now.

Maki thought she had a great shot at two jobs at another organization she interviewed with in December, jobs that paid $10,000 and $20,00 less than her previous salary. Even with her grudging willingness to work for less money, she still didn't get either position.

"It's really hard not to let that bug your self-esteem," she says, "your sense of who you are."

TO UNDERSTAND Maki's thinking, it's important to know that she feels she's among those who've paid their dues.

Before she left Montana for Seattle in 1996, she had worked in the psychiatric ward at a hospital for close to minimum wage. In her 20s, she worked as a cook's assistant on the Burlington Northern Railroad, making 35 meals a day for the crew, bunking in the galley car.

"I feel like I've done my time," Maki says of that type of work. "I'm not gonna go back to being the cook's helper ... I want to be where my heart is happy."

Pervis Willis and Kate Sluyter have witnessed the strain and bewilderment in jobless workers firsthand as case managers at the WorkSource unemployment office in Renton. "We're doing more pure counseling" now, Willis says. "People are having a hard time emotionally, trying to deal with the grief."

"It's almost like a treadmill," Willis says of the current economic recovery. The harder you try to find a job, the harder it seems to get one.

Both say they've never seen so many skilled, experienced people out of work for so long. From factory workers to architects, the story is the same. Sluyter says the majority of her clients right now are ages 50 to 60.

The age issue poses a unique set of problems because some older workers are still heavily invested in career expectations that seemed so realistic only a few years ago.

People get so discouraged that their personalities, even their voices, change, Sluyter says. "They're crabby. They're mad at everyone and everything."

The marketplace that workers were trained to master has simply vanished, replaced by a tougher-to-navigate economy that doesn't always fairly reward skills and experience. In the twisted calculus of the new economy, a great resume will, for some, yield diminishing returns.

Willis says people are so conditioned to believe they should rely on themselves alone to find work that they fail to take advantage of social networking and agencies like his.

"The only security you have is your ability to sell yourself," Willis says. "But that's the one thing that people aren't comfortable with."

When people finally do come in to WorkSource, he says, "it's almost like a deer in the headlights — 'What do I do next?' Folks have a difficult time letting go and facing reality."

It's tempting to look at one of the computer screens at the WorkSource center Maki visits each week and read the digital tally of open positions (18,955 of them on one recent visit) as a sign that jobs are plentiful.

Also, officials at WorkSource's parent agency have high hopes for 220 newly trained nurses and 1,000 people enrolled in a green-jobs-training program, both sponsored by federal stimulus grants.

But those bright spots don't tell the whole story.

Willis and Sluyter warn people they might have to downgrade their wage expectations to get hired because some employers are exploiting the high jobless rate by lowering their salary offers.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said as much this summer when he called the road ahead "unusually uncertain" and cautioned that prolonged joblessness may have "long-lasting effects on workers' employment and earnings prospects."

Another problem: Employers are "hiring at the very top and the very bottom" of their organizations, Sluyter says. "There's not a lot of middle where a lot of our workers might fit in."

One theory about the longterm jobless is that giving them extended unemployment benefits makes them less eager to go back to work. Willis calls that a weak argument.

"The majority of people would like to be self-sustaining and not depend on anyone," he says.

One of Sluyter's clients was a company's fraud-department manager who got laid off and was forced to downgrade to a minimum-wage job as a waiter — at age 58.

Ultimately, "it's all about paying the bills," Sluyter says.

People are doing whatever they have to do to maintain their way of life, while slowly adjusting to the broader economic realities.

INDEPENDENCE DAY came and went without any job offers for Maki. She was still caught in her "limbo place."

At 54, she is among the recession's most vulnerable victims. Older workers aren't just disproportionately affected by job cuts, they are spending more time on the unemployment rolls than any other group.

Nationwide, age-discrimination lawsuits have risen nearly 20 percent since the recession began in 2007, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Taking advice from job counselors, Maki's done all she can to disguise her age when applying for positions, including leaving out work experiences on her résumé that reach too far into the past.

She dyes her hair to keep the gray out.

Maki has also forced herself to prepare for the dreaded scenario of not finding a golden job opportunity before her unemployment runs out. She'd give notice to her landlord, sell some possessions to raise cash, maybe move back to Montana, "God forbid."

"Sometimes I'm mad at God and ask, 'God, why are you giving me all this grief?' " Maki says. Her frustration never lasts long, though.

"God will always show me the answer," she insists, "or show me someone who knows the answer.

"My life is not gonna stay this way. I'm in the valley, but I'm headed back to the mountaintop."

Tyrone Beason is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. John Lok is a Seattle Times staff photographer.