The Wall Street Journal | Page A003
At 65, an Unlucky Job Seeker Faces a Bruising Reality
BY DAN FROSCH
KERSHAW, S.C.—Lynn Lee had just arrived for work at the ADM soybean processing plant one April morning when she spotted the cars with outof- state license plates and knew something was wrong.
After more than five decades in this town of about 2,200, agricultural giant Archer Daniels Midland was shutting down its facility. Lee, who had been at the plant since 2021, boxed up her belongings and drove home.
At 65, it was her fourth layoff. Yet tears still rushed down her cheeks.
“I remember thinking, ‘What are the odds this would happen again?’ ” Lee said.
Lee has survived a rolling tide of economic forces that have transformed manufacturing in rural America. The textile plants that moved to Brazil in the mid-2000s. The glass-fiber plant that shut down several years later. The sign-making company that shed workers during Covid-19.
After each layoff, Lee found something new. Now, she was at retirement age. But like many older Americans with little savings and heavy financial burdens, retirement was out of the question.
She had $7,000 in mostly out-of-pocket medical debt left over from breast-cancer treatment and a heart procedure. Plus, there was the $42,000 she still owed from a second mortgage on her home.
Unforgiving market
Lee was back to searching for work. This time, she’d be competing against a legion of other job seekers in an unforgiving market. Nearly a quarter of unemployed people have been without a job for at least 27 weeks.
Lee had hoped the ADM plant would be her last stop. She had been earning $17.40 an hour handling invoices and tracking the loads of soybeans. A few more years and she would feel financially secure about calling it quits.
Weeks after the layoffs, Lee got her first unemployment check for $270 after taxes, calculated in South Carolina based on wages. Under state law, the weekly checks stop after five months. After that, she would have to rely solely on $830 a month in benefits from her ex-husband, who died of a heart attack in 2020.
“In my mind, I thought I’ll find something better than ADM,” she said. She set about applying to a few places.
Lee quickly scored an interview for a human-resources job at a propane company through a friend. The job paid $22 an hour. “That went wonderfully,” Lee thought after the interview. But the manager never called.
Lee’s next best shot was with the newest big venture to come to Kershaw: the Haile gold mine, which multinational mining company OceanaGold acquired in 2015.
Not long after ADM closed, Lee attended a job fair at the town’s old railroad depot. Days later, she said she got a call from an OceanaGold HR manager asking whether she could interview.
This time, Lee wasn’t sure how it went. The mine said it would let her know in a few weeks.
For the first time, Lee began going to a monthly food pantry in Kershaw. She picked up chicken thighs, pork chops, fresh vegetables and milk.
While Lee waited on word from the mine, she scoured the internet. She had been working since 10th grade. Back then, she would wake up at 5 a.m. to drive a school bus, picking up kids around Kershaw and driving them—and herself—to school. After class, she would take everyone home before heading to her second job as a carhop at Sonic.
Lee’s mom sewed children’s clothes at a textile plant before dying of complications from a hysterectomy at 35 when Lee was 16. After high school, Lee got a job working nights hanging drapes at a textile plant as well.
Over the next 29 years, she worked packing, inspection and scheduling jobs for Springs Industries, whose textile plants were scattered across the area. Her final job was in the baby-product department, earning about $48,000 a year with benefits.
Stunned locals
Springs, whose roots in South Carolina date to the 1800s, had transformed communities such as Kershaw into flourishing towns. The closure of its U.S. operations in 2007 and move to Brazil stunned locals. Lee had envisioned her--self retiring from the company. She received six months’ salary as severance, she said.
She spent some time raising her daughter and began commuting to Charlotte, N.C., a few nights a week to take college classes, earning her associate degree. She wrote her final paper on the expendability of the American worker.
“Who else knows this better than me?” she thought to herself.
A few weeks after her interview with OceanaGold, Lee was at the zoo in Columbia, S.C., with her adult daughter and 3-year-old granddaughter. She sat on a bench checking her phone for word from the dozens of jobs she had applied for. A short email from the mine appeared, saying her application for the position hadn’t been successful.
A more personal note followed, saying there had been many strong candidates and the mine would consider her for other jobs.
More interviews
At home, Lee signed on to her computer and fired off more applications.
She did a mock phone call with a customer for a job at a pet-vitamin company. She stopped by a job fair and applied for a position at a temporary- staffing agency. She landed another interview with the mine—this one for a sixmonth clerical gig that could lead to something permanent.
None came through. Lee began having swings of anxiety and sadness.
“In a bad way this weekend,” she texted one day in August. “So upset and beaten down. Sitting here crying and scared.”
Lee began to run the numbers if she retired. She would collect roughly $1,850 in her own Social Security, but lose her ex-husband’s survivor benefits. With her $700 mortgage, as well as medical and other bills, it would be tight.
“I’m going to have to put on red stilettos and head out to the boulevard,” she chuckled. “At least I still have my sense of humor.”
On Sept. 30, Lee got her final unemployment check.
She called the bank and said she wouldn’t be able to make her mortgage payment for the first time. The bank agreed to allow her to pause payments until February.
In October, finally a flash of luck: Lee got a job through a temp agency collecting water payments at $17.30 an hour. She struggled to hoist herself into the high rolling chair at the teller window.
A few days into the job she fell off the chair, hit her head and drove herself to a local ER. She was more mortified than hurt, she said, and back at work the next day. The job ended shortly after that.
She decided not to buy a Christmas tree this year to save money. One night in early December, her daughter drove up from Columbia and surprised her with one. Lee’s granddaughter helped decorate it. A friend took her shopping and bought her a ham, a turkey and enough groceries to fill her refrigerator.
She snagged another interview with the mine for a clerical job and one for a part-time bank-teller position.
Still, Lee said, she felt blessed. She had her family, her friends and her spirit. “Something is going to break for me,” she said. “It has to.”
( 3)
Comments
Post a Comment