Guilty and stressed, layoff survivors suffer, too

No one to commiserate with
Worse, there’s no place to complain about long hours and extra duties. Supervisors don’t want to hear it and laid-off co-workers certainly won’t be sympathetic. Even family and friends may urge workers to count their blessings.

“The reality is, for some people, it’s going to be more work for a while,” said Deborah Dale Brackney, vice president of the Mountain States Employers Council in Denver, which serves 3,000 clients in the Rocky Mountain region. “There may be more sucking it up.”

That can be demoralizing to people already suspicious of management actions. A flurry of research after the economic downturn of the 1990s found that layoff survivors reported high levels of distrust and lower levels of motivation and engagement. Absenteeism went up, productivity went down.

Some employees who survive workplace cuts say they feel compelled to work harder than ever. When Wachovia Corp. rumored layoffs last summer, before the troubled firm was rescued by Wells Fargo & Co., one 33-year-old worker watched in shock as 50 colleagues were tapped to go.

“You’re anxious yourself. You never feel very secure in what you are doing,” said the Charlotte, N.C., worker who hopes to keep her job during an expected round of cuts. “You have to keep proving yourself over and over again. You have to prove your existence.”

‘The last penguin on the ice floe’
The magnitude of the current crisis, which has swept nearly every sector of the economy, has left workers remaining in certain industries particularly grateful. As television and media critic for the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, Eric Deggans has reported regularly about increasing layoffs in the industry.

While his own publication offered buyouts but avoided layoffs this year, the nearby Tampa Tribune cut its editorial staff by 18 this fall, adding to the thousands lost in newspapers overall. That includes media critics at many papers, noted Deggans, 43, who acknowledged he feels fortunate to have his position.

“Anybody who has a significant job in journalism feels that way,” he said. “I sort of feel like the last penguin on the ice floe.”

That isolation translates to other industries, where layoff survivors know their employment status can change on a whim. Every day for months, real estate agent Beckstrom wondered when the end would come — and crossed her fingers that it wouldn’t.

Just before Thanksgiving, it did. Bank officials foreclosed on the ailing housing project and Beckstrom and a few final employees lost their jobs.

“People from our home office came and packed up all our stuff,” she said. “It was very, very emotional.”

Now she’s working with headhunters, trying to figure out how to keep her home — and to explain to herself why she stayed so long.

“With all your heart, you just cling to that hope that something will happen,” Beckstrom said. “I was really clinging to that hope.”

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