In Toledo, Downturn Empties Offices

White-Collar Workers Reeling as Layoffs Force Them to Remake Their Lives

TOLEDO -- Rob Noonan's friends think he's a sucker. Laid off from his $140,000-a-year construction management job when the credit markets froze, he still shows up at work, one man working without pay in a cluster of vacant cubicles, trying to make something out of nothing.

While friends are mystified that he would toil for the developer who fired him after 16 years, Noonan figures voluntary work is his best path to a real job at real pay. And in an employment market this awful, he adds, "I really don't have anything better to do."

Noonan, 56, is a casualty of an economic crisis that has reached into the white-collar ranks, costing the jobs of thousands of executives, supervisors and office workers who never thought the paychecks would stop. Watching with disbelief and then despair as their comfortable lifestyles washed away, they are recalibrating their expectations in ways they never imagined.

"The key is to keep a lot of stuff going on," Noonan said during his fifth jobless month. "The most important thing is that going in to work has given me a feeling of significance. It still keeps my spirits up."

In this corner of Ohio, the workforce is contracting at an alarming speed, with unemployment climbing to rates more typical of counties in Appalachia. In March, unemployment in Toledo reached 12.6 percent, an increase of more than 50 percent over March 2008.

More than 1,200 people attended a Toledo Zoo job fair to fill about 200 minimum-wage summer jobs running the carousel or selling hot dogs. Another 500 dropped off résumés.

The city and its economy, long tied to the auto industry in nearby Detroit, never recovered from a downturn at the beginning of the decade. A nascent wind- and solar-power sector offers hope and some jobs, but not nearly enough to keep up with recent losses in manufacturing, real estate and finance.

Larry B. Dillin, head of Dillin Corp. and Noonan's former boss, laid off 60 percent of his workforce of about two dozen in the Toledo suburb of Perrysburg. In a period that reminds him of the weeks after the 2001 terrorist attacks, he sees "a lot of people with a deer-in-the-headlights stare, people not knowing what normal is anymore."

As President Obama's economic recovery policies are tested, employees cut from the hardest-hit sectors are calculating what their recoveries will require. It takes the average worker about five months to find a new job, a month longer than a year ago. The new position often comes with a drop in salary, seniority and security.

"The quality of people coming to my door is incredible, and the options are minimal," said Bruce Rumpf, president of Toledo-based temp agency Job1USA. "What I'm seeing is a lot of talented people with an inability to recapture anything near what they were at. Everyone's going backwards."

One of those people is Dawn Weinbrecht, 40, a do-it-all title company employee who survived three rounds of layoffs and accepted 10 fewer hours a week to keep her $40,000 job. The pink slip came in May 2008. She found accounting work but was laid off there, too.

She swears she will not surrender, but she is anguished as she asks, "Do I scratch everything and start over?" These days, she feels lucky if she can find a prospective employer to listen to her pitch: "A lot of ads will say, 'No phone calls, please' or 'Due to high volume, cannot respond to receipt of résumés.' "