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October 4, 2008
More than once, Kenneth Osborne stepped outside the Tennessee Career Center in Collierville waiting room and lit a cigarette.
Osborne, 45, used to manage a warehouse. Now, he draws a weekly unemployment check.
Wearing a blue University of Memphis No. 18 football jersey and Tigers cap, Osborne's wait on this morning stretched three hours -- or about the length of a college football game.
Unemployed folks jam the waiting room in the Tennessee Career Center in Collierville, where the numbers have been steadily increasing since summer. Peggy Jones of Memphis lost her job with a real estate attorney after 20 years.
Unemployed folks jam the waiting room in the Tennessee Career Center in Collierville, where the numbers have been steadily increasing since summer. Peggy Jones of Memphis lost her job with a real estate attorney after 20 years.
"Long waits are not new," said Don Ingram, administrator of Tennessee's Employment Security Division in Nashville. "During times of high unemployment, unfortunately our funding is not increased and we cannot hire additional people."
While the career center office in Collierville has less volume than the one on Poplar Avenue in Memphis, it also has fewer interviewers to handle unemployment claims and other issues.
But all across the state, the career centers are busier. Unemployment claims are up 12.5 percent this year over last year, Ingram says. And the state's unemployment rate for August was 6.6 percent, compared to 6.1 for the nation.
In Greater Memphis, the rate was even higher: 7.1 percent. That translated into 43,840 unemployed people out of a labor force of 618,870. Greater Nashville's rate was 5.7 percent.
Mary O'Kelly, 51, is a recent casualty. She got laid off last week from her job as a bookkeeper for G & R Roofing in Bartlett.
"I saw the handwriting on the wall," she said, noting several local builders went bankrupt in 2007. "I know how this construction stuff works."
At the Collierville office, everybody had a story for how they came to be sitting in the waiting room.
Joseph Stovall, 24, who lives in Lakeland with his girlfriend in a house he says she bought with a "subprime loan," got laid off from his job as an ironworker in Osceola, Ark.
Although he says he was spending at least $150 on gas each week, he also was making $17.50 an hour and sometimes getting 70 hours a week.
"At this point, I don't know what to do," he said. "I don't have any college training."
Thompson Billings, 28, is nearing the completion of a liberal arts degree at Ole Miss. His full-time job as a communications assistant was outsourced to the Philippines.
Charles Doyle, 48, is employed as an assistant manager at a FedEx Kinko's, but he says he took that job after a layoff elsewhere to "buy the milk, pay the bills."
He now comes to the career center to check job listings. This week, he saw some manager positions that might be promising.
"I hate to use the word hustle," he said, "but you've got to hustle to get what you want, to see where there's a greater revenue stream."
Stovall, out of work more than a month, just wants to get some money flowing his direction again.
"Unfortunately," he said, "my last few jobs have been because I knew someone."
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