Unemployed Hit the Road to Find Jobs

From the Wall St Journal - June 25, 2009

By JENNIFER LEVITZ

LINCOLN, N.H. -- After seven months without a paycheck, Tim Ryan turned into a werewolf.

Laid off from a construction job, Mr. Ryan finally found work last month playing the wolfman at Clark's Trading Post, a tourist attraction in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. For $12 an hour, about half what he made before, he dons furry rags, a coonskin cap and an eye patch and jumps out of the woods when the Trading Post's steam train chugs by, snarling and growling at passengers.

The job is nearly two hours north of his home in Pittsfield, N.H., too far to commute. So Mr. Ryan sleeps in an old, mold-ridden cottage with no running water that someone lets him use free. "These days, you have to do things you never thought you would," says the 52-year-old. "You have to go to extremes."

With the unemployment rate at 9.4%, some Americans are willing to go wherever they can to nab a job, even if it is temporary. To adapt, they find living quarters near the job in campers or cheap apartments, giving up normal family life for a paycheck, in a contemporary echo of the itinerants who roamed the country for work in the Great Depression.

Evidence of this labor trend is mostly anecdotal. In Linden, Tenn., where more than 300 people lost their jobs when an auto-parts plant closed in September, at least 20 now work three hours away in Paducah, Ky., manning tugboats on the Tennessee River, says John Carroll, the mayor of Perry County, Tenn. While there, they sleep on the tugboats. The unemployment rate in their home county is 22%.

In Detroit, where layoffs have hit about half of the 5,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 58, a union official says he has a list of 2,200 members who are willing to travel for work, up from 1,400 last year. "We have guys all over the country: California, Chattanooga, West Virginia, Las Vegas," says Bob Hines, the local's assistant business manager.

A provider of corporate temporary housing, Oakwood Worldwide, has seen a 6% rise this year in rentals of furnished apartments, which it attributes to more people taking temporary jobs away from home.

And ITT Corp. says it relocated more new hires in 2008 than ever before -- 13%, versus a typical 3%. Many employees are moving just themselves, keeping their families and their homes in a different state, says ITT's director of human resources, Lisa Simeon.

U.S. Census surveys of mobility actually don't report more people moving, but fewer. The surveys, however, ask respondents whether they are living somewhere other than where they did a year before. They don't measure workers who are currently away from home but don't consider themselves to have moved.

'Partial Mobility'

"There is this partial-mobility strategy" now, says demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution, in which people are starting to move in a makeshift and impermanent fashion. He likens it to the way many Mexican workers come to the U.S. and leave their families behind.

There are costs to this strategy. Spouses left at home must do the work of both parents. Children miss out on things. Loneliness is a steady companion for the parent on the road.

Researchers have long documented strains on families that are separated. A study last year by the Rand Corp. think tank found that in families with a member in the military, the spouse at home tended to have poorer mental health and report more behavioral and emotional difficulties among the children than in the general population. Workers who live away from home often say they know of the toll but endure it because they expect the dislocation to end when the recession does.

The partial-mobility strategy is common in Big Spring, Texas, halfway between Dallas and El Paso. The local Suburban East RV and Mobile Home Park Campground is packed with men who have come from all over to erect wind turbines along Interstate 20.

"I got me a camper for our vacation time. I never thought I'd be living in it," says Jerry Beaty, 48 years old, who is living at the RV park, two hours away from his family in Abilene, Texas.

For years, he had steady work in Abilene maintaining and remodeling doctors' offices. It dried up when medical facilities tightened their budgets.

During 28 years of marriage, Mr. Beaty says, he and his wife, Cathey, had been apart just two nights, when he went deer hunting. "She boohooed a lot, and it was hard on me, too," he adds.

Now, Mr. Beaty works six days a week, in 10½-hour shifts, on the turbine-building job near Big Spring, getting up at 4 a.m. and going to bed by 9 p.m.

There isn't much to do in the evening. On Thursdays, the turbine crews at the campground go to Brenda's BBQ in Big Spring for the $11.50 all-you-can-eat special. Two turbine workers have pitched in to plant a garden at the campground.

'That Itty-Bitty Town'

Mr. Beaty's wife, who is a nurse, arrives from Abilene for weekend visits on Friday, while Mr. Beaty is still working. He can hardly wait to get back to his camper to see her. "The 30 miles from work back to the campground seems like forever," he says.

On Sunday evenings, Cathey Beaty leaves. "It's kind of sad," she says. "I come home to an empty house again, and he's stuck in that itty-bitty town." But, she says, "you take work where you can get it. You don't like it, but you suck it up; that's what you do."

In fact, for workers willing to make a more permanent move, there are regions of the country, such as the Dakotas and parts of Iowa and Nebraska, where work for people in professions such as carpentry is still ample. The unemployment rate in Bismarck, N.D., for instance, is 3.7%. In Iowa City, Iowa, it's 3.2%. But picking up and moving the whole family is a complicated undertaking, to say nothing of the difficulty of selling a house in today's market.

The family separation, when just one half of a couple moves, is especially wearing for those with young children. Lance Meudt's home is Dodgeville, Wis. He recently took a six-month job as an electrician two hours away in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, renting a small apartment there for $450 a month. "There was no work in my vicinity, and with two little kids and another on the way, I have to make a living. But it's definitely hard being away from my kids, and hard on my wife, too," says Mr. Meudt, 33.

Wearying Cycle

Back in Dodgeville, Lori Meudt, a stay-at-home mother, looks after their children, ages 4 and 2, and has a baby due in November. It is "those evening hours till bedtime that I find the loneliest," she says. "One night, there were toys all over, and the house was trashed, and I just started crying and saying, 'I can't do it anymore. I can't keep up.'"

Some workers move for jobs only to be laid off again, caught in a wearying cycle. "It's been bad luck after bad luck," says Mark Salmoni, a 50-year-old electrician who says he has been on the road, from West Virginia to Iowa, on seven different jobs since being laid off at an oil refinery near Detroit 18 months ago. On one assignment in West Texas, he says, "we got there and the project supervisor said, 'We're gonna money you guys up. You guys are gonna get at least 12 weeks.' We got two and a half."

Mr. Salmoni is leaving again soon, this time for work at a coal plant in West Virginia. His wife, Joan, is home in Detroit with their two teenage children. If it weren't for her part-time job at Home Depot, "we'd be selling stuff," Mr. Salmoni says.

For employers, having lots of people willing to go where the work is makes recruiting easier. When Anne Englert, whose family owns Clark's Trading Post in New Hampshire, advertised tryouts for a new wolfman in April, she drew a dozen enthusiastic applicants, former construction and millworkers from throughout the state. "Almost everyone hadn't had a job for six months or more," she says. "They were ready to do anything."

That includes sharing the spotlight with the Trading Post's other stars, three docile black bears that have learned to drink root beer in front of the audience and then toss the cans in the recycling bin.

Mr. Ryan's wolfman job at the Trading Post runs only through October. It carries no fringe benefits and pays less than half the $22 an hour, plus gasoline money, that Mr. Ryan says he got until November at a job building oil-change shops. But he's grateful. His unemployment checks were about to run out, as was a short moratorium that his mortgage lender had granted him. His family briefly had to go on food stamps. He grabbed the job, even though for the first weeks he had nowhere to sleep but his 10-foot camper.

Family Matters

Though happy to be bringing in money again, Mr. Ryan is troubled about missing out on family things with his son, age 12, and daughter, 15. "I won't be able to see my kids but once a week. I love to put my kids to bed at night and say their prayers with them," he says.

He finds it easy, though, to slip into character as the wolfman. Tall, with chiseled arms, he has shoulder-length blondish-gray hair and a long, bristly beard. "I'm kind of scary," he says. "People keep saying they'd never thought I'd get paid for my looks."

When the first steam-train ride of the summer season left Clark's Trading Post on Memorial Day weekend, the conductor warned passengers that after crossing the river on a covered bridge, they would be in wolfman territory. Soon, a gunshot and an evil cackle were heard from behind the birches. Out roared Mr. Ryan, wearing rags, covered in dirt and waving a club. He chased the train, growling and hollering, "You're gonna be sorry! They'll be trouble for all of ya! Now you've done it!" Children dived into their parents' arms, scared but laughing.

"That was a blast," Mr. Ryan said afterward, resting in the woods before the next train. Now that he's working, he added, "hopefully I'll be able to sleep at night."

Write to Jennifer Levitz at jennifer.levitz@wsj.com