Unemployed People Inconvenienced by COVID-19

From lay-offs to furloughs; the impact unemployment has on people’s lives.

Photo of unemployment graph courtesy of Fortune.com

“My initial reaction was just a little bit of a panic. How am I going to pay all my bills moving forward?” said Sarah Dawson, a 29-year-old designer from Brooklyn. Dawson is among the millions of U.S citizens who are unemployed due to the Coronavirus pandemic and are faced with the worries of having no pay. 

Sarah Dawson posed with her sewing machine.

She worked for a swimwear company from late August 2019 until the crisis affected “nonessential” companies in March, 2020. Dawson was used to having a routine that allowed her to stay active and create. Her days would begin at 5 a.m when she would get up and go to the gym. After about an hour of exercising, she would go home to get ready for work and had a 30-45 minute commute to Manhattan. Her workday would start with at least two or three meetings and then she’d be able to get into her cycle. 

She has her own brand creating intimate apparel called Sada by Sarah, so working for a swimwear company was new and exciting to her. “There were different things that I had to keep in mind in regards to fit and fabrication,” said Dawson. When she got off the clock from her job, she went home to either meet with clients or work on orders for her business. However, those few months of being busy for a majority of her days changed abruptly. 

According to Market Watch, 26 million Americans have filed for unemployment due to COVID-19, as of April 23. People who don’t have “essential” jobs such as; healthcare, news media, telecommunication, and food services, are unemployed, on furlough, or they’re working from home. “There has been massive waves of unemployment but never has a crisis caused such an accelerated and rapid decline,” said Zoe Fanzo, senior associate at The Bachrach Group recruiting agency.

Shortly after COVID-19 caused a pandemic, Dawson received a mass email from HR at her company stating that all employees would be on furlough with no pay and no guarantee of being rehired. “I just felt like the company was very irresponsible initially because I knew that it was nothing that I had done and it was out of my control,” said Dawson. Fortunately, she has her own business and she had some money saved up in her emergency funds to hold her up for a few months. 

According to Newsweek, furlough, is a mandatory suspension without pay. However, there is uncertainty about whether companies will be able to bounce back from this crisis. About 90 percent of the people that Fanzo worked with are currently unemployed.

Brandon Beltran before the pandemic.

Dawson’s disappointment from losing her job due to this crisis is shared by many people across the nation. This includes 26-year-old Brandon Beltran who lives in Maryland.

A typical day for Beltran consisted of working for 12 to 14 hours. He served as the branch rental manager at Enterprise where he was in charge of managing the number of cars the company needed for the week, payroll, and employee hours. “I was responsible for my own growth and pay, so the better I did, the more I got paid and the faster I got promoted,” said Beltran. He was working at Enterprise for three years and the mobility of his job kept him motivated to stay there.

Unfortunately, Beltran was furloughed in March. At first, there was a possibility of returning to the company because it was just a suspension. But a week later, he heard he’d be fired. “A majority of retail businesses at the time were laying off a lot of people, so I expected it to come from my job as well,” Beltran said.

Beltran still had unused vacation days, so he is getting paid for those. His life hasn’t changed from a lack of income, however, he has been affected mentally. “You start to think what if they never wanted to keep you as an employee or if they were already trying to get rid of you and this is the perfect excuse to,” said Beltran.

The New Normal

Dawson and Beltran are both used to having busy schedules and spending a lot of their time at work. Now that they aren’t working, there has been a shift in the way that they stay productive. While that thought of losing his job weighs on his mind, Beltran is occupying it in another way. He is using his newfound idle time to take free online classes from Harvard. He lives with his girlfriend, so they’ve been spending more time with each other. 

Dawson is utilizing her designing skills to help keep people safe by making masks and selling them. She also taught her sister how to sew and they collaborated on creating masks.  “I usually have no time to spend with my family because I’m so stuck in my routine of work,” said Dawson. While being unemployed has its downsides, Dawson found a new way to make money and be more present with her family at once.

Masks designed and created by Sarah Dawson.

Looking towards Future Employment

Ever since Beltran became unemployed, he has been actively searching for a new place to work. Beltran applies to about three or four jobs a day. He’s had an interview lined up just a day after being laid off. “I would be looking for job security,” said Beltran. He is hoping that his future establishment does better at communicating with employees. 

Dawson has a different set of expectations for her future employment. Even if she got rehired, her former company no longer serves her interest. “I realize how much I don’t want to go back and how much I don’t want to be complacent again at another big corporation,” said Dawson. Before she received her position at the swimwear company, she was working for her own brand, and she plans to expand her business more. She’s looking into part-time jobs for instructional work that will allow her to teach people.

Dawson and Beltran both share a common concern about jobs after this lockdown: preparation. While this pandemic had a bigger effect than anyone would’ve expected, many companies were not ready for any crisis at all. “I felt like as a big corporation, you should be prepared, not for this exact situation, but for unforeseen loss of income,” said Dawson. 

Many companies were not prepared for a crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Institute of Public Relations, 52% of the companies they reached out to said that the crisis has a “moderate” or “major” impact on their business operation and 83% are “moderately” or “extremely” concerned about the impact it will have on their companies as a whole. 

“I think a lot of companies need to just figure out what plan they will have in case of a situation we’re going through right now,” said Beltran.

Fanzo, the job recruiter, was used to working in an economy where most candidates were employees and having mobility to jobs with higher-paying salaries. Now she is faced with candidates who are more interested in finding work than finding their dream job.

Post- Quarantine Positivity

Fanzo suggests that when looking for work in the future, it would be best to ask employers about the way they treated their staff in response to COVID-19. According to Market Watch, COVID-19 has caused almost as much of a strain on unemployment as The Great Depression did in the 1930s. However, Fanzo assures that people facing job loss like Dawson and Beltran should stay hopeful. She has colleagues who have been recruiting for decades and have seen the way unemployment fluctuates in times of a crisis. “Though it is difficult right now, I would encourage unemployed people to know that things will bounce back, hiring will resume, and there will be opportunities to rebuild the economy,” said Fanzo.

Although Dawson and Beltran are forced to go looking to the job market again, this crisis has allowed them to see what they want in a future job. Dawson plans to take notes on the way companies are handling this situation to help with her own company’s growth. “Can I plan ahead to have funding for my employees that if we can’t work for months I can still pay people’s salaries?” said Dawson. In Dawson’s case, companies’ response to this crisis is an eye-opener for her own business plans. 

“It’s not necessarily what I’m looking for in other companies, but what I want to do with my own company moving forward in case of a crisis.”