Aiding the afflicted | Rapid Responder Marty Perlmutter works with the newly unemployed. His job is to offer advice and hope.

Marty Perlmutter, one of Maine’s Rapid Response coordinators, is on the road to Saco by 8:30 a.m Monday, March 23. It’s another cold morning, but Perlmutter’s only jacket today is a faux-suede blazer the color of smoke. On his head is a blue Acadia National Park cap, the brim pressed low over his dark brown eyes, tufts of his thick salt and pepper hair curling out over his ears. The air in the car is warm and stale, the back seat and trunk are filled with half-empty plastic crates containing spare copies of “Transitions,” the Maine Department of Labor’s guide to resources for the laid off, and Perlmutter, his thick hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel, is early enough for his meeting with the recently unemployed to take the long way to Saco along Route 1.

“It’s a service to help people get from point A to point X, Y or Z,” Perlmutter says of DOL’s Rapid Response program as he cruises his gold Ford Taurus past a Scarborough Marsh withered by the long winter. Though he’s never worked as a psychologist, Perlmutter’s voice dips and pauses with a therapist’s waltzing cadence. This careful way of speaking helps Perlmutter maintain a professional distance from the stresses swirling around Maine’s newly unemployed. “Point A being where they are today, hearing of a layoff or a change, and point X, Y or Z,” Perlmutter hovers for a moment over the “Z,” “their next opportunity. As I say, it’s hard to say in six months where someone’s going to be.”

Since he started the job in January, Marty Perlmutter has been dispatched to just over 30 layoff events as part of the state’s Rapid Response program. Perlmutter is one of 15 Maine Rapid Response representatives, men and women typically based at area career centers who are trained to pass on information about applying for and retaining unemployment benefits, accessing additional federal aid and searching for new jobs. After eight years at the Portland CareerCenter, Perlmutter was himself laid off due to downsizing last spring, only to be rehired this winter because the pace of the layoffs had increased dramatically and the DOL didn’t see an end in sight. DOL only tracks its dispatches by fiscal year, but even so, the numbers are stark: Since the beginning of the 2009 fiscal year on July 1, 2008, the department has assisted 6,473 permanently laid-off workers around the state, more than double the total from fiscal year 2008, and there are still two more months to go in 2009. Perlmutter has personally worked with more than 1,500 of those laid-off workers, more than 900 of them in the last six weeks alone. Normally, Rapid Response coordinators are dispatched once every other week, but since the fall coordinators like Perlmutter have been on the road nearly every day.

Perlmutter’s meeting today is with the former employees of the wood-frame manufacturer Wood Structures in Biddeford. One week before, the company’s some 150 employees showed up for work and were told to turn around and go home, Wood Structures was closed. It’s unusual, Perlmutter says on the ride down, for a company to surprise workers like that, and he expects some of the people showing up to the Rapid Response meeting at the Saco City Hall today will be angry. The workers aren’t sure whether or how long they have health ins

urance, or even whether the company is filing for Chapter 7, which means it’s closed for good, or restructuring under Chapter 11.

But even the Wood Structures layoff has allowed for some recovery time before Perlmutter steps in. There have been days when he’s been called in to the very meeting where workers are told they no longer have jobs. Those meetings, he says, can be challenging.

“When people are told on the spot, some people are in shock,” Perlmutter says. “There’s weeping, some people are ‘How am I going to tell my family?’” Perlmutter pauses, mulls over those memories. “I really believe that the way a layoff is handled has an effect on employees’ morale.”

A new direction

Rebecca MacLeod could just about pass out from all the information about being laid off she’s taken in over the past few hours — where you’ve got to look for new work, what programs you want to enroll in, what ones you don’t need to bother with. It’s Wednesday, March 25, the first sunny day this week, and a nagging part of her wishes she was outside working on her car, not here, in a cramped Springvale CareerCenter classroom with faded pastel paintings on the walls, hearing from a guy named Marty about federal money that’s supposed to help her and her five former coworkers from GE Healthcare’s Whatman plant get retrained for new jobs. In September 2008, the Sanford manufacturer of medical testing tools said it would close by the end of 2009, putting about 225 people out of work.

MacLeod is tough and shrewd, and at 37, she figures it might be time to learn how to write a resume. A quick study with computers and most things mechanical, MacLeod, a married mother of three with long brown hair and big blue eyes, used to be a shipper at the Whatman warehouse. Her whole working life, MacLeod has always talked her way into jobs. She never needed a resume, or had to worry about interview etiquette.

So she showed up bright and early for a four-hour workshop on resume writing and interview skills before this one on Trade Adjustment Assistance money she might be eligible for, which she’s going to use, if she gets it, to help pay for culinary school. Everyone’s saying nursing school, but MacLeod thinks that market’s saturated, and she likes kitchens more than hospitals — one day she might open a bed and breakfast. That’s her dream.

“It’s been good,” MacLeod says of the career center presentations. “I have information that I didn’t have before, if I decide that I need to find work or make a resume.”

After his two-hour presentation about the TAA funding granted to Whatman for ex-employee retraining, Perlmutter fields a couple of questions about filling out the application form before the group, all of whom know each other, files out of the room chatting and smiling. MacLeod lingers, fills out her TAA application and hands it to Perlmutter, and then she too is gone. Perlmutter is left to quietly pack up his notebook, his stack of “Transitions” guidebooks, his leftover pens. He’s dressed simply — a wine red cotton shirt, black slacks, black socks, black sneakers. It’s nearing three in the afternoon, and the long day Perlmutter’s already had shows on his face. In the morning, at his office in the Portland CareerCenter, he sifted through surveys from the Wood Structures meeting at the beginning of the week to figure out how best to help those workers. He then reviewed the weekly lay-off list from the DOL of recently closed businesses in his coverage area of Oxford, York, Cumberland and Androscoggin counties. And now, after the Whatman meeting, Perlmutter’s heading to Goodall Hospital in Sanford because he heard they’re cutting salaries. In his experience, salary reductions can preface layoffs, so Perlmutter plans to introduce himself to hospital administration so if layoffs do happen, they’ll call him to help the workers. Then he’ll drive the Taurus back to his home near Willard Beach in South Portland, where he’ll decompress by selling records and sheet music on eBay, or by cooking a big meal, or by plugging away at the mystery novel he’s eight chapters into writing.

When Perlmutter’s not on the road, he’s in his Portland office digging up bad news. Most companies don’t contact Rapid Response when they’re downsizing, so Perlmutter has to find them. He starts with the layoff list that usually arrives at the beginning of the week. He reads all of the major papers in his coverage area for layoff or closing news. He checks the DOL’s national layoff list. And he listens to rumors.

“Sometimes people come into a career center and say, ‘Hey, I think I’m going to be laid off,’ and sometimes people call from a career center and say, ‘These people were just laid off,’ and I might want to check into it,” Perlmutter says. He and his career center colleagues even look for going-out-of-business signs in store windows. Then Perlmutter calls the business, says he heard a rumor that they’re closing, and offers his assistance. Perlmutter says more than 90% of businesses welcome the help.

Along the way, as is the job’s hazard, Perlmutter picks up pieces of strangers’ tragedies. Workers who have recently been laid off tend to process the news one of two ways — there are those who are quiet, who don’t want to discuss how the layoff has affected their lives, who sometimes betray the devastation of the news by the depth of their silence. And there are others — workers like MacLeod — who need to talk about it, can’t help but talk about it, want you to know that their lost job means pain or happiness, liberation or anxiety. Through the chatter and the reticence Perlmutter passes, meeting Mainers for the first time, often the only time, during one of the most difficult periods of their lives.

“I’m lucky enough to have a significant other, so to speak, who I can talk with about my days,” Perlmutter says. “I think she would tell you that I get more angry than anything else about the way people are treated. A layoff has been called something like a death in the family and people go through what’s called a grief cycle, and you have to be careful not to step on those emotions. A lot of times, people just want to talk.”

Common casualties

In the dim morning light inside Carroll’s Music Center in Lewiston, Marty Perlmutter meets four Mainers who within days won’t have a job. It’s Friday, March 27, and Carroll’s, a music store that opened in 1945, won’t last another week. Perlmutter’s been called in by the owners — Colleen and Carroll Poulin — to talk to the couple and their two employees about how to file for unemployment and find new jobs. The shop along Canal Street is as silent as a funeral parlor in this hour before the doors are unlocked to customers, and littered with evidence of a life’s pursuit ending — empty music stand boxes are piled under shelves picked bare by liquidation-sale opportunists, neon orange “Sale” signs are pasted on speakers and amplifiers, Christmas knickknacks have been brought out of storage and priced to move. In a circle in the center of the store, the staff sits in wooden chairs with scraps of white paper with “Sold” written in marker taped to the back.

Perlmutter delivers his laid-off talk to the Poulins and the remnants of their 10-person staff — Paul Mercier, 65, has worked for Carroll’s Music for 22 years, and Paul Caron, at 54 the youngest of the group, has worked at the store for 11. The music store resembles a log cabin, with an arched ceiling with exposed wooden beams and wide windows partially blocked by signs proclaiming “Going Out of Business” and “Retirement Sale.” At 57, Perlmutter looks like one of Carroll Music’s casualties. He could be Paul Mercier, thankful he’s old enough to qualify for Medicare, or Paul Caron, glad his wife has health insurance through her job, or Carroll himself, hoping he’ll be able to make money repairing instruments from his home, since that’s all he knows how to do.

“We’re all joined at the hip,” Colleen Poulin says, motioning to the three men. “It’s like we’re getting a divorce. It’s so traumatic. It’s just devastating. I thought we had stress before, but this has been so much anxiety, so much fear, it’s terrible.”

Poulin’s comment hangs in the air, and Caron tries to lighten the mood.

“It’s funny,” he says gamely. “There’s no shame in losing your job, just look at professional sports, how often coaches get fired — Billy Martin’s been laid off how many times?”

The group chuckles half-heartedly. The silence returns. Each one of them knows how hard it will be to find work — any work, let alone in the music business — in this economy, and near their homes in central Maine.

20 years

“I was laid off myself,” Perlmutter says. It’s days before, at the start of the week, before Perlmutter meets the Carroll’s Music Shop workers, or MacLeod and her Whatman coworkers. It’s the beginning of the week, in the Saco City Council chambers, and Perlmutter is speaking to about 100 of the laid-off Wood Structures workers. He doesn’t know who he’ll meet in the coming days, he doesn’t know who he’ll meet any day, and, in the end, the hectic pace of it all makes the strangers’ tragedies run together, makes it hard to keep the days straight, to situate the layoffs in time. The only constant is that all Perlmutter has to offer at the end is the same as what he had at the beginning — information.

It’s Monday, March 23, and Perlmutter talks to the Wood Structures workers. One month later, the federal government will grant more than $600,000 to the workers for reemployment services, but today, Perlmutter works the microphone with the gravity of a preacher. Men and women who were told by Wood Structures a few days before to turn around and head home watch him pace up and down the center aisle. This is Perlmutter’s eulogy for the laid-off. It’s a variation of the speech he gives to workers all over southern, central and western Maine — from Saco, to Springvale, to Lewiston, in big groups and small, in angry crowds and resigned ones, in silence and chatter. The speech involves what Perlmutter says the Rapid Response Team doesn’t touch on enough — the fear, anger and sadness caused by losing a job. Perlmutter spends hours handing out surveys and applications for state and federal aid, and making sure he has enough pens and “Transitions” booklets for three times the size of whatever group he’s speaking to, but department protocol largely ignores emotions. But, Perlmutter believes in balancing the reality of the economy with, as he calls it, “an optimism of things that could happen.” And so he reads workers the poem he wrote the night before he was offered the job as Rapid Response coordinator.

“I was laid off myself,” Perlmutter says with his slow psychologist’s lilt. “I understand what it feels like. We feel all sorts of emotions, and all of that is valuable. I was out of work starting June 20 of last year and it took until December to get a job, to be called on a job. As time went on, I began waking up in the middle of the night worried if I’d ever get a job. And one of those nights at 3 a.m. I wrote a poem about looking for a job. And I’d like to share it with you. It’s entitled ‘20 years.’

“For 20 years I worked each day,

for 20 years I earned my pay.

For 20 years I made my living,

for 20 years I helped by giving.

For 20 years I assisted others,

for 20 years I coached my brothers.

Now suddenly I must confess,

I’m in despair and feel distress.

I’m out of work and though no sin,

times are tight and money’s thin.

I’m hanging tough yet full of fears,

of losing it all after 20 years.”

Sara Donnelly, Mainebiz managing editor, can be reached at sdonnelly@mainebiz.biz.