Immigrant Family Tries to Overcome

If you have any doubts about the justice of the bill that Congress passed recently, over President Reagan’s objections, requiring companies to give employees at least a 60-day notice of a plant closure, check with Vladimir and Detelina Kriakov of El Toro.

The Kriakovs were crunched--along with 825 other Orange County families--by the overnight closing of the Xidex Corp. in Irvine last October, shortly after it was acquired by an Indianapolis firm named Annacomp. “They give us 12 hours’ notice,” says Vladimir, whose picture--along with his wife, who also worked at Xidex--appeared beside a Times story on the closing. “We come in on Thursday, and they tell us tomorrow we will shut down so come back and get your pay.”

According to Kriakov, Xidex’s contributions toward easing this shock consisted of 2 weeks’ termination pay and a list of companies where employment might be found. But most of the firms on the list, says Kriakov, “paid very bad wages.” An Annacomp spokesman contended at the time that the employees should have known--even though they were working overtime right to the end--that the plant was in danger of being shut down because the stockholders had been notified of that possibility in a quarterly report.

Kriakov--who isn’t a stockholder and seldom does lunch with one--found small solace in the Annacomp explanation that “it is sometimes difficult to balance the issue of what’s best for the stockholders and employees.”

All the Kriakovs know is that they went to work one Thursday morning feeling very secure and went home that evening unemployed, with only 2 weeks of income certain. And this just a year after they realized a lifelong dream by buying a condominium in El Toro and a few months after Detelina bought her first car, an elderly used model.

So 1988 wasn’t the best of years for the Kriakov family, which also includes 17-year-old daughter Jania. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t the worst, either.

I talked with the Kriakovs the day after Christmas, and things were . . . well, OK. It was, says Vladimir, “a small Christmas. We didn’t have very much to spend for gifts. Our condo is important to us. Almost everything we earn goes into keeping it. But that makes everything else tight. Our bank account is always under $100 after we pay our bills.”

Vladimir is working, Detelina isn’t. And he gives full credit to The Times for his new job. An acquaintance who had been laid off several months earlier and found work with the Cannon Corp. in Costa Mesa saw Kriakov’s picture in The Times, called him and suggested he try Cannon. He did and went to work a few days later.

His wife didn’t fare as well. “It is much harder for the ladies,” says Kriakov. “The pay is very low for the jobs available, much worse than my wife was making at Xidex.”

So she has been studying--toward a very specific goal. In her native Bulgaria, she was a cosmetician, and she would like to do that here. But she has been unable to get a license in California because her written English is not good enough to pass the test. So she studies. “That,” says her husband, “is her job.”

The Kriakovs escaped from Communist Bulgaria 6 years ago and spent a year in a West German refugee camp before starting a new life in Orange County. Kriakov is a skilled electrical technician, but his salary was not enough to sustain the family. So she put her cosmetician dreams on hold and went to work as a machine operator at Xidex almost 3 years ago. Their combined income enabled them to buy the condo and gradually upgrade their life style.

Now, they are barely breaking even, and there are some new demands coming up this summer. Jania is graduating from El Toro High School--”always A in school,” says her proud father-- and wants to go to UCLA to study international business and languages. She will apply for student aid, but her parents know they will have to help, and Jania’s education is important to them.

So he hopes for a better job, and she hopes for a cosmetician’s license before the coming year is out. Kriakov has just been moved from afternoons to nights at work--the “grave shift,” he calls it--and doesn’t like that very much. He also finds the inflexible movement of a production line a “nervous” way to make a living.

But he’s hanging in while he pushes for something better, and she wants to work her way through “one more English book” before she takes her written licensing exam again, probably in early Spring.

So the Kriakovs approach the new year with hope, encased in a very stern sense of pragmatism and reality that doesn’t rose-tint life very much. They know how many of the people laid off with them have had to sell their cars while they looked for work, and some--especially women and supervisors--have yet to find work. “A lot of them,” he says, “have had to move away because it’s just too expensive to live around here.”

The Kriakovs don’t want to do that. They like it in Orange County. They know it’s going to be tough, but there isn’t a single note of self-pity or rancor in their talk. As he said of his wife after Xidex shut down: “She was upset 2, 3 days. Then she said, ‘OK, what’s next?’ ”

Orange County needs a lot of people like Vladimir and Detelina Kriakov. But we’re not doing a very good job of making it possible--let alone easy--for them to live here.