SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : PART TWO: MAKING THE BREAK : Coping With Being Axed : A Layoff Carries Less of a Stigma in Era of Takeovers

By JAMES BATES

Sept. 17, 1989 12 AM PT

<i> Times Staff Writer </i>

In the old days, you were sacked, shown the door, pink slipped, canned, axed and given your walking papers. Then you watched someone change the locks on your office door as you left.

No more. A Mr. Dithers today is more likely to tell a Dagwood Bumstead that he’s been dehired instead of fired. Now, your company restructures or downsizes, and decides you are redundant. Or the boss decides the time is right to “rightsize” the company and concludes that you are wrong for the job.

If you are a nobody, you can tell people you’ve been laid off, displaced or idled as part of a work force reduction. If you are a big shot, you “resigned to pursue other business interests,” even though your only interest is in finding another job.

Whatever euphemism is used, it’s a firing. And it’s an unpleasant fact of business life that is increasingly common for people who in an earlier era would have assumed they had jobs for life.

The man in the gray flannel suit no longer has the job security he once enjoyed. In a time when people pay as much as $25 billion for companies knowing they can cut costs later, managers and owners often resort to cutting the payroll to settle buyout debts.

Losing a job involuntarily prompts complex emotional responses, often a mixture of grief, anger and embarrassment.

“A lost job is rarely a surprise, but it’s always a shock,” said Bradford H. Taft, a partner in Career Transition Group, a West Los Angeles “outplacement” firm that is hired by employers to help fired workers find jobs.

Mike Shea, who was laid off as a program manager for a Litton Industries unit in Woodland Hills in May, said that after he lost his job he spent his days working in the back yard of his Simi Valley home, carefully avoiding his front yard for fear he would be seen by neighbors.

“The first week or two you can tell people you are on vacation. You’re happy to see a weekend come because then you can go into your front yard,” he said.

Now, Shea said, he dresses in a business suit early each morning and schedules job appointments, leaving his home as if he is headed for work. He said the set routine has improved his self-image.

Shea also joined a club of out-of-work executives formed through the state Employment Development Department in Simi Valley, which provides desks and telephones for members to help in their search. Members meet frequently to share information and to give each other support.

“It’s the only club I know where you join hoping to lose your membership,” Shea said.

Phyllis Macklin, a partner with Minsuk, Macklin, Stein & Associates, an outplacement firm in Princeton Junction, N.J., said she tells fired workers that it is all right to feel embarrassed and angry after losing a job.

Taft in West Los Angeles adds that fired employees have to put the incident behind them psychologically, accept it and realize that even though they have lost a job they have not lost the skills and experience they acquired over the years.

Employment counselors argue that in the wake of the recession in the early 1980s and layoffs resulting from mergers, being fired no longer carries with it the stigma that it once did.

Look at the men who managed the New York Yankees for George Steinbrenner, who has changed managers 17 times in the 17 years that he has owned the baseball team. Being dumped by Steinbrenner is no longer a disgrace. Billy Martin alone has been sacked five times by him.

Some people even do better after being fired. Lee A. Iacocca was fired in 1978 from Ford Motor Co. by Henry Ford II. He went on to lead rival auto maker Chrysler Corp. to a roaring comeback, as well as write best sellers, star in commercials, pen newspaper columns and become one of the best-paid executives in the nation.

Likewise, Grace Mirabella, who was fired as editor of Vogue magazine, started a fashion magazine for publisher Rupert Murdoch. The publication, called Mirabella, appears to be a hit.

Still, such high-profile firings and comebacks are of little comfort to those who get canned, even to those who see it coming.

Macklin said people must think about how to explain their firing to prospective employers without lying, but in a way that does not reflect badly on themselves.

If new owners took over your old company and fired you because they brought in their own team or if your company had a few bad years, it can be easily explained in a way that does not reflect badly on you. If you lie, Macklin warned, it will catch up with you when the prospective employer runs a background check. Employers, she said, often are very understanding about a firing.

Taking too long to find a new job also can hurt. Macklin said senior executives can be expected to take six to eight months to find a new job, with lower-level executives taking four to five months. Taking too long can raise questions in a prospective employer’s mind.

“It almost has a shelf life,” she said. “Six months is not a big deal. A year-and-a-half is a big deal.”

Surprisingly, people often get better jobs after they are fired, for a number of reasons. One is that they are in a position to negotiate a new salary for the first time in years, instead of accepting standard annual raises.

Another is that people go through a self-evaluation in which they make themselves more attractive to prospective employers in much the same way a divorced person might go through a self-evaluation and become more attractive to prospective spouses.

“People get sloppy in the way they dress and in their attitudes. When you have to clean up your act because you are presenting yourself to a new audience, you realize some of the potential you have,” Macklin said.

YOU’RE WHAT?

How many ways can you say “fired”? Career Transition Group of West Los Angeles offers a list of euphemisms for the dirty deed.

Axed

Canned

Dehired

Displaced

Discharged

Dismissed

Eliminated

Downsized

Rightsized

Riffed (reduction in force)