The Newark Metro: Back to Work At Last

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Back to Work At Last
By Ramona Alcantara

Ask Mark Dunbar, 20, about his mother’s new employment status and he has a clear response: “I am happy for her.” Moments later his mother arrives home from work. He greets her and the door and then they both walk off into her bedroom. She changes out of her uniform, which today is a black blazer with matching skirt and a white blouse into a tank top with matching shorts. After the clothes swap, she talks to her son for a moment and goes on to give him his daily medication; he was born with Down syndrome and last year began to suffer with seizures. Once they reach the kitchen and he finishes taking the pills with a glass of water, she reminds him about his doctor’s appointment for the next day, therefore he will be staying home from school tomorrow and she will not be going in to work.

Denise Dunbar, 47, is a single mother who lives in Orange, NJ with her son and three other relatives in a two family house. She has been working for the financial institution Chase in New York City since February of this year. However, it has been nearly two years since she has been employed.

The Ledger reported in March 2007 that Citigroup would be laying off workers in an “effort to cut costs and streamline the bank’s unwieldy global operations”. The article explained further that “positions will be lost to attrition or relocated from high-cost locations-including London, Hong Kong and New York”. Dunbar worked for Citibank (under the same Citi umbrella as Citigroup) for 22 1/2-years and was one of the many who laid off in April of 2007.

“They were looking to cut back on staff, to downsize. I asked them, ‘Who goes and who stays?’ and they looked at how long you were there for and that’s how they made their decision. Also, some people were able to do another person’s job, so why keep two people who could do the same thing? They also sent some jobs overseas where they could pay for cheaper labor.”

The former Citibank teller who worked her way up to Specialist/Business Analyst then recalls how she felt when she discovered that she would be let go from the company.

“Honestly I had two minds; I was happy that I was going to be home for a while and then the reality hit that, ‘Oh my God, I won’t have a job anymore.’ I would not be getting up to go to work to take care of the things that I used to do.”

What is the main advantage of staying home while having a child? Dunbar said, "It felt good, I was able to get up and make breakfast for him and put him on the bus for school. When he got home, I was there to receive him and I had not done that in several years. It was a good feeling because he [knew] I was there for him and he was very happy because I was able to do a lot more things with him. If his school was having some activity, I was able to go and not think of asking for a day off. I could just jump in the car and go there and he was happy that [I was] there and to support him. So it was a great experience and I was happy.” These days while Dunbar is at work, family members living in the house await her son’s arrival from school.

Dunbar explained the compensation she received from Citibank, “They gave me a buyout and a severance pay for a year. After they let me go I continued to receive my paycheck.” The pay allowed Dunbar to be somewhat comfortable financially. Along with the money, she was still receiving her same medical insurance. In spite of that, when her first year of unemployment started to come to an end, Dunbar encountered a crunch with medical insurance.

“After receiving everything that I was getting from Citibank, medical insurance was expensive, so I wasn’t covered for a whole year. And it was kind of hard because if I had to go to the doctor I had to put [it] off.”

She filed for unemployment again and was eligible for the unemployment 13-week extension passed by the House of Representatives. Still, things were not smooth sailing in her house financially. This played into the major con of not working.

“Bills are coming in and you still need to save money. After a while, you have to start dipping into your savings account to take care of the household expenses. It came to the point when the reality hit like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t have a job and I really need to go out and find one’. Then it was hard to find a job because the business I was in started to really cut back and they weren’t hiring at the time.”

Due to the fact that Dunbar was employed and paying taxes in the state of New York, she was listed as unemployed under that state instead of New Jersey. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics Data (www.bls.gov) the unemployment rate in April of 2007 was 4.4%. The rate has now risen to 7.8% as of March this year.

After grasping her reality, Dunbar went to the New York City Unemployment Office to attend a one-hour workshop. She met with a counselor who helped her put together a resume and locate jobs in the banking field. Early November she applied for a position at Chase in New York City via the financial institution’s website. She received a call for an interview mid November, but shortly after received another call indicating that her interview was cancelled.

“I felt disappointed, but I figured if it was meant to happen then it would happen”.

January of 2009, Chase called Dunbar apologizing and explaining that the position was no longer open at the time she had applied, but it was currently available. She followed through with the second opportunity for an interview and soon after landed the job.

Through her shifts between Citibank, unemployment and now Chase, Dunbar describes her current employment position as “a great experience”. She adds, “It is the same banking industry [but] there are new things to learn when you have been out of the working environment for about two years. But you go to training and get a better understanding of their system and everything becomes easier.

Her two-year period of unemployment has not stopped her motivation to move ahead. She recalls other former co-workers who have fallen into depression and even talked about how some people even commit suicide due to the recession because they have nothing to fall back on. Nevertheless, Dunbar refuses to let such things happen, even if it means she has to start from the bottom in her new Chase position, “I’m starting off as a teller-but I will be working my way up.”

Ramona Alcantara, a Rutgers-Newark student, is related to the Dunbars. Posted September 2009.