Paul Bass Photos
Carbone with WorkPlace COO Adrienne Parkmond.
Twenty-three forgotten workers got a pep talk from someone who’s been there — and was offering them a new chance.
The pep talk took place Monday inside the old New Haven Brewery building by the Mill River at 458 Grand Ave.
Joe Carbone was there addressing the class for the first morning of a new five-week training course aimed at some of the estimated 75,000 to 100,000 people in Connecticut who aren’t just unemployed, but long-term unemployed.
Carbone, who served as New Haven’s mayoral chief of staff in the 1980s, has gone on to launch a program called “Platform to Employment” through a Bridgeport-based agency called The WorkPlace. that has earned national raves for helping often middle-aged people thrown into joblessness and despair by the combination of the Great Recession and the outsourcing and “just-in-time” temporary labor demands of the new global economy. 60 Minutes, among others, highlighted it as a hopeful success story, and 10 cities across the country have brought in The WorkPlace to run similar programs. In the process Carbone has become an evangelist of sorts for millions of forgotten American workers. (Click on the video to watch the 60 Minutes piece. Click here for a story about a previous pitch he gave on the subject to business leaders.)
Now Carbone, who is 64, has brought the program to the city where he grew up. The state has given TheWorkPlace $3.6 million to run five-week programs this year for 500 long-term unemployed people in four cities, including New Haven. Monday morning’s group was the first of four that will meet in New Haven.
Carbone told the 23 class members — men and women, black and white, from New Haven, West Haven, Milford, East Haven, the Naugatuck Valley — that he spent eight and a half months unemployed at one point.
“It was was one of the darkest moments of my life,” he said. “I considered it a curse.”
He recalled receiving phone calls from employers who cancelled interviews: “It will zap you of your self-confidence. …
“You begin to say to yourself, ‘Maybe I’m done’ … The whole process of unemployment is debilitating. People lose their self-confidence.”
He spoke of how, unlike after past recessions, employers did not bring back millions of workers who’d lost their full-time jobs. Instead they downsized. Or they relied ever more on hiring agencies to funnel them temporary workers. Some eight million out of 28 million part-time workers in the country would prefer to be working full time, according to Carbone.
“This was structural change,” Carbone said. People were “squeezed out” of the workforce “not because they weren’t competent. Not because they didn’t have a good work history. Because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
That has left many, like some of those in the room, running out of unemployment benefits after their 27 weeks’ expiration and remaining unemployed, or temporarily working part-time, for up to five years. The longer a person stays jobless, the harder it is to find a new job, between battling depression or a sense of worthlessness to overcoming employers’ reluctance to consider long-term unemployed candidates in a buyer’s market. Many of the long-term unemployed don’t show up in official unemployment figures (currently around 6.6 percent in Connecticut) because they have given up looking for work.
Carbone’s program spends five weeks coaching the students, assessing skills, helping draw up employment plans, as well as offering clinical services to deal with the emotional and psychological fallout of remaining unemployed.
The WorkPlace then arranges eight-week trial job placements with employers. It offers the employers a deal: Give this trained and ready person a shot at an open job, and we’ll pay the full salary for the first four weeks, part of the salary for the next four. At any time you can fire the person. Carbone said that in repeated trials, employers have ended up keeping 90 percent of the people on in the jobs.
“You’re going to get your old self back,” Carbone told the group.
The group included John Murray (pictured shaking Carbone’s hand before the class). Murray, who’s 54, said he previously worked as a site manager at an outsourcing center for Fortune 500 companies, he said. Then his employer’s contract ran out and wasn’t renewed. Ten months later, with Coach Carbone’s help, he’s looking to being insourced back into full-time work.