'It's just a job'

"Name and Social Security number?" the lady asked as she handed me a sheet of paper and a pen.

"Uh, uh, no," I stammered, an awkward attempt to explain that I was at the Chester Workforce Development Center for a newspaper interview, not because I didn't have a job.

As the woman found the person I was scheduled to talk to, I looked around the room. The faces, the black, the white, the men, the women, even the child on one lady's lap, told me that this is not where people come with the hope of finding a new career. They are here for survival.

I spent almost a month reporting and writing the stories about Chester County’s jobless community that have appeared in The Herald over the last few days. I sat in community centers in Great Falls and Fort Lawn, a McDonald’s in Richburg and school classrooms in Chester, among other places.

The message I thought I heard was clear: Chester County’s textile mills closed, but many of its workers remain without jobs. Some need a GED. Some can’t read. And the agencies that can help these people aren’t working together like they should.

Two conversations changed my mind.

The first was with a guy named John Williams, who many Chester people know as the man who divides his time between a food pantry, a discount clothing store and a drug and alcohol abuse program for men. The Turning Point is the name of that ministry.

I wanted to talk to John because unemployment, the side nobody wants to see, is in many ways his life. John told me about unemployed people who turn to drugs when they lose hope. He talked about how unemployment affects a family, and the story of a 17-year-old girl who couldn’t get to a job interview because she didn’t know someone with a working car, with enough gas, to get her there.

But ever the preacher, John turned the conversation to me. My scruffy beard and my disheveled hair, he said, might not settle well with some employers. For one reason or another, he said, I could be out of a job someday.

I thought about my mortgage, my wife’s grad school tuition and bills. Then, using John’s logic, I quietly wondered what I would do without my work. But I still didn’t get it.

Columnist Andrew Dys finally drove the point home for me. He was writing a story about a woman who had lost her son in Afghanistan. I told him I’d only interviewed one mother shortly after such a tragedy and it had to be the most difficult thing I’d done “in this profession.”

“It’s not a profession,” Andrew snapped. “It’s just a job.”

That stung. But it made sense. It’s why I was standing in the employment office that day last month rambling like a fool because some person thought that I needed help. I mean, I was a professional...

But I’m not. I just have a job, like the thousands of Chester County people who once worked in those textile mills.

I hope these stories help some of those folks. I hope the agencies in the county find a way to work together like they should. I hope new industry comes to Chester and brings thousands of jobs that will stay in the county for years and years.

And yes, I hope others learn to look beyond job status and see themselves.