Lost Jobs Are Echo of Tragedy

Ellis Henican

October 5, 2001

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"You want to see my resume?" William Pierson was asking yesterday.

Pierson comes to us from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. He's a sturdy 40-year-old with a serious manner and large, steady hands. He handed me a single piece of paper, neatly typed and well laid out.

Fifteen years managing a large file room for McGraw Hill - supervising a staff, dealing with lawyers, keeping complex records straight. Followed by three years in the lobbies of 1 and 2 World Trade Center, a job that ended, quite abruptly, in a giant pile of rubble on the morning of Sept. 11.

"It was a lot more than a security job," he said. "It was data entry. It was customer service. We would keep track of who was coming and going from the towers, maintaining a large database. We dealt with anything that came up."

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And then, like thousands of others from the Twin Towers and from many miles around, William Pierson was suddenly out of work. He is one of the human echoes - and now the echoes of echoes - of the World Trade terror attack.

Not as tragic as the dead or the missing, for sure. But here and alive and dusting himself off, eager to carry on.

Yesterday, Pierson turned up on the 16th floor of 275 Seventh Ave., which is the Emergency Employment Clearinghouse, a program of the nonprofit Consortium for Worker Education.

"I'm not looking for any grass growing beneath my feet," he said of his employment plans.

With support from the Central Labor Council and the New York Partnership, the clearinghouse has received promises from thousands of employers to hire - at least temporarily - people thrown out of work by the World Trade Center terror attacks. These displaced workers are now showing up for job leads, training referrals, resume workshops, counseling sessions and other "quick fix" employment services. It's an impressive effort thrown together in almost no time at all.

Some of these people, like Pierson, worked right at Ground Zero. Others, like Michael Staten and Andrea Urban, have lost jobs in distant parts of town.

They all faced these new realities yesterday, as City Comptroller Alan Hevesi announced he expects terror-attack job losses to reach 115,000. Each of their stories is rattling unique.

"I saw the look of my boss's face, and I knew immediately," said Staten, a 24-year-old industrial designer who worked for a marble company. "He said, 'You're not the only one affected.' I don't even know if they're still in business this week."

The company was in Brooklyn. "But a majority of the clients were in the World Trade Center area," Staten said. "One big job was supposed to be delivered that day. Now some of the clients don't even have companies any more."

The job losses happened in all kinds of direct and indirect ways.

"Someone attacks the World Trade Center, and it's 'boom, boom, boom' - the effects are felt in all these other locations," said Urban, an actress who is now without her day job as a chiropractor's assistant.

"It was an actor's dream job," she said. "Good pay. The last woman had left for 'All My Children.' And now the temporary services say their regular people are taking even the lowest-paid jobs."

One stopgap?

Urban's husband, also an actor, was taking their 22-month-old to meet commercial agents yesterday. "We're putting our son to work," she laughed.

William Pierson, from the World Trade lobby, said he's not sure what has become of the company he worked for, Unique Security. There are rumors of a bankruptcy, he said. "My union is trying to get us our back pay," Pierson said. "We haven't heard anything yet."

All he knows, he said, is he has a 16-year-old daughter. His paychecks have stopped. And he'd better find something in a hurry.

"That morning," he remembered, "I got in at 7:45. I was in the South Tower, Tower Two. I saw everything. At first we thought the noise had something to do with the engineering system."

But the metal started flying. The sound of breaking glass was everywhere. "I got out 10 minutes before my tower collapsed," he said.

For a few days, Pierson said, he tried to collect himself. He had nightmares. He felt intensely sad.

"I had two counseling sessions with the Red Cross," he said. "That was really helpful. Then, I went down to the site. That's how I got over my fear. It makes you realize this terrible thing did happen, but there's nothing you can do about it. You can't control it.

"All you can do is get on with your life," said William Pierson, temporarily displaced worker.

"All you can do is get back to work."