October 27, 2008 10:57 AM

Putting faces to the layoffs
Posted by Jesse Nunesat 10:57 AM

It's one thing to read about most recent company that is announcing layoffs, or see the number of unemployed grow in the monthly labor reports. It's another thing to put faces to the names, to see the effect this down economy is having on individuals and families.

As the number of layoffs and cutbacks continue as the economy continues to feel the effects of the credit crisis, more and more people will either be directly effected, or know someone close to them who is.

A story in the Sunday Globe by way of the New York Times News Service looks at one family from Alabama that was hit hard by job losses in a very short time. From the story:

Dwight and Rochelle Stokes, both in their late 20s, have just joined the layoff rolls. So has Dwight Stokes's father, Warren, 48, who lost a $30-an-hour job this month on the assembly line of the Chrysler truck plant in Fenton, Mo., near St. Louis., where the father had worked for 12 years.

Just a year ago, he and Rochelle, and their two very young children, moved to Phenix City from Fenton so he could take the mechanic job at the Pratt & Whitney plant in nearby Columbus, Ga. Airlines send engines there for periodic overhauls, and when Dwight Stokes arrived 400 workers were tearing down and rebuilding 15 engines a month.

But as the airlines reduced their flights - and announced 36,000 job cuts, nearly all of them taking place in the current fourth quarter - that number fell to three engines this month and "it was going to be worse for November, just one or two," Dwight Stokes said.

[Dwight Stokes lost his job] a few days after his wife lost hers as a cosmetologist at Great Clips, a family-owned barbershop and beauty salon.

"It got really slow in July and August," Rochelle Stokes said. "I would sit there for two hours, and some days we had only 10 clients, four of us for 10 clients."

To read the whole story, which includes dire predictions for the year ahead, click here.