Burke Devore’s prolonged unemployment

Burke Devore’s prolonged unemployment is the consequence of an industrial restructuring that makes experienced middle managers surplus even as they remain capable of doing the work. After Halcyon Mills eliminates his product line, he spends months in company-sponsored transition counseling and then searches for a new position in a crowded market where employers can choose among many qualified candidates. The loss becomes both a financial strain on the Devore family and a crisis of professional identity: Burke knows the paper industry, but knowledge alone no longer secures a job.

Layoff and the promised transition

Burke had worked for Halcyon Mills for twenty years: four as sales director and sixteen as product manager. Rumors of downsizing, followed by two smaller reductions in staff, meant that the yellow slip handed to him with his paycheck in October 1995 was not a complete surprise. The process was presented as orderly and supportive. Counting the final five months he remained at the mill after receiving notice, Burke says he followed the company’s transition process for sixteen months, including counseling, résumé training, and consideration of other options. The language of professional care softened the announcement, but not its consequence: his work was being brought to an end.

The scale of the reduction made clear that his case was part of a broader contraction. The Belial mill of Halcyon Mills went from 2,100 employees to 1,575, a cut of roughly one quarter. Burke’s product line was discontinued; Machine No. 11 was sold for scrap, and the work was absorbed by the company’s Canadian affiliate. The five-month lead time initially seemed useful, giving him time to look for another job while he remained on salary through Christmas. It also marked a gradual separation from work rather than an immediate break, a period in which the company could describe his departure as managed while his place in the organization had already disappeared.

Severance and family insecurity

The severance package offered real support, but its terms also made the limits of that support precise. Burke received ten months’ pay, calculated at one month for every two years of service; two months were paid at a somewhat lower rate. The company also continued medical coverage for four years, based on one year for every five years of employment. That coverage protected Marjorie Devore and Burke, while Billy’s coverage was due to end when he turned nineteen. Betsy, already nineteen, was uninsured. Burke therefore faced not only a finite period of income support but a family whose access to insurance differed by age and would change again within months.

A separate payment for vacation time, sick time, and other accrued items came to $4,716.22. Burke regards the calculation as so elaborate that he doubts he would have noticed a small difference in the amount. The exact sum stands beside the much larger uncertainties the package could not settle: whether he would find another position, how long the search would take, and what would happen when benefits expired. Later, Burke describes the household as running out of money and time. The package cushions the transition; it does not remove the economic precarity that gives the search its urgency.

A search with too few openings

Burke initially understood unemployment as many displaced workers do: an unexpected vacation before a quick return to work elsewhere. His experience overturns that expectation. Layoffs are widespread across industries, while the number of companies firing exceeds the number hiring. More applicants pursue fewer jobs, so a period of unemployment cannot be explained simply by a candidate’s unwillingness to work or lack of effort.

He makes the search tangible and repetitive. He puts his education, work history, and life onto a résumé; buys manila folders and first-class stamps; makes thirty copies at a drugstore copying machine for five cents each; and circles promising advertisements in The New York Times. He also pays for trade journals that his employer had once supplied, including Pulp and The Paperman, and studies them closely to keep up with the industry. The routine involves both ordinary expense and a professional discipline: Burke is trying to remain current in a field that may move on without him.

His expertise is not in doubt in his own account. Burke believes he could take on almost any managerial job in the paper industry with minimal training in a particular specialty. But employers facing a surplus of applicants need not hire a broadly capable manager and train him. They can select someone already trained for the precise function, often willing to accept lower pay and fewer benefits simply to secure employment. Burke sends résumés and often receives no reply. The silence gives him no way to determine whether his salary expectations, wording, or omissions have cost him an opportunity; the application process offers effort without explanation or assurance.

Competition and the narrowing of professional identity

The market makes small distinctions consequential. Burke believes that even if his knowledge, experience, willingness, and proficiency match another applicant’s, an interviewer may prefer the person with a slightly better education or some less measurable advantage: manner, voice, smile, shared sporting interest, or choice of tie. The problem, as he sees it, is not that he is incapable of doing the work. It is that there will almost always be someone marginally closer to an employer’s ideal, and employers no longer need to settle for a second choice.

The résumés he encounters sharpen this sense of comparison. Burke dismisses applications aimed indiscriminately at jobs far beyond their writers’ specific experience, but worries about candidates whose backgrounds resemble his own and whose credentials may look a little stronger. Herbert Everly’s résumé illustrates the careful self-presentation expected of older applicants: it omits a photograph and employment dates, though it still gives clues in the form of twenty-three years of experience and a 1969 college graduation. It presents Everly as impersonal and businesslike, and Burke judges it adequate to win an interview. The example shows how résumé writing becomes a form of signaling, with age, experience, and personal presentation managed as part of the contest for a limited opening.

Burke’s sense of the competition is also bounded by time. The résumés in his files come from people laid off around the same period as he was, roughly six or seven months before or after his own dismissal. He treats this group as the immediate labor pool for the jobs he seeks. But industrial layoffs recur in waves: if he does not secure a position before another round of reductions, a fresh group of applicants may enter the market. The prospect turns waiting into a threat of further crowding and makes speed seem as important as competence.

Automation and the vanishing middle

Burke’s account places his personal loss within a change in how large companies are organized. He describes three broad levels: executives who make decisions, workers who produce goods, and middle managers who carry information between them. Managers relay orders downward and reports of completed work upward; they also communicate material needs to suppliers and product availability to distributors. In this structure, middle management serves as a conduit between those who direct production and those who perform it.

The computer, in Burke’s analysis, takes over much of that coordinating function. Companies still retain some managers to perform specific tasks, but no longer require the hundreds or thousands who had previously passed information through the organization. Burke argues that middle management is being reduced even when a company is profitable: computerized systems make managers unnecessary, facilitate mergers, and allow companies to strengthen returns to shareholders. The consequences fall unevenly. The organization becomes more efficient by its own measure, while experienced managers lose their jobs and face competition for the smaller number of positions that remain.

Burke’s own sought-after production-line job is an exception to complete replacement. It still requires one or two people able to oversee the line and communicate with workers, so the position exists even as comparable managerial work disappears elsewhere. That exception helps explain the urgency of his search: he does not imagine that all work has vanished, but that openings have become scarce, specific, and exposed to successive waves of displaced applicants. His unemployment is thus both a personal financial emergency and a symptom of a labor market in which accumulated expertise cannot guarantee continued employment.