Laid-off workers speak out: ‘Any help will help’
Tennesseans’ lives upended by COVID-19
Every good restaurant manager needs the occasional break from the business, says Becky Sellars, but this is a break she can’t afford.
Sellars, of Bartlett, was laid off from restaurant chain IHOP as sales plummeted amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The former manager and her boyfriend, who was laid off at Abuelo’s Mexican Restaurant, can pay a few weeks’ worth of bills as they look for new jobs. Finances will begin to look dicey beyond that for the couple, who have a 12-year-old child to support.
“If we can’t get employed in the month of April, what are we going to have to do to survive?” Sellars said.
Sellars is among the fast-growing population of Americans who have been laid off from their jobs, many in the restaurant and hotel industries, as the coronavirus outbreak has upended day-to-day life and drained the sales of businesses unfit for social distancing.
Tennessee hasn’t been shielded from the swell of layoffs. The state Department of Labor and Workforce Development said last week it has seen a large increase in unemployment claims.
For the week ending March 14, 2,702 people filed unemployment claims, per the federal Department of Labor.
The next week, that number jumped to 39,096 claims reported by Tennessee.
As Tennesseans and other Americans seek a new source of income, Congress is nearing a deal on a $2 trillion in emergency relief that would provide one-time payments to Americans, among other measures like expanded unemployment insurance coverage. Sellars said she doesn’t want Congress to delay aid any longer.
“At this point, any help will help,” she said.
Jackson man’s event work vanishes
With the high demand for unemployment benefits, the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development is extending customer service hours and tripling the number of employees trained to process claim applications.
“As a Department, we are shifting resources to align with our greatest need,” said department Commissioner Jeff Mccord in a statement. “The changes we are making will go a long way in keeping up with the demand created.”
Steven Morgan said he has been in touch with the state unemployment office since he was laid off as an event marketer at gutter protection company Leaffilter.
Morgan, a Jackson resident who worked in Leaffilter’s Memphis office, represented the company at events to help generate sales. On March 10, he began to notice a wave of event cancellations due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Every time the marketing team attempted to supplement one canceled event with another, the new event would be canceled, Morgan said.
“Within about a four-day timespan, everything was shut down,” said Morgan, who has been out of work since March 14. “We literally lost all of our scheduled work.”
Morgan expressed frustration over the company’s lack of communication to hourly employees during the pandemic, but Amazon has since hired him. On Tuesday, Morgan said he was waiting for his start date at the e-commerce giant for seasonal work in both customer service and warehouse fulfillment.
The warehouse job is based in St. Peters, Missouri, meaning a four-hour commute for Morgan. He said he’s lucky he has the flexibility to do so.
“I’m going to go up there and get a hotel room to stay up there,” Morgan said. “Had I had kids, that would be completely impossible.”
Some are aiming to stay put until their jobs come back. Stephanie Weir, who was laid off Monday from her data specialist position at United Auto Recovery in Collierville, said she wants to never see a pandemic like this again in her lifetime.
“I’m just kind of in limbo,” she said. “I hope this doesn’t last too long. … I can hold on (financially) maybe two weeks.”
Her heart ‘is in pancake land’
Sellars and her boyfriend are staying at home during the pandemic and applying for jobs. The COVID-19 outbreak was already a concerning development for her as she has a weakened immune system due to systemic lupus.
On Tuesday, Sellars said she is “looking for anything temporary or seasonal” in terms of work, but she expects the job she had with IHOP to return eventually.
“I don’t want to make a long-term commitment to another business when
I know my heart is in pancake land,” she said.
Sellars had worked for IHOP “off and on” for the past three years, beginning as an assistant manager at the local Wolfchase IHOP and most recently working as a regional training manager based primarily in Cordova.
The 15-hour shifts she encountered were demanding, but Sellars enjoyed helping other employees advance up the career ladder and connecting with restaurant regulars. One frequent diner was a 76-year-old man who would eat at the Wolfchase IHOP every morning as his wife was in a nursing home and he couldn’t make breakfast himself.
Sellars was concerned as the coronavirus started affecting local restaurant sales, but she still expected to return to work as usual after a trip to Arizona to visit family. IHOP laid her off March 19.
“I was a little shocked, but I also understand,” she said. “We had to start doing delivery or to-go (orders), and 70% to 80% of our business had always been dine-in at IHOP. There wasn’t a quick enough conversion, and that massively impacted sales.”
‘Ghost town(s)’ hurts restaurant workers
Stephane Marshall knows she isn’t alone. Memphis restaurant Bluefin laid off the server and bartender on March 13. Her years of experience in the restaurant industry were no longer
needed due to the coronavirus pandemic. When she picked up her last paycheck this month, she saw the normally lively South Main Street where the restaurant is located has turned into “a ghost town.” COVID-19 has walloped restaurant industry employees as the option to dine-in has vanished.
“I have never seen it that dead downtown,” said Marshall, who lives in Memphis.
Marshall always enjoyed talking to bar patrons — especially when they had a drink or two in them. But she’s willing to branch out of the restaurant industry into a field with better pay, especially to support her 9-year-old and 2-year-old children.
“I’m trying to do something more in customer service or warehouse (work),” she said.
Whatever the field, Marshall wants to get started soon. Relief from Congress could help, although she is worried it may not come soon enough for people who have been out work for weeks.
“I’m pretty low on cash,” she said. “It’s like (I’m) trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents. It’s hard right now, but I’m trying to make it through.”
‘No chance’ for DJ work
Jared Park makes his living playing tunes and talking on the microphone.
Since the pandemic, he has spent a lot of time talking to himself. Park, whose stage name is Manelic, is a Nashville DJ who is out of work with local hangouts, bars and restaurants shut down.
“All my work pretty much resided in bars and public meetings so as soon as people started taking (the coronavirus) a little bit more seriously and then especially with the safer-at-home mandate, there was no chance of me getting that type of DJ work at all,” he said.
Park has applied for unemployment while also trying to come up with supplemental income by reaching out to Musicares, which provides assistance for people in the music industry in difficult times, United Way and some other nonprofit organizations.
“I’m mainly just trying to figure out financially how I’m going to stay afloat for the next month or so,” Park said. “I would expect that once the restrictions lift and bars are allowed to open back up, I’ll have an income again.”
He is the regular DJ on Saturdays at the Flamingo Cocktail Club on Houston Street and Fridays at Pearl Diver on Gallatin Avenue. He also performs at private events through the week.
“My weekly schedule revolved around preparing my playlist, making my own blends and just doing preparation work,” he said. “So pretty much all of my work kind of came to a halt.”
Park is also a producer and songwriter and is using the downtime to focus more on that.
Videographer counted on sports
Carl Heinemann was on his way from Nashville to Tuscaloosa to shoot video of Alabama’s spring football practice when he got the call he dreaded. Alabama coach Nick Saban had canceled practice because of the coronavirus.
Alabama’s practice was Heinemann’s last hope. Ole Miss, Kentucky and Tennessee had already canceled, and Heinemann, a videographer, had been booked by ESPN to shoot spring
practice at each of those schools.
Almost all of Heinemann’s work in March has been wiped out by the pandemic. And when Heinemann doesn’t work, he doesn’t get paid.
Heinemann, owner of Heinemann Productions Inc., has a niche in sports and was counting on a big March, as he does every year.
“For the start of the year, March is the busiest time of the year for us,” Heinemann said.
“We already had on the books a lot of sports. We were at the SEC Basketball Tournament that Thursday morning (March 12) when it was canceled. We got paid through that day, but missed out on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. After that I would have done Dick Vitale Bracketology.
Plus, I had MLS and Predators games that all went away.”
Heinemann also does freelance work for the NFL and NHL networks along with several others.
“We’re in it just like my vendors are in it — they’ve lost a lot, too,” he said. “They’re trying to figure out ways to stay on the air with creative programming. I’m sure their advertising is going to go down because they don’t have games on the air.” It is a predicament Heinemann never expected to be in.
“I’ve been at this for more than 25 years, and I always said I was good because there’s always going to be sports and there’s always going to be television and with that would be work,” Heinemann said. “I can’t say that anymore.”
Double-whammy for musician, bartender
When Jessica Wilkes, a Nashville musician, learned the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas – where she was scheduled to play earlier in the month – had been canceled, she was glad she had a backup for means of income.
Wilkes is also a bartender at Duke’s restaurant and bar in East Nashville.
“When South by Southwest got canceled I think we all started to realize how serious this pandemic was and what I thought was, at least I have the bar,” she said.
Wilkes then got hit with a doublewhammy.
A week later Duke’s was closed because of the pandemic.
“It’s especially difficult because it’s Music City so most of my friends are touring musicians and or service industry people and now they find themselves without a job,” Wilkes said.
“I realize that’s a lot of people in the world; it’s not just Nashville. But it started hitting here with the cancellations of tours pretty rapidly.”
Wilkes said the pandemic came at a particularly difficult time for many of her regulars at Duke’s who were still recovering from the tornadoes that hit earlier in the month.
“I felt like Duke’s was kind of a gathering place for everybody that was displaced from the storms and didn’t know what to do with their time,” Wilkes said. “The rest of the world was still aware of what was going on (with the coronavirus) while we were still recovering from the tornado. You know, it’s hard to pay attention to two crises at the same time. So I think most people’s attention who come into the bar was on helping people here in their immediate surroundings, and then we came up from air from that and realized the rest of the world was under quarantine.”