Double layoffs a double whammy for couples

Published 8:35 pm Friday, February 6, 2009

It is a well-known risk to lack diversity in an investment portfolio. Now, couples employed by the same company are learning a similar lesson, the hard way.

As layoffs mount across the country and in all sectors, couples who are co-workers are increasingly vulnerable to losing their families’ twin sources of income at once. The lack of variety in job skills can also make it difficult to bounce back, especially in a struggling industry.

Such hard times have befallen Pam Podger and John Cramer, who met as reporters at The Fresno Bee in California in 1991 and later went to the Roanoke Times in Virginia.

When the Times began cutting costs and offering early retirements last year, the couple jumped ship and thought they had found safe harbor at The Missoulian, a 40,000-circulation newspaper in Missoula, Mont.

Less than 10 months later, the publisher laid them off, unsettling the new life they had begun with their two toddlers.

“Do I wish one of us had a sudden yen to go into medicine, law, business? Sure, some days,” Podger said.

Podger now freelances and teaches part time, while her husband has a part-time job at a smaller paper owned by the same publisher.

Whatever the financial risks, it is simply unrealistic to expect couples who fall in love on the job or while studying the same field in school to be thinking about revenue diversification, said Stephanie Coontz, a family studies professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia.

“I imagine that people will try to be more thoughtful about not putting all their economic eggs in the same basket, but I doubt if they will start trying to meet people outside their field just for economic reasons,” Coontz said.

People searching for a lifetime partner say the idea of choosing mates based on their careers would add too much complication to a difficult process.

“Most of the single people I know are happy just to find another single person they get along with let alone worry about what kind of job they have,” said Margaret Warren, 45, a Pensacola artist and computer consultant who dates a restorer of antique automobiles.

Double layoffs would have been extremely rare just a couple of generations ago.

Before the 1970s, families weathered economic downturns by sending the non-working spouse, typically wives, into the work force. But today roughly 53 percent of all married couples, and 64 percent of married couples with children under age 18, rely on two incomes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In theory that should have increased financial security. Instead, couples often use the extra income to buy bigger homes and other luxuries, said Rick Harper, director of the University of West Florida’s Haas Center for Business Research. “In the 1980s, both spouses worked and the savings rate for families went from 12 and 14 percent to essentially zero,” he said. “In this decade, households smoothed over the rough spots by taking equity out of their homes. Now there is no equity left to take.”