July 9, 2011
Chicago-- Christopher Joseph Lombard, 53, looks composed wearing a Cubs jersey over his emaciated body, sitting on a bench on the corner of North Clark Street and West Berwyn Avenue. Unemployed for almost two years, he seems unmoved by the news that unemployment rose to a grim 9.2 percent on Friday in its third consecutive monthly increase.
Lombard, who has been living in Edgewater for the past year and a half, worked as a cab driver in Detroit and used to make decent money. The company folded in early 2009 and he became jobless.
“I had to cut back on a lot of things that I liked to do,” Lombard said. “Paying the rent, just getting the odd jobs here and just squeaking by enough to get the rent paid.”
While he was unemployed, he had to frequent soup kitchens on a regular basis. He spent a lot of time riding his bicycle because he could not afford to drive his car, which stayed parked for almost two years.
Finding work was hard. He used to walk the streets every day looking for any kind of labor jobs. Sometimes he was lucky, sometimes not. “You have to be willing to go out, maybe, and scrounge like that too,” Lombard said. Six months ago, he finally found a steady truck-driving job through a connection with Chinese Mutual Aid Association, a community-based social services agency in Uptown.
“I don’t so much see unemployment as being a problem, I know there is a lot of work out here, it might not be what a person wants to do,” Lombard said. “That’s why I think unemployment rate is too high because a lot of people are being too selective.”
Life is different for the 56-year-old African-American Terry Kyles, who was visiting Edgewater from the West Town: he has been unemployed for the last three years after losing his job at Suncast Corp., a household storage manufacturing company. He survives on food stamps now.
Christine Dumdum, a 39-year-old manager at Richman Tax Solutions Inc. in Edgewater, said that the number of unemployed clients in her office has increased by 10 to 20 percent since last year. “Mostly, my clients that are experiencing unemployment are laborers,” Dumdum said.
She has seen many cases of people who have been unemployed for over a year.
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