ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Janet Mahoney has never had to apply for a job since getting out of college 20 years ago. With high-tech positions popping up all over town, companies were wooing her.
But as one of the growing number of employees let go by fiber-optic networking company Global Crossing Ltd., which filed for bankruptcy protection in January, the 41-year-old technology executive is finding the job market much different.
Now, she's using an executive recruitment firm to help her polish her resume, give her interviewing tips and devise a strategy to land a job. Her only requirement: She wants to stay in the family-friendly Rochester area.
That won't be easy because Rochester also is struggling. The six-county area of 1.1 million in upstate New York is trying to maintain its status as a pocket of affluence and resiliency while it attempts to redefine itself and lessen its dependence on the region's dominant employer, Eastman Kodak Co. It is an economy in transition as Kodak, which once accounted for 22% of the region's payroll, has dismissed nearly two-thirds of its local work force in the last 20 years--a total of 36,000 jobs.
Kodak is cutting more this year, and Global Crossing's Rochester operation--the company's biggest with more than 1,300 employees a year ago--probably will take another hit after the company's news Friday that it will cut 1,600 more workers in the coming months.
Community leaders long have boasted about Rochester's elastic economy, which has been able to withstand several decades of battering to a hard-hit manufacturing sector stretching from Buffalo to the Adirondack Mountains. An ever-emerging stream of small, new companies consistently has picked up the slack from major layoffs at Kodak and the other giant employers, Xerox Corp. and Bausch & Lomb Inc., and increased the job ranks every year.
But last week, as a wet March snow blew in off Lake Ontario, the region felt another kind of chill: The state Labor Department's monthly survey found that the historically low unemployment rate jumped to 6.3% in January, higher than the nation's 5.5%, and that the area had lost 12,400 jobs in the previous 12 months.
For Rochester's popular, dynamic mayor, William A. Johnson Jr., the news wasn't surprising. Long warning that the elastic in the economy was getting stretched out, Johnson proclaimed that the area had reached the saturation point in its ability to absorb the thousands of jobs eliminated at the Big Three and elsewhere.
