Valley residents struggle with unemployment

Mathis Winkler

Monday, Oct. 1, 2001 | 10:11 a.m.

The four lowestfare.com co-workers still get up early, even though they no longer have to report to the Internet-based travel agency. And they can't fall asleep at night, they say.

After more than five years of regular paychecks, the women -- all single mothers -- now worry about how to pay their bills.

Like thousands of workers across the Las Vegas Valley, travel agents Cassie Williams, Jesi Bahn, Linda Griffin and Lexie Suafoa received pink slips last week as tourism slumped after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

They were among 12,924 people statewide, most of them from Las Vegas, who have filed unemployment insurance claims in the two weeks since the attacks, state officials said Friday.

Now the four, who were let go last Monday, are struggling to balance their feelings of frustration and helplessness with a need to go on.

"You really don't know where you can get help from," said Williams, one of 460, or about half the work force, laid off by the Las Vegas-based company owned by billionaire casino owner Carl Icahn. Four-hundred of those layoffs occurred in Las Vegas.

Williams, 27, says the job loss still seems unreal.

"I feel like we're on a long vacation," Williams said, sitting in the $1,100-a-month townhouse she recently rented to live closer to work. "I'm bored. I'm ready to go do something. I'm ready to go back to work."

But there's no sign that will happen soon, Williams said. Nobody seems to be hiring, and she has to get a job that will allow her to take care of her 8-year-old son, Aaron, she said.

"I need a job that will allow me to survive," she said. "I can't kill myself trying to make a living."

After sharing the grief of other Americans over the attacks, Williams feels like she's become a victim herself.

"People donate to New York, but there's also people here affected," she said.

That feeling is echoed by others, who have flooded the state's welfare centers to ask for help.

Filling out an application for welfare assistance at the state office in Henderson with a friend, a woman who lost her job as a dealer at the MGM Grand said she felt betrayed. The woman declined to give her name.

"Everybody's laying off. I can't believe they could do this to anybody," she said. "I thought that we were supposed to unite together. It's absolutely insane. What are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do now?"

Such feelings are understandable, said Mark R. Floyd, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who notes that unemployment can lead to depression.

"Work is such an important thing to us," he said. "To a great extent you are defined for what you do for a living.

"You get up every day and go to work, you really don't question that that's going to change," he said. "You get accustomed to it and then, boom, one day you get the word. It's a big change."

Griffin, one of the laid-off travel agents, has started to look for help to tide her over.

Last Wednesday she visited the state welfare office on East Charleston Boulevard to find out about Medicaid. She'll have to return on Oct. 8 to discuss her situation in more detail, she said.

Since she and her colleagues received two weeks' severance pay, Griffin can't apply for unemployment until that has run out.

A 36-year-old mother of three and grandmother of one and her family's sole supporter, she said she's having trouble making her kids realize that things will have to change.

"My daughter is like, 'Where are you going to get money? What are we going to do?"' Griffin said.

Suafoa, 30, also has tried to explain the situation to Alex, her 7-year-old son.

"I told him not to ask for as much as he was asking for, because I no longer have a job," she said. "He said, 'Why don't you have a job anymore?' I explained to him it's not as it used to be anymore. He understands."

And she's hoping that she will soon return to work.

"We're all hoping that people will realize that something like this can't scare all of America," Suafoa said. "I do think that business will start picking up again, when all is said and done, and I think everyone is going to be OK."

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