Business

Labor’s lost faces

CITY FIELD: Marilyn Berenzweig and hubby Michael keep things real, while Charles Bowers shows off his modest living room at Tent City, NJ, a 70-person homeless camp that has all the earmarks of Depression-era housing (except for a lone Mercedes.)

CITY FIELD: Marilyn Berenzweig and hubby Michael keep things real, while Charles Bowers shows off his modest living room at Tent City, NJ, a 70-person homeless camp that has all the earmarks of Depression-era housing (except for a lone Mercedes.) (Rich Schultz)

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TENT CITY, NJ — Marilyn Berenzweig worked in Manhattan for more than 35 years, rising to design director for a textile company. She was paid $100,000 a year before being laid off from an industry that is mostly deserting New York for the Far East.

Now she and her husband, Michael, live in a tent in the woods among 70 or so other homeless people in Lakewood, a Central New Jersey town about 10 miles inland from the Jersey Shore.

Most of the all-adult residents of this heavily wooded community, known locally as Tent City, say they can’t find a job or affordable housing.

“I like to camp,” says Marilyn, 61. “I’ve always liked the outdoors.”

Michael, 62, is incongruously playing a piano that’s under a plastic sheet while Marilyn and I talk..

“It was a struggle for years. Every time you turned around you heard of a company closing a studio,” said Marilyn as she cleaned paintbrushes on a folding table. She’s been unemployed for 2 1/2 years and has basically given up looking — which means she, like millions of others across America, isn’t even counted by the government as being jobless.

There are just no opportunities out there, she says.

I visited this seven-acre community last Friday, the day the Labor Department reported what — to those who are clueless, at least — were good employment numbers for January.

I thought it would be good to put some faces to the statistics.

As you probably heard, Labor on Friday morning announced that 243,000 new jobs were created in January. I wrote on Saturday that the figure was incredibly misleading, even if it was picked up — unquestioned — by every news organization in the country.

In truth, Labor’s survey of companies found that 2,689,000 jobs had disappeared in January, which shouldn’t surprise you, because seasonal workers are always laid off during the first month of the year.

That 2,689,000 figure is the raw, unadjusted, not-tampered-with number.

In January 2011, there were 2,858,000 jobs lost.

Since last month’s decline in jobs was less than in the previous January, and thus lower than Labor’s computers expected, it was converted into a seasonally adjusted gain of those 243,000 jobs.

And the decline in the unemployment rate to 8.3 percent from 8.5 percent was mostly due to people like Marilyn completely dropping out of the labor force and no longer being counted.

The folks here got a good laugh out of the government’s numbers.

“I positively do not believe the economy is improving,” says Charles Bowers, 43, who goes by the nickname “Country.” From Tennessee, he had worked in construction before the housing bust.

Bowers and his son, Anthony, started living in his tent two months ago. I’ll introduce you to Anthony in Thursday’s column.

“They need to do something about the job situation and the homeless situation,” said Country.

He’s referring to the guys in Washington, but mainly President Obama. “If he can fix the jobs situation, he’ll have fixed the homeless situation,” he adds.

The guy in charge of Tent City is Rev. Steve Brigham, a former electrical contractor who started the camp more than five years ago. In the early years it was filled mostly with the mentally ill or addicts who flocked here because Ocean County didn’t have facilities for such people.

“Now we are finding people coming down who are falling through the cracks economically,” says Brigham. “Over the last two weeks, it’s almost a person a day” moving to Tent City, he says.