End of the Census = end of a job

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — It was a finely honed machine, this U.S. Census team, and it had a good run. But in the coming days and weeks, many of its members will experience the pain of unemployment — once again.

Christine Egan, 31, a massage therapist, said her census job offered shelter from the economic storm last year.

“The economy was terrible; there was nothing,” she said. “I’ve already gone through ‘horrific,’ so I’m immunized.”

She smiled, optimism almost extending to her eyes.

“It must be better now, right?” she asked

When the Census Bureau hired upward of 700,000 Americans over the last two years — most in the last six months — it landed more experienced workers with more sophisticated skills than any time in recent memory. This was the upside of the nastiest recession of the past 70 years.

Now, its decennial work largely done, the Census Bureau is shedding hundreds of thousands of workers — about 225,000 in just the last few weeks, enough to account for a jot or two in the unemployment rate, say federal economists. Most of those remaining will be gone by August; a few will last into September.

In past decades, the bureau faced a challenge just keeping workers around to close up shop, as most dashed for new jobs that might pay better. Not this time around. Jobs remain scarce. In Rhode Island, the unemployment rate stands at 12.3 percent, higher than a year ago. The national rate, too, has not budged.

As most census workers have nowhere to go, rushed farewells are rare. Self-reflection, and a touch of anxiety, mark the mood.

“Typically at this point in the process, we’re losing a lot of people because they’re taking jobs,” said Kathleen Ludgate, the regional director in Boston. “I wish we had that problem now.”

Ludgate receives notes from departing workers, some by e-mail, others in ink. They thank her for the chance to learn something about themselves and their country. They write to say their confidence had picked up, that they can again meet the gaze of friends and neighbors.

These are the missives of hard-working people who found themselves in a tighter spot than they ever expected and who came to view census work as a lifeline.

Bureaucratic quirks make life in this recession a nerve-racking ride. Many departing census workers will be eligible for unemployment, although by no means all of them.

Some census employees, particularly those who knocked on doors — known as enumerators — worked in fits and starts. They were dispatched intensively, then laid off, then rehired. Unemployment rules are a crazy quilt, with no two states quite the same.

“If a worker was in the last tier of long-term unemployment, they might not be able to go back to unemployment,” said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project. “They may have been better off not taking this job.”

Perhaps so. But in the Providence office, workers speak of a certain joy that comes with applying their minds.

What’s left of the Providence team works out of a ground-floor office that overlooks a cemetery, and on a recent morning workers checked tallies and researched vacant buildings. Bob Hamilton, the director, introduced his staff.

Egan, the massage therapist with a degree in history from the University of Rhode Island, was his assistant field manager. Vada Seccareccia, an architect with the undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College, is his payroll manager. And the soft-spoken young mother who oversees the clerks? Yasmin Mercedes has years of retail experience and, if she can’t find work, plans to go to college this fall.

“You look for people who had certain skills in a previous life,” Hamilton said. “It’s not hard to find them, not with this god-awful economy.”

Wages vary by regional cost of living and responsibilities. A census worker might get $17 an hour in Providence, $23 in Boston or $12.25 in Jackson, Miss.

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