I experienced my first corporate layoff when I was only 25 years old. I was already married, and my husband Brad and I were in the middle of building a new house. At such a young age and with very little work (or life) experience under our belts, we were ill prepared for this kind of financial setback.

We had moved to the Dallas, Texas area 4 years earlier from our hometown of Grand Forks, North Dakota so that Brad could attend graduate school. But he always worked part time even while he was in school, and his part-time job was as a trim carpenter, something he was quite skilled at. He quickly made connections with a group of home builders who built new homes on “spec,” which meant they didn’t have a buyer yet, but they would get them started with a standard, popular floor plan. Usually at a later stage of construction, potential buyers would tour the partially built homes and make a purchase agreement. They would then be able to make choices on the final finishes that would go into the home—the paint colors, tile, carpeting or wood flooring, paneling, stain colors, appliances, countertops, etc.

What Brad contracted out was all the finish woodwork in the houses: hanging the doors, putting up all the trim (baseboards, crown moulding, windowsills and frames, etc.), installing any handrails for staircases, and something that became wildly popular in the 80s: picture-frame paneling and fake ceiling beams. He got so good at “book-matching” that paneling, or matching the oak grain exactly across the panels, that he was quite in demand by the builders.

After 3 or 4 years of working with these builders, Brad also got to know the other contractors fairly well, so he knew who was good, who was reliable, and who was trouble. Soon his main builders started talking to him about building a house for the two of us, and the more we thought about it, the more appealing it sounded. They said they’d cut their fee in half for him, for starters. In addition, we could save money by bartering. Several of the other contractors were building their own homes at the same time, so they would just trade labor with each other: “Hey, if you’ll trim my house out, I’ll come and lay your brick when the time comes.” No money exchanged hands. (I know now that the IRS frowns on that kind of thing, but no one brought that up at the time.)

So as much as it might have been foolish-sounding for two young married people to think about building a new home, one of whom is a full-time student, to us it seemed like there was never going to be a time when we’d be able to do it any cheaper. We felt like we’d be silly not to take advantage of what was right in front of us.

I had been in my job for about 4 years. About 2 weeks after I graduated with my B.S. in geology at the University of North Dakota, we headed straight for Texas. Once we settled into an apartment in Dallas, I started job hunting. I really was clueless how to go about it, especially in such a huge city where I didn’t know my way around, so I went to headhunter. I laugh when I think about this now. This guy, who was probably used to placing executives with tons of experience, took one look at me (completely green) and one look at my resume (completely empty), and sent me next door to Core Laboratories, an oilfield services company that hires just about anyone off the streets to work in their labs.

Photo of a microscope with a mounted glass slide
A petrographic microscope with a mounted glass slide. Adobe stock photo. Get 10 free Adobe Stock images. Click to expand photo.

They did hire me. $12,000 a year, and at least I didn’t end up in their lab working with smelly chemicals. Because I had taken petrology class in college, I got hired as a petrographer, looking down a microscope all day long, describing rock thin sections. For those of you who have no idea what that means, I’ll try to explain briefly (bear with me here, you can do this). When oil wells are drilled, many times the drillers take an actual core sample of the earth they are drilling through. It’s important, for many reasons, to understand the rock type that the oil is contained in. So they pull that core sample out of the ground—visualize a long, fat PVC pipe, only it’s solid rock. Then it gets slabbed (cut in half lengthwise), and laid out in long boxes so we can get a good look at the bedding structures. From the layers that are suspected to be the oil reservoir, sections are sampled. Those samples are cut into small square shapes, glued to a glass slide, and then ground down to a few millimeters thick.

It’s this “thin section” that I was examining under a microscope—the actual rock sample of the oil reservoir. I was looking at the mineral composition, grain size, how porous the rock was, what kinds of cements and/or clays were in the pore spaces, were there any rare-earth minerals there, etc. For limestones, I was also looking for and identifying fossils, which was actually a lot of fun. All these data help explorationists and engineers better develop and exploit the oil resources that are underground.

Thin section photo of a limestone, showing a slice through a fossil
Thin section photo of a limestone showing a slice through a coiled fossil in the center, which is a gastropod (a snail). The dark brown stuff is just what it looks like: hardened mud. The blue color is open void space, where oil (or water) accumulates in the rock. Adobe stock photo. Get 10 free Adobe Stock images. Click to expand photo.

Whew! Did I lose anybody?

I did that for 2 ½ years, until a new opportunity came my way within the same company. There was another department within Core Lab that served as a consulting geoscience arm and took on much bigger projects than simply, “here, process these 12 samples from this oil well.” They had a large core study come their way and needed someone to team up with the primary geologist, Dave, on the job. I got seconded to that department to assist Dave with that project, which lasted several months. It not only included the core study and thin section work, but mapping, cross sections, and a full interpretation and report that we had to deliver.

There was just one problem. About a month before we started to finalize the project and write up the report, Dave quit and moved on to a better-paying job! This put our boss Dick into quite a panic, because I was an unknown commodity—he had a report to deliver to his client and had no idea whether I was capable of pulling it off or not.

Somehow, I rose to the occasion and surprised everyone, including myself. I was able to compile the various kinds of data, analyze it, and come up with a reasonable and sound interpretation. The report was well written and conclusive. Dick was taken aback. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “you still have a lot to learn, but for someone your age and your level of experience, this is very, very good. I never expected this.”

I think everyone in that department was holding their breath and just waiting for me to fail. It was my first real success in the professional world, and it felt great. Right after that, Dick offered me a permanent position in that department, so the transfer was official. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t get another chance to repeat that success, at least not with this company.

That consulting arm of Core Lab had an unusual makeup compared to the rest of the company. Dick had a particular affinity for British-educated geologists and engineers, and almost every time he had an opening, he filled it with British professionals. What this meant was “green cards,” the ticket to working in the US for foreign workers, which grants them permanent residency. (The identity cards aren’t green anymore, but they used to be, and the name has stuck.) Knowing that the procedure for hiring a foreign worker had to first start with “the employer must place a series of advertisements for its job opportunity and attest that no qualified U.S. workers applied for the position,” the rest of us (Americans) often wondered whether this requirement was ever met. How was it possible that an American geologist or engineer couldn’t be found to fill these jobs? We seemed to know plenty of people looking for work.

At the time, the UK economy had tanked and work was almost nonexistent in our field. So getting an offer to work in the US, with a corporation paying all the immigration and visa fees, attorney’s fees, transportation and housing costs, bringing entire families over, and possibly paying signing bonuses—well, it looked like a pretty sweet deal to the rest of us. Our manager liked the educational foundation these guys received so much so that he was willing to sponsor them through the green card program at huge expense, compared to US-trained geoscientists and engineers.

As I would learn for the first but not the last time, the oil industry has boom-and-bust cycles. About a year after transferring permanently into that consulting group, things started to go considerably downhill in our industry. The energy crisis of 1979 caused fuel shortages and long lines at fuel pumps, and the long-term effects of that were still being felt in our economy. By the time we reached the early 1980s, inflation was in the double-digits. When Brad and I started building our house in November of 1982, our projected mortgage rate was going to be 16.1%; by the time we finished it 6–7 months later, we were elated to learn that the rate was “only” going to be 13.6%!

Sad Fired Young Employee businessmen with a box of his belongings
Sad man leaving the office with all his belongings.  Get 10 free Adobe Stock images. Adobe stock photo.

Layoffs were announced at Core Lab in early 1983, and for the next several months, we suffered through the first, then the second, and then the final round of bloodletting of personnel. In my department, I survived the first two rounds of layoffs so I should have been happy, but the tension in the air during those months was palpable. I was one of the few people actually working, because core studies continued to come in the door, while the other guys were twiddling their thumbs and looking worried. And an interesting thing was starting to happen, as anyone who has experienced a layoff at a large corporation can probably attest to. One watches. One assesses. One sees a pattern starting to emerge.

During the second layoff, a geologist friend came into my office, furious because he’d just been let go. He asked me, “What about you?” and I said, as sympathetically as I could, “Not yet, sweetie.” He then made some comment to the effect of, “Don’t think I’m going to go away quietly—don’t think I don’t see what’s going on here. None of these Brits are being let go, but they are laying off all the Americans?! What’s right about that when they are saying they have to do this to save money?”

Until he spelled it out for me, I hadn’t completely put it together. But he was absolutely right. There was something very wrong and inequitable about how the layoff was being handled. In that department, when it came time for belt-tightening and fiscal responsibility to shareholders, it wasn’t the more expensive employees who were let go—it was the US workers who lost their jobs. For months we watched as American geologists, engineers, secretaries, and draftsmen got laid off, while the Brits with green cards were retained. In the end, with the exception of one female geologist with about 15 years of experience, only British professionals remained in our department.

A few months later, one of the young secretaries was in my office in tears, telling me she’d just been let go. Then my phone rang. She looked at me and said, “Oh, no.” Sure enough, it was Dick, asking me to come to his office. When I arrived, he was nervous; his voice was shaky. He came right to the point. “I’m gonna have to let you go. I’m so sorry. I feel terrible, I know you guys are building your house and all. I wish I didn’t have to do it, but my back’s against the wall. Take the rest of the day off, and come back later on in the week to get your stuff. Just take some time for yourself right now.” He had already talked to several people that day and he looked pretty wrung out. But I had steeled myself for what was coming and frankly, I didn’t feel sorry for him.

I later did some research on the green card/immigration laws, just to answer some nagging questions I had. When a company sponsors a foreign worker for the green card program, and once that green card is issued and they are granted permanent residency in the US, that company is under no obligation to employ them for any particular length of time. So that answered my question about “maybe he had to keep them for a year or so…?” And vice versa: once the foreign worker obtains the green card, they are free to work for anyone else; they don’t have to stay with that particular corporation. In fact, in the mid- to late 1980s, most of these same geologists and engineers who kept their jobs took the fastest boat back to the UK as soon as economic conditions improved over there. They had no loyalty to the US or to this company. So the loyalty shown to them was sorely misplaced.

Our house in Grapevine, Texas, right after construction was completed.
Our house in Grapevine, Texas, right after construction was completed in the summer of 1983. Click to expand photo.

Unfortunately at that time, I was too young and too timid to stand up for myself. I accepted the inevitable layoff without question, as most people do. I peppered the oil companies in the Dallas area with my resume for about the next 6 months and hardly even got an acknowledgment, much less an interview. I realized that if I was going to stay in this industry I needed to go back to school and get my M.S. degree. A year after the layoff, I entered the University of Texas at Arlington and started the M.S. program. Now with both of us in grad school instead of just one, Brad and I would have to endure several more years of financial hardship with, we hoped, a bigger reward on the other side. We somehow managed to finish construction on that house, but the elaborate back deck, fencing, and landscaping we had planned got scrapped. That layoff was a pivotal point for us, changing the whole trajectory of what we thought we were doing with our careers and our future plans.

Core Laboratories is still in business today and thriving, although the consulting department has long ago been disbanded. I’ve often wondered whether the decision-making that took place in that particular department went on company-wide and was sanctioned, or whether Dick and his department was isolated enough that he was able to operate autonomously. I guess I will never know.

As a female who chose a field that was, and still is, overwhelmingly male-dominated, I can honestly say that I’ve never felt discriminated against for being female—that has never been a particular complaint of mine. Now that I’m in my 60s, however, my colleagues and I who are still working often bump up against age discrimination as we continue to seek out steady employment. It doesn’t surprise me anymore and I half expect it. But I never dreamed that in this country, my colleagues and I would experience discrimination for being an American. Or to put it more accurately, for being educated at an American institution, while working for an American company.

I’m grateful that in the 40 years that have passed since that took place, I’ve learned to speak up. Corporations almost always hold all the cards, and usually have a few decks hidden under the table as well. Everyone who gets laid off feels unfairly treated in some way. If we don’t go away quietly, they can withhold health insurance, or severance packages, or favorable job references, so we often feel powerless in these situations.

But maybe the tables are slowly turning in our favor. With the experiences of the past few years, especially with the COVID pandemic and people becoming accustomed to working remotely, we are starting to reassess how we want to spend our days and the types of companies we want to work for. We are feeling more empowered to make the best choices possible for ourselves and our families, and that may mean saying “no” to the corporate world.

If you have a layoff story or a discrimination story that you’d like to share, please leave it in the comments section below. If it’s too long for a comment and you’d like to submit a full story to this blog, you can reach me through my Contact page and we’ll discuss it!

[Some illustrations in this story are from Adobe® Stock. This site is an Adobe Stock affiliate, meaning I will earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you, if you make a purchase or become an affiliate from a link on this site.]

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2 Responses

    1. Ha! You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Ironically, my boss was American, so I don’t know where his predilections came from. And I was too young to grill him on the subject.

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