My name is Tina Lee and I'm from Atlanta, GA. I am 57 years old and lost my job as a legal secretary in November of 2009, along with a handful of secretaries and paralegals. I had worked with what is a large corporate law firm for 12 years, and had hoped it to be the firm I eventually retired from. The reason given for being fired was that they were reducing staff due to the economy. I was in one of many groups of firings the firm had been implementing since early 2008. With secretaries, they chose who to fire based on seniority. So what that means is that all the secretaries remaining at the firm had more than 12 years seniority; what it also means is that it is mainly secretaries older than me who kept their jobs. In the year or 2 leading up to my firing, each time secretaries were fired, the remaining secretaries had to take on more and more attorneys. We were so overworked that I could visibly see secretaries aging before my eyes. There was a ban on working overtime even though many of us simply couldn't keep up with our greater and greater workload. So, many of us worked unpaid overtime or took work home in order to keep up with it. The firm didn't like this and I was reprimanded for working off the clock, but what was I to do -- if I didn't keep up with my work, I could be fired.

Being damned if we did and damned if we didn't, and seeing the effect working on such a treadmill had upon premature aging, the day I was fired actually gave me a sense of sadness tinged with relief. The firm was generous with severance pay (as long as we signed an agreement in which we agreed not to sue the firm for any unpaid overtime), and I received 12 weeks' severance. I had 1 or 2 interviews for jobs during this period, but had a lot of competition for each job since all the law firms in Atlanta and across the nation had been firing not only secretaries and paralegals, but attorneys too. So there were attorneys applying for paralegal jobs and paralegals applying for secretarial jobs. But to this day, the legal field has not been hiring new staff, and in the exceptional circumstances when they do, hoards of applicants show up.

So, for the first time in my life, I applied for and received unemployment compensation. Since the process of being approved for UC took until June of 2010, I was forced to start using the funds from my 401(k) plan (which totaled around $30,000). Once I started receiving UC checks, they only totaled $325 per week (the maximum anyone can receive), so I had to continue to supplement them with withdrawals from my 401(k) plan (which I had transferred into a personal IRA). If I had not done so, I would have lost my house.

Legal secretaries work hard, but are very well paid, even though the majority of them only have high school diplomas. When I was fired, my salary was $58,000 annually, but I personally know some legal secretaries who make $75,000+. This means that there is no way for me to make a lateral move in employment and make anywhere near what I could make as a legal secretary. So, my search for employment was restricted to openings in law firms, which were few and far between. The only time I have been able to actually get an interview with a firm has been through an inside referral by friends. Most of the time, employers or their agents ask for you to submit your resume online, and most of the time you never get any response one way or the other, not even an acknowledgement of receipt.

I now only have $1,000 left in my IRA and my UC ended at the beginning of January. I have had to become a lot more resourceful in finding ways to make an income. I do some freelance work for attorneys out of my house and I have designed a line of jewelry which I sell on consignment with people who sell at flea markets. I'm also in the beginning stages of trying to design my own website so I can sell my jewelry and post my poetry. I write poetry simply because I'm compelled to do so, and I must say, these last 2 years have spawned a lot of poems out of me. I enter them in poetry contests that pay a monetary award, but have never won any contests. I've started renting a room in my house, which helps a lot. The law firms continue to show no available jobs for secretaries. From this point forward, I'm going to be forced to make an income any way I can, and I will have no retirement to support myself with unless I can find another legal secretarial job or win the lottery.

In just two years I've gone from being financially stable with a secure retirement to being one step away from being homeless with no hope of ever being able to retire. I can't tell you how much it infuriates me to hear politicians calling social security an entitlement that's the cause of our current deficit (which is a total lie). I have had to totally ignore the fact that I have high blood pressure and needed to have a colonoscopy. Healthcare is totally out of the question unless a dire emergency.

To those who say the unemployed are just lazy and don't want to work, I say the fact that I worked for 30 years debunks that theory. Why would I willingly choose to lose everything I have worked for my entire life, my security in retirement and my healthcare coverage?  I refuse to take a job that won't make enough to maintain my mortgage payment and bills for doing so would ensure I lose my house and eat up time I could be using to make more money. And I can't sell my house since it is now worth less than what I have mortgaged (when I took out this mortgage, I only borrowed what was then half the value of the property).   

I do not feel that I have done anything to cause or deserve this. To those who say that employers should not hire the unemployed, they all do so from the safety of having a job themselves while passing judgment on others. With policies like that, they will no doubt one day be on the receiving end of not being employable because of being unemployed. Such policies will only keep the recession going. When did people become so self-serving, greedy and lacking in empathy?