Tabatha Beardsley vacuums the breakfast room at the Best Western Prineville Inn, where she works part time. Beardsley, 29, is one of many Crook County residents who love the area but can't find enough work.More
PRINEVILLE -- Once, Tabatha Beardsley catered to the stars, bartending at Manhattan parties and a film shoot where she met actors Robin Williams and Danny DeVito.
These days, Beardsley, 29, rises early to prepare self-serve breakfast for a sleepier crowd -- guests at the
. She doesn't regret the transition because she gets to raise her kids in her hometown. But as much as she likes the Best Western, she could use full-time work, instead of the 14 to 19 hours a week she has now.
"I'm actively looking," Beardsley said. "I want to have more of a career-based job."
That's a tall order even for a New York veteran such as Beardsley, who made it there, as the song goes, and should be able to make it anywhere. As an underemployed worker, she joins Oregonians in the broadest category of so-called labor underutilization, which includes jobless people and those too discouraged to seek work.
More
The so-called U-6 measure, at 17.2 percent in August statewide, exceeds the 9.6 percent seasonally adjusted Oregon unemployment rate by 7.6 percentage points.
Officials don't track the U-6 for counties. But adding 7.6 to
Beardsley has demonstrated job-hunting gumption before, landing a position as a nanny-chauffeur after she and a friend graduated from high school in 2000 and rode a bus to New York. There, she was driving her boss to work one day, after dropping his children at school, and looked up to see the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
"It'll never go away, never," Beardsley said of the image. "But I got to learn a lot -- about how people can come together."
The stately Crook County Courthouse (center), built in 1909, dominates downtown Prineville, the seat of the county named for George Crook, a U.S. Army officer during the Civil War. In a difficult economy, officials managed to attract Facebook, which built a data center in Prineville that will soon expand.Returning to Prineville in 2008, Beardsley found work managing an adult foster home and then bartending.
She switched to Best Western for a schedule better suited to raising a son and baby girl with her husband, Kevin, a
computer technician.
Beardsley would take a secretarial or customer-service job. She'd relish the chance to attend college.
One thing she passed up, between her Prineville jobs: unemployment benefits. "I really do like to work for what I get," she said.
--
, Twitter: @ReadOregonian