The Army Of Jobless Grows By Thousands Around Wall Street

ABOARD THE STATEN ISLAND FERRY — Bill Conevery looks like the rest of the commuters crowded onto the 5 p.m. ferry out of lower Manhattan. He has the suit, the yellow silk tie, the briefcase.

The only thing missing is the job. He has lost it not once, but twice, in little more than a year.

The first time was in March 1989, when First Boston Corp. laid off a crew of people in the back office of the municipal-bond department. Conevery, a supervisor of bond paperwork, had been there 17 years. He was lucky enough to land another job right away handling municipal bonds at Chase Manhattan Bank, but that job was wiped out in October.

Now, Conevery, 46, is on the unemployment rolls.

"I am a statistic," he says.

There are plenty of other statistics - 40,000 fewer people are employed in the nation's securities industry now than two and a half years ago. More than half of those 40,000 jobs were lost in New York. The Wall Street community these days resembles any other town that's been through a big plant closing.

On the ferry crossing New York Bay on the way to Staten Island - a borough that some refer to as the bedroom of Wall Street - everybody seems to have a friend, a cousin or a neighbor who has just lost a job in the securities industry. War stories abound.

There is the guy who came back from vacation to find out that his employer had laid off his secretary. There is the clerk, a real-life version of the lead character in Working Girl, who, after years of clawing her way up the ladder to a promotion, arrived at work to discover that her entire department was being eliminated.

The latest round of layoffs in the industry - unlike the cuts that immediately followed the crash of 1987 - seems to be taking the harshest toll not on the upper echelons earning six-figure salaries, but on the rank and file.

Although some people may think of these people as spoiled yuppies whose comeuppance is long overdue, many among this new breed of unemployed appear to be middle-income people who have put in long years on Wall Street and are ill- trained for other occupations.

For example, Conevery has had to ice his plan to get a college diploma - a project that has involved a decade of night school while he worked full time and raised a family - just a few credits short of graduation.

He concedes that it will be virtually impossible to find a position in his area of expertise because municipal-bond departments have been among those hit hardest on Wall Street.