Bait and Switch (22 page)

of monsoon strikes the mountains, forcing me off the road to sit and stare through the windshield wipers at the whiteout be-47 Arne L. Kallenberg, Barbara F. Reskin, and Ken Hudson, "Bad Jobs in yond. I have a job. I have been found fit to represent a major America; Standard and Nonstandard Employment Relations and Job Quality in the United States,"
American Sociological Review,
65: 1 (2000), pp. 256-78. In personal communications, Kallenberg and Hudson assured me that the trend is continuing.

But a growing number of the nonstandardly employed are My brother is a corporate dropout and former owner of a mo-former corporate employees, professionals and managers who tel in Arkansas; my brother-in-law came to real estate after a have burned out or been expelled from their jobs. For the move to escape the high living costs in Hawaii derailed his career as white-collar job seeker, the lures—or, as the case may be, a schoolteacher. When his teaching credentials proved nontransferable snares—are everywhere. My in-box always contains one or two to Colorado without a several-thousand-dollar investment in further exhortations to "Be Your Own Boss!" and "Make as Much courses, he managed a Burger King for five years and spent a brief Money as You Want!" often accompanied by an eye-catching interlude as a paralegal before settling on real estate. One of my question like: "Sick of the Corporate Rat Race?" "Got a Case of Atlanta contacts, a woman with a background in web-site design, the MONDAYS?" "Head Hurt From Hitting a Glass Ceil-has taken the real estate course and is considering taking the ing?" "Lost That Loving Feeling for Your Job?" Recruiters to state exam. Clark Nickerson, whom I also met at Fuddruckers, these quasi employments lurk at networking events, like the had been an industrial sales manager for twenty-seven years and fellow I met at Fuddruckers who offered to match me to an decided to enter the field after an "early retirement" proved appropriate franchising opportunity. I could have my own financially nonfeasible and a yearlong job search bottomed out.

Merry Maids business, he assured me, and run it by remote By mid-April [2003] I was doing everything you should do—going to control from the location of my choice.

networking meetings, using the job boards—but I was really having a Selling real estate is one of the more respectable and traditional hard time staying motivated. My wife and I sat down—she struggles when alternatives to the corporate world and offers no more of an I do—and she said, "This is just not working." What I realized then was I didn't want to get back into the industrial sales world. She said, initial hurdle than selling insurance: all you have to do is pay

"What about real estate?"

for a course and pass a state-licensing exam. My brother does it in Missouri, my brother-in-law in Colorado, as do a number of But as a default career for the white collar unemployed, geographically scattered friends and acquaintances.

real estate is far from reliable. According to the respected in-

dustry magazine
Realty Times,
first-year realtors suffer an 86

was Cynthia, the woman who burst into tears at Patrick's boot percent failure rate, and of those who survive, 70 percent earn camp, and Richard, who appeared to be on the verge of doing so less than $30,000 a year. In my brother-in-law's opinion, himself—two realtors who had been unable to stay afloat and real estate "is too easy to get into. A lot of people don't really were restarting their job searches from scratch.

see it as a profession, just an interim thing." For an "interim Another nonstandard form of employment held out to the thing," though, he says the payoffs are slow to come.

unemployed is franchising, known to cynics as "buying yourself a job" because the initial fee for the right to use the corporate You need at least enough money to carry you for a year. I started with franchisor's name is in the $15,000 to S40,000 range.
48
In an four hundred cold calls a week—door-to-door and phone calls—and didn't really make anything for six to eight months. Then, when you get a earlier era, people were more likely to start their own small commission check, you don't realize at first that forty to fifty percent has to businesses; today you can buy a sort of prefab business, in come out of it for expenses—everything from taxes to the desk fee a lot of agencies charge. After my first year, I had to get a bank loan just to pay our which operating procedures, as well as any products used or sold, are taxes.

supplied, for a monthly "royalty," by the franchisor. About 400,000

Americans are franchisees, managing eight million employees and Both my brother-in-law and his wife, my sister, toil away at his generating one-third of U.S. gross domestic product—real estate business, grossing about $75,000 in 2004, of which everything from doughnuts and burgers to fitness centers. But half went for taxes and expenses.

as in real estate, the rewards are uncertain and the prospects of In his midfifties and still in the early, nonremunerative phase of failure dauntingly high. In his study of franchisees in a variety of his real estate career, Clark Nickerson is hopeful: "It's going good, industries sociologist Peter M. Birkeland found a survival rate of only going great . . . It's a lot of training and learning and basic grunt work, but I'm fully confident that I'll have some clients and listings soon." All I could think of, when Clark told me this, 48 According to www.francorp.com. Francorp bills itself as "The Leader in Franchise Development and Consulting."

about 25 percent and average franchisee incomes of about $30,000.
49

came from recruiting others to the sales force. I went with him to Finally, as an option for the white-collar unemployed, there a meeting led by a local doctor, and was impressed by the relative are thousands of commission-only sales jobs such as the one inattention to the vitamins' merits compared to the emphasis on AFLAC offered me. According to the Direct Selling Associa-enlisting others to sell them. For his efforts, my friend lost $400

tion, 13.3 million Americans worked in such sales jobs in 2003, selling but gained a vitamin supply that will hopefully help compensate $25 billion worth of goods. In many cases, like AFLAC, these jobs for his lack of health insurance.

offer rewards not only for selling the product but for recruiting new I GET A second "job" offer of the commission-only variety at a job people to do so as well. On its dark side, the direct-selling world is fair, not long after my success with AFLAC. Mary Kay cosmetics filled with costly traps for the unwary—pyramid schemes in which was not one of the companies that attracted me to the fair,
52
and, the ultimate product is vague or nonexistent. An outfit called JDO

when I get there, my impulse is to avoid the Mary Kay table, Media, for example, enticed people to make money by enlisting which from a distance seems to be loaded with candy—actually pink others to sell a sketchily defined "marketing program "—for which cosmetics. But since no potential recruits are lining up, Linda, the privilege each recruit had to put up as much as $3,500.
50

table's minder, is standing in front of it, and buttonholes me as I Even the legitimate firms offer only scant remuneration, with loiter in a moment of indecision as to where to make my next only 8 percent of commission-only salespeople earning more pitch. If I fill out a form, she tells me, I could win $25 and a free than $50,000 a year and over half earning less than $10,000.
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makeover: "Just what you need when you're looking for a new job!"

Four years ago, an unemployed friend of mine got drawn into a She is a large woman in a mauve suit with a white lace top vitamin-marketing scheme, in which the real rewards, again, underneath, mauve eye shadow matching her suit, and a pink rhinestone pin in the shape of a high heel attached to her 49 Peter M. Birkeland,
Franchising Dreams: The Lure of Entrepreneurship in
America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 1-2, 31, 115.

50 Kris Hundely, "Get-Fleeced-Quick,"
St. Petersburg Times,
April 12, 2004.

51 Susan B. Garland, "So Glad You Could Come. Can I Sell You Anything?"
New
52 Internet announcements of job fairs generally offer a list of the "exhibiting"

York Times,
December 19, 2004.

companies.

shoulder. Again, I have to wonder why my tasteful silver OK,"

brooch was rejected by Prescott, especially if Linda can get she says consolingly. "You can say it. You just haven't tried Mary Kay away with this whimsical display. I fill out the form, which yet."

wants only contact information, and reveal that I am looking We set a phone appointment for the following week, and she for a PR job. "I had a high-up corporate job for thirty-one years, wishes me "an awesome day." As instructed, I go to the Mary and one day I realized I was sick of it," she says, her gaze Kay web site and study the wisdom of Mary Kay herself, an elderly drifting across the room: "The downsizing. Achieving so much woman made up to resemble Dustin Hoffman in
Tootsie.
I learn and they can never afford a raise. You're up against everyone for that high earners can win a pink Cadillac and that the corporate promotions. You can't trust anyone. I never got the en-philosophy is "God first, family second, career third." I also talk to couragement from management or the support from other Leah Gray, my unemployed acquaintance in Atlanta, because she women."

had put in a stint with Mary Kay.

The "support from other women" part holds me rooted in place, trying to imagine this great valentine of a woman in the When you join, there is a mini ceremony in a dimly lit room in which the director lights each new consultant's handheld candle and says some cutthroat corporate world she's described. Now Linda's prob-encouraging words. I have to admit I thought it was cheesy and overdramatic lems are solved. "I work only twenty hours a week, and—you for my taste. She was saying things like "You've all made the most important life-changing decision: to join Mary Kay." The ironic thing is that I am a very know what?—I make as much as I did before." In addition, hard sell and fell into this trap.

she works two days a week in a needlepoint shop, "and you know who that
is—women,"
in other words, potential Mary When we finally connect, Linda is ebullient. "It's a very Kay customers. "Have you ever used Mary Kay cosmetics?" she supportive business. It's awesome. It's hard for me to describe it asks me.

without sounding like a nutcase."

"No," I admit. "I guess I've been more into L'Oreal." "That's

"What do I need to spend up front?" I ask.

"Just one hundred dollars for the start-up kit, plus thirteen dollars I've had for years. It's a big problem for the country, so it's not for sales tax and shipping. You can't start any business in this just us."

world for just a hundred dollars! Barbara, I am going to get real.

I have gotten the drift now and attempt to cut the call short by I'm sure you've thrown away a hundred dollars for something that's claiming an impending appointment. "Look," Linda says in hanging in your closet."

summation, "don't overanalyze this. It's just a fun business and a She goes on about how easy it is to learn to do the "skin-great opportunity. I can't explain it to you more than that."

care classes" at customers' homes. "I teach you everything and provide you the words to say in the class. They don't care if you read it or memorize it."

It's hard to get a word in edgewise as Linda prattles on, but Leah SO, AFTER ALMOST seven months of job searching, an image warned me that she ended up spending over $700 on cosmetics makeover, an expensively refined and later upgraded résumé, and before realizing that this was not for her. So I ask Linda how much networking in four cities, I have gotten exactly two offers: from I will need to spend on inventory in order to have enough to sell.

AFLAC and Mary Kay. But these are not jobs, not in the way I

"Inventory," she responds meditatively. "I don't usually get defined a job when I started this project, in that no salary, that question. Of course, you don't have to buy one ounce. I benefits, or workplace is provided. Surely there are plenty of don't recommend it, though. I suggest eighteen hundred dol-actual sales jobs offering a salary and benefits in addition to lars to start. Do you have to? No, but personally this is how I commissions, but a real job involves some risk taking on the part of feel. Women don't want to wait for their lipstick and mascara."

the employer, who must make an investment in order to acquire So, $1,900 just to get started. "What do you do for health your labor. In real estate, franchising, and commission-only sales, the insurance?" I throw in, recklessly.

only risk undertaken is by the job seeker, who has to put out money

"You're totally on your own. I have coverage of my own, which up front and commit days or weeks to unpaid training. Then she is on her own, ever fearful that the market will soften or that the quasi employer will flood the area with competing sales reps or franchisees.

No one, apparently, is willing to take a risk on me. Is the eight

fear that, if given health insurance for even a month, I will go on an orgy of body scans and elective surgery? The most any corporation seems willing to give me is the right to wear its logo on my chest and go about pushing its products.

Downward Mobility

I had pictured the corporate world that I seek to enter as a castle on a hill, outside of which the starving vagrants wander, set upon by wolves and barbarian hordes, begging for entry into the safety of the fortified towers. But now I see there is another zone out here: a somewhat settled encampment, where people toil for uncertain rewards at minor tasks invented by the castle The fact that I am attending job fairs at all is a measure of my dwellers. There is an advantage to occupying this zone: you declining expectations. None of my coaches ever recom-are free of the rigid conformity required of those who dwell mended job fairs, or even mentioned them, and I got the im-inside; you can actually "Be Your Own Boss!" A few do very pression that many are pitched to entry-level workers rather well, acquiring pink Cadillacs or fortunes from real estate than professionals.
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On a web site advertising a Los Angeles job deals. Many more are ruined or pour themselves into efforts fair, I find advice confirming this somewhat downscale that generate near-poverty-level earnings year after year. There is no safety out here; the wolves keep circling.