Bait and Switch (24 page)

Alas, there is no job fair at the Marriott. Bypassing the front desk which reads "Rating and Underwriting Rules and Algorithm, and going straight to the ballroom, I find a sign saying "MetLife," a Experience rating spreadsheet, strategies, u/w guidelines." Insofar generous buffet lunch spread out in the corridor, and a room full as I can comprehend the questions and comments, they are of MetLife functionaries sitting at parallel tables, many still discussing how many claims they can reject before they drive nibbling from their plates. Why not just go in and sit down, as the client away. Far more interesting are the toys available on our though I am one of them? Take a little rest before staggering back tables: crayons on mine, crayons plus small containers of Play-to the Holiday Inn, fantasize that I am employed and valued Doh at the table in front of us. A man in his fifties has enough to be sent to an out-of-town meeting? In the French fashioned a kind of pumpkin out of his Play-Doh, with segments movie
Time Out,
an unemployed white-collar man never reveals in different colors. So this is what it's like on the inside—difficult and his condition to his family. He gets up every morning, pretends scary, yes, but with playful little encouragements to regress.

to go to work, once even entering a corporate glass tower, where Then a man comes in the door from the corridor and walks straight he wanders around with his briefcase, nodding at the busy people up to me. "I'm Mike," he says sotto voce, shaking my hand, "and he encounters, and relaxing in an armchair in the atrium until he's you are?" When I give him my name, he wants to know where I'm eventually challenged by a security guard. If you're white and not from.

pushing a shopping cart, you can go almost anywhere.

"Communications," I tell him.

I fill a plate with a chicken wrap and salads and slide into the

"Based where?"

seat nearest to the door. The suited woman next to me is too

"Uh, Denver."

busy multitasking to notice my arrival: watching the Power-Point He gives me a knowing smile and walks off. Why didn't I think presentation going on at the front of the room while to add, after Denver, "We're starting a new project there"?

grinding her jaw and working a hangnail down to a bloody Maybe he thinks I'm a spy from Aetna or Unicare and is about to stump. Everyone else seems equally intent on the screen, summon security. I give myself ten more minutes to clean my plate and rest my feet, because the painful truth is: this moment of freedom, than anything I might find in an office or cubicle—I fantasy employment is as close as I'm ever going to get.

see that more clearly than ever now. But I can no longer imagine I continue to make applications and follow-up phone calls that it is mine entirely by choice. The corporate world has spo-through September, until I am overwhelmed by a sense of fu-ken, and it wants nothing to do with me, not even with the smiling, tility. If this were my real life and my actual livelihood were at suited, endlessly compliant Alexander version of me.

stake, I would be climbing the walls. But even in my artificial situation as a journalist-slash-job seeker, I cannot help feeling the rejection. All my life, my real life, that is, I've found myself in FOR THOSE WHO can't afford to be fussy about status or pay, one strange situation after another, and always managed to there are of course plenty of jobs in America. Hundreds of thousands succeed or at least survive. Am I not plucky, resourceful, even a of immigrants crowd into the country every year to work in lawn wee bit charismatic? The answer, coming in the form of nothing maintenance, on construction crews, or as house-cleaners, nannies, at all—no responses, no nibbles, no interest of any kind—and meat packers. Even in the absence of new job creation, apparently is
not.

high turnover in the low-wage job sector guarantees a steady Then, too, I will confess to having looked forward to my cli-supply of openings to the swift and the desperate. To white-mactic and of course entirely voluntary exit from the corporate collar job seekers, these are known as "survival jobs"—something world. I would work for three or four months, according to the to do while waiting for a "real" job to come along. But this original plan—promoting my company's new libido-enhancing designation may be overly optimistic.

drug or rationalizing the deaths from its painkillers—until I arIn late September, my job search effectively over, I started trying rived at the
hasta-la-vista
moment when I would suddenly an-to track down the job seekers whose cards I had collected for nounce to my bewildered employer that I was going on to better something approaching a serious interview. I told them I was things, meaning my actual life. And it
is
better, my freelance writing an article on white-collar unemployment for a business publication, as a way of earning a little Money while I off cherished possessions at yard sales or auctioned them on eBay; continued my search. (Later, I contacted them again to tell they downsized their living quarters. John Piering, a fifty-two-year-them that the article had grown into a book and would be old laid-off IT professional with two small children, described his written under my usual nom de plume, Barbara Ehren-family's efforts to hang on:

reich.) Eleven people responded; none had found "real" jobs We limit how often we go out and stopped using the credit cards.

yet; and even those who had been quite guarded in the set-Luckily, we have lowish mortgage payments [about $650 a month]. The tings where I originally met them were eager to talk about big problem is utilities. They just go up and up. We cut down on the AC

their strategies, most of which by now included taking sur-and leave the windows open. We still have cable TV for the kids and high-speed data access for job searching.

vival jobs.

Piering's five-year-old had to be taken out of pre-K, which cost $125 a month. He and his wife—who does temp work, "stuffing envelopes"—now divide the child care the same way many working-NOT EVERY UNEMPLOYED PROFESSIONAL has to contemplate class couples do: "I do the day shift; she does the night shift."

taking a survival job, of course, at least not right away. Many of Unemployment insurance is the first fallback for the laid-off, but it the people I met during my search had accumulated enough provides only 60 percent of one's former earnings and ends after assets in the course of their working life to be able to coast twenty-six weeks. In 2004, 3.6 million unemployed Americans along for a year or more, even while pouring money into exhausted their unemployment benefits before finding a job,
57

coaching and executive-job-search firms. Others used a variety of and when that happens, even the middle-aged often turn to their strategies to stretch out their stay in the middle class. They sent parents for help. Hillary Meister, a forty-five-year-old with a career a stay-at-home spouse into the low-wage workforce. They in communications, moved back to the town where her parents relinquished the perquisites associated with even minor levels of affluence, such as eating out and other entertainments. They sold 57 Leland, "For Unemployed, Wait for New Work Grows Longer."

live when an illness temporarily curtailed her job search.

who had gone from unemployment to underemployment in the

"Without my family," she says, "I'd definitely be on the streets."

sense of having to work at jobs inappropriate to their skills. Steve, for Steve, the former marketing man who was thinking of learning example, tried Wal-Mart but found that "for a professional, it's tough.

about wines to qualify for an upscale serving job, is giving up his They're looking for someone at very little pay, like eight dollars an current $845-a-month apart ment for a room with kitchen hour." Now, as mentioned, he's thinking of waiting tables in a fancy privileges: "All I need is a place where I can plug in a computer."

restaurant where he might, just possibly, be able to network with his Until now, he says, "my family's been helping me out. Otherwise customers. Gary, a former broadcast journalist and PR person, I'd be on the street, literally . . . But they keep saying, 'What's reports that he's now looking for entry-level positions at Best Buy, wrong with you? Just take a job, any job.'"

Circuit City, and Home Depot. Once these men have landed their Unfortunately, there is no reliable information on the num-jobs as waiters or sales "associates," they will no longer be visible, to bers of former white-collar workers who eventually succumb to the federal government, as members of the "unemployed." Case this kind of advice. The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures closed, as far as the larger society is concerned—problem solved.

"underemployment" only in terms of one's hours; that is, you Others of the long-term unemployed sink even lower in status, are officially underemployed only if you are working part-time and to the kind of jobs normally undertaken by recent immigrants would prefer to work full-time. In March 2004, the or the totally uncredentialed. John Piering went from being an unemployment rate was 5.8 percent, while the underemployment IT professional to "working temp—moving furniture, laborer rate, measured strictly as involuntary part-time work, was work," whatever he could get. Hillary Meister tried grooming 10 percent. As to the proportion of people employed at low-dogs at PetSmart, until her allergies caught up with her. Dean paying jobs that make no use of their education or established Gottschalk, a forty-one-year-old computer technician, has been

"skill sets," no reliable estimates are available.

driving a limo. Leah Gray, the former marketing executive I met I found plenty of people in this situation, though—people at the Roasted Garlic, has been working at menial jobs since her first layoff in 2001.

choice of jobs this time: "One reason I took [this job] is that I've tried to stay within five miles of where I live because I I've done everything from scrub toilets to clean out apartments in this don't want to waste money on gas."

[apartment] complex for eight dollars an hour. I did that for eight months, and the only benefit was that I got twenty pounds lighter from doing it. It gave me a new appre-Wild alternations like these require a degree of flexibility ciation for the predominately Hispanic employees who usually do that kind undreamed of by the most creative career coaches. Take the of thing.

case of Donna Eudovique, an African-American single mother of Leah's job search has been, at times, dangerously stressful, two, whose eight-year-long search transformed her into a reshe wrote me in an e-mail.

markable jack-of-all-trades. When she moved to Georgia in the wake of a divorce, she discovered—as my brother-in-law The vast amount of duress has taken a heavy toll on me. I've had a few "first had in Colorado—that her teaching credentials were useless timers." For the first time, I landed in the emergency room and was without an expensive investment in further courses. Since diagnosed as having a severe panic attack . . . I had to pull over to the side of the road and call 911. My heart started racing, my throat was swelling, my then, she has done just about everything: driven a truck for body was numb, my motor skills were so affected that I couldn't keep Georgia Power, sorted mail for UPS, worked in a copy shop, my hands gripped on the wheel, and I began to shake profusely. It definitely wasn't a pleasant experience. On a second "first timer," I am very laid tile and hardwood floors. When I talked to her in Septem-embarrassed to admit that I have been getting collection calls for the bills I incurred for ber, she was doing substitute teaching for $90 a day and, on the days treatment which are in the ballpark of $900... My third "first timer"

is that I am $73,000 in debt and have $16,000 until my credit cards are maxed out when no subbing job came through, sewing custom-made dresses for

. . . So, I actually joke with people that I wouldn't mind my identity sale (no small skill in itself). "When you get to be forty-eight years stolen. I wouldn't have to worry about my debt.

old," she told me,

When I spoke to Leah in October, she had just started you expect to be wel -grounded, be able to sit down and know where your money is working at a retail chain "standing on [her] feet on concrete all coming from . . . But I'm just working off my wits . . . I've got children to feed. Yes, day" for $7.60 an hour and no benefits. She felt she had little I get discour aged, but I'll do whatever I have to to live. I qualified for food stamps, then they stopped. Now I'm trying to get them back.

ter lifting all day, they're too tired to do their searching."

Leah Gray encountered another problem familiar to the un-Health insurance is a long-lost luxury: "I just make sure I stay really employed and underemployed: while she had lost weight doing healthy"—she laughed—"eat well, take my herbs, and get an manual labor, the stresses of this last year provoked a thirty-pound annual exam at a clinic where you pay on a sliding scale."

gain, and she can't afford to buy a new suit for interviews.

When I remarked on her ability to laugh, she said, "It's the least I Gary, whose pregnant wife had to give up her job for bed rest can do. I don't have any more tears."

shortly after he lost his own job, is optimistic about thepossibility of The hope, as one sinks into the world of low-paid, menial moving up the management ladder within a survival job at one of jobs, is that either the long-awaited e-mail will finally come, the big-box stores: "Just getting into the groove again would be offering a more appropriate professional job, or the survival job good. It could lead to something big. You gotta get a foot in the itself will provide a route to upward mobility. But the door. You have to be positive." Similarly, Steve believes that if the job survival job may preclude the search for a better job. While I as a server at a fancy restaurant doesn't come through, a barrista was skeptical about my coaches' insistence that searching is a job at Starbucks could lead to his becoming a shift supervisor full-time job in itself, it easily eats hours a day—hours that are at S10 an hour, although he knows "you have to burn a lot" to no longer available to the survival-job-holder. "It's hard to achieve that position. What many of the white-collar unemployed continue the search with ten- to fourteen-hour work-don't realize is that their professional expectations and outlook days," Dean Gottschalk, the tech guy turned limo driver, can, perversely, hamper their success in a survival job. John Piering told me. "I've had to cut back on interviews for now. What I left a job at Radio Shack because he had his own managerial ideas bring in is just a notch above slinging burgers." Steve, who and "didn't like the way they did things." Donna Eudovique was had been about to study wines, has laid-off friends who are fired from one of her jobs because she refused to abandon her working at Home Depot and Lowes, "but they're so tired af-professional image: "The boss came and told me not to dress the way I do—I wear skirts and suits. They told me to wear loses value."6 So once you fall into the low-wage, survival-job trap, blue jeans . . . He fires me and tells me it's because of the way I there's a good chance that you will remain there—an unwilling dressed." As Katherine Newman observes in
Falling from
transplant from a more spacious and promising world.