Bait and Switch (25 page)

Grace,
"Without any guidelines on how to shed the old self, In the midsixties, China's Chairman Mao conducted a vast without any instruction or training for the new, the downwardly experiment in sudden downward mobility. As part of his mobile remain in a social and cultural vacuum."
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Trained Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, thousands of managers for responsible positions requiring at least a modicum of and professionals—the very people one might have thought leadership and innovation, they are unprepared for the sudden would be essential to the nation's economic development—loss of status.

were abruptly sent to the countryside to work alongside the And no matter how upbeat they are—no matter how ingen-peasants in the fields. The idea, ostensibly, was that the disious and flexible—the unemployed and underemployed un-placed professionals would come to appreciate the backbreaking derstand that the clock is always ticking in the background.

labor of planting and sowing that their own well-being The longer you are unemployed, the less likely you are to find an ultimately depended on, much as Leah Gray came to respect appropriate job, and entries like "sales associate," "limo the Hispanic workers whose toil supports the North American driver," or "server" do not make an attractive filling for the economy. But whatever the socially redeeming value of downward growing Gap in one's resume. At the same time, you are inex-mobility, the experience of a "survival job" can be devastating to orably aging past the peak of occupational attractiveness, those who have been groomed to expect far better. Mao's which seems to lie somewhere in the midthirties now. Experi-transplants did not become better citizens; in fact many of them ence is not an advantage; in fact, as Richard Sennett notes of were left permanently embittered by their experience. Perhaps even corporate employment, "as a person's experience accumulates, it more so, in a society where worth is measured entirely by income and position, downward mobility carries a sense of failure, 58 Newman,
Falling from Grace,
p. 10.

rejection, and shame.

I do not follow my fellow job seekers into the world of survival jobs. My great advantage in this project is that I can simply say "game over" and return to my normal work as a writer.

My fellow seekers still hang there, suspended above the abyss.

conclusion

Could I have done better? Looking back on almost a year of job searching, I can find many things to regret. There were weeks when I failed to "update" my resume on the job boards, that is, to insert some small change, even in the area of punctuation, that would send my resume back up toward the top of the virtual pile. There were also many instances of incomplete follow-up, where I failed to follow my resume with a phone call, although this was usually because I could not find the name of an individual to call. It is likely, too, that, encouraged by the ever-

positive and proactive Kimberly, I initially aimed too high, the end of my search did I learn, in G. J. Meyer's book defining myself as an "executive" and, in some applications where
Executive Blues,
of the "academic stench" that can sink a corporate current salary figures were required, weighing in at an career.
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overweening $60,000 to S70,000 a year. And, wisely or not, I Less mutable qualities, like age, may have worked against me failed to utilize services like "resume blaster" that, for a fee, will too. My resume revealed only that I was probably over forty.

send your resume out to thousands of random companies—

But even that relatively youthful status could have repulsed many to their considerable annoyance, I should think.

potential employers. Business journalist Jill Andresky Fraser warned With hindsight, I can see the potentially repellent fea-me that a forty-plus woman was unlikely to be hired except by tures of my resume—my upgraded one, that is. In it, I had someone seeking a "motherly secretary." Katherine Newman, among eliminated the Gap by turning institutions and organizations others, has documented corporate age discrimination, quoting, for previously listed as clients of my consultancy into actual employers.

example, a Wall Street executive who told her, "Employers think Instead of doing event planning on a freelance basis for a major that [if you're over forty] you can't think anymore. Over fifty and journalism school, for example, I became a visiting professor

[they think] you're burned out."
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Yet more and more people are who taught public relations students, which is actually a little working, or seeking work, well into their midfifties and beyond, in closer to the truth (although I taught essay writing, not PR, part because pensions have become so rare. The Labor and to journalism students). The idea was that I would be far Department estimates that workers over fifty-five will make up more attractive as a person who had actually held various jobs, 19 percent of the workforce in 2012, up from 14 percent in 2002.
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rather than one who had merely flitted through on short-term contracts, and, of course, that a teacher should be well 59 Meyer tells of a friend whose career at a publishing house hit a dead end, apparently because he had a master's degree in English and had taught for years: qualified to be a practitioner. But my choice of this particular job

"Because of it he never became one of the boys" (p. 169).

60 Newman,
Falling from Grace,
p. 65.

may have marked my resume for instant deletion. Only toward 61 Porter and Walsh, "Retirement Turns into a Rest Stop as Pensions and Benefits Dwindle,"
New York Times,
February 9, 2005.

Another disadvantage arose from the artificiality of my situation.

"elite" or "VIP" job boards. If there were other, entirely different, A normal job seeker of my age would have acquired a Rolodex of tacks to take, none of the job seekers I met seemed to know of them.

contacts to turn to when unemployment hit—people she It is the existence of so many other luckless job seekers, knew through previous jobs and social contacts in the corporate many of them far more likely to succeed than myself, that world. Obviously, I could not turn to friends and ask them to help makes me believe I probably did not do such a shoddy job of me go undercover within their firms or to expend their credibility searching after all. Most of the people I met during my search on vouching for me to another firm. Far more than many job had the advantages of being younger than I am, thoroughly familiar seekers, I was on my own and required to carve out new contacts with the corporate world and its expectations, and possessed of within an alien environment.

relatively Gap-free resumes, at least until their recent bouts of But I gave it my best shot. I paid for coaches, I traveled far and unemployment. They had, in many cases, managed large wide to networking occasions and executive-job-search numbers of people, handled impressive sums of money, nurtured training sessions. I underwent a physical makeover and, al-important projects from start to finish—even, in some though perhaps less successfully, attempted to soften my nor-accounts, won lavish praise before being asked, usually out of the mally blunt persona into something more "likable" and "team blue, to clean out their desks. Like me, they utilized the job player"–like. I spent long days hunched over my computer and boards, the networking groups, and the executive

working the phone. I read at least a dozen how-to books on

"transition" sessions. In fact, my guess is that in most cases networking, interviewing, and self-marketing in general. Yes, I they were much more disciplined than I was about turning the could have given $4,000 to a firm like McCarthy and Company to search into a full-time, home-office-based job. But months polish myself even further and introduce me to its networking later, most of them are no closer to a job than I am.

contacts. But as it was, I spent over $6,000 on my various coaches, IN ONE SENSE, though, I was successful. If I did not get through the trips, training and networking sessions, books, and positions on door, I at least got a taste of white-collar life at its most miserable and precarious. It is not a world I was prepared for, nor, I branch's performance by the COO the very week he was fired.

think, were most of the other job seekers I encountered Capitalism, as Marx observed—with surprising admiration for within it.

its dynamism—never promised stability, and it's been a generation Middle-class Americans, like myself and my fellow seekers, since blue-chip companies like IBM offered their white-collar have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that workers a job for life. As the best-seller
Who Moved My
hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and secu-

Cheese?
advises, dislocated professionals must learn to adapt to rity. This has never been true of the working class, most of new flavors of cheese as the old ones are taken away. But which toils away at wages incommensurate with the effort when skilled and experienced people routinely find their skills required. And now, the sociologists agree, it is increasingly unwanted and their experience discounted, then something has untrue of the educated middle class that stocks our corporate bu-happened that cuts deep into the very social contract that reaucracies. As sociologist Robert Jackall concluded, "Success and holds us together.

failure seem to have little to do with one's accomplish-Bouts of unemployment, if nothing .else, provide some time to ments."
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Of the unemployed people I met during my figure out what it is. People used to working sixty to eighty hours search, some were innocent victims of mass purges; others had in per week, in the office, at home, and while commuting, suddenly fact been ascending in their careers at the time they were find themselves with time on their hands. Time to reflect and ask ordered to leave. Paul, whom I met at the ExecuNet session, not only
what would I really like to
do?—the question that the reported being singled out precisely for his high earnings, career coaches always urge you to ponder—but, more broadly, which reflected prior accomplishments. Leah Gray said she
what's wrong with this picture?

received an adulatory evaluation shortly before being laid off from And this effort need not be undertaken alone. People have a her last good job. Jeff Clement had been commended for his natural—I would guess, hardwired—need to reach out to others in similar states of distress. Breast cancer sufferers, gambling 62 Jackall,
Moral Mazes,
p.41.

addicts, and people squeezed by chronic debt, among consolations of their particular religious sect. In every one of others, routinely gather in support groups for comfort and these settings, any potentially subversive conversation about the practical tips. And today, perhaps more than at any other time economy and its corporate governance is suppressed.

in our history, white-collar victims of corporate instability have I make no claim that this silencing is deliberate. No one has opportunities to confront their common problems together.

issued an edict warning about the revolutionary threat posed by Thanks to the "transition industry," with its many networking unemployed and fearful white-collar workers, should they be events and coaching sessions, the unemployed and the precar-allowed to discuss their situation freely. But, whatever the iously employed can get together on a regular basis, meet, and motivations of the coaches and organizers of networking ses-talk. These events could become settings for a wide-ranging sions, the
effect
of their efforts is to divert people from the discussion, leading, perhaps, to some kind of action.

hard questions and the kinds of dissent these questions might But in my experience, no such discussion or action occurs.
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suggest.

When the unemployed and anxiously employed reach out for For example, the constant injunction to treat your job search as a human help and solidarity, the hands that reach back to them job in itself, preferably "supervised" by a friend or a coach, seems all too often clutch and grab. There are the coaches who want designed to forestall seditious musings. Much of the job seeker's $200 an hour for painstakingly prolonged resume upgrades

"job"—Internet searches and applications—is admitted to be and pop-psych exhortations. There are the executive-oriented useless, and seems to have no function other than to fill the time firms that sell office space and contacts doled out one name at a that might otherwise be devoted to reflecting on the sources time. And there are, in churches around America, groups of the problem. Then consider what the coaches advise is a far that advertise concrete help but have little to offer beyond the better use of time than Internet searching: networking. It is networking that creates the possibility of solidarity among the 63 The exception was one meeting of the Washington, D.C., Forty-Plus Club, unemployed, the excuse to come together, exchange stories, and where pending changes in unemployment insurance were mentioned, though no action was suggested.

perhaps discuss common solutions. But by its very nature net-surly one, but the instruction goes beyond self-presentation in working tends to undercut any incipient solidarity with one's fel-particular interactions: you are to actually
feel
"positive" and win-low seekers, each of whom is to be regarded at best as a source nerlike. By the same token, you are to let go of any "negative"

of contacts or tips, and at worst as a possible competitor.

thoughts, meaning, among other things, resentments lingering And even networking was discouraged at many of the from prior job losses. As one web site I quoted warned, "If you events I attended. I was often frustrated to leave a gathering at-are angry with your former employer, or have a negative atti-tended by ten to fifty other people knowing hardly anyone's tude, it will show." The prohibition on anger seems unlikely to name, occupation, or career trajectory—unless, that is, I man-foster true acceptance or "healing," and it certainly silences any aged to snag some fellow participant on the way to the parking conversation about systemic problems. The aching question—lot. Partly this was because most events consisted of such why was I let go when I gave the company so much?—is cut off heavy "data dumps"—financial and Internet information, bib-before it can be asked.