Bait and Switch (26 page)

lical instruction, and so forth—that no time remained for It is not only through the instructions given to job seekers that informal socializing. The effect, invariably, was to cut off any the transition industry narrows the range of the thinkable and serious discussion or exchange of personal experiences. At the forecloses the possibility of collective action. In books, coaching networking events and coaching sessions I attended, people sessions, and networking events aimed at the white-collar often expressed their gratitude to have connected with others unemployed, the seeker soon encounters ideologies that are in the same boat. "At least now I know I'm not alone" was a explicitly hostile to any larger, social understanding of his or her common remark. But how little connection was offered!

situation. The most blatant of these, in my experience, was the Finally, consider the constant enjoinder to maintain or EST-like, victim-blaming ideology represented by Patrick develop a "winning attitude." It goes without saying that a Knowles and the books he recommended to his boot-camp smiling, confident person will do better in an interview than a participants. Recall that at the boot camp, the timid suggestion that there might be an outer world defined by the market or ruled infinite power Hernacki exercises through his thoughts.

by CEOs was immediately rebuked; there wasonly us, the job Different as they seem on the surface, the atheistic philosophy of seekers. It was we who had to change. In a milder form, the individual will and the distorted Christianity I encountered both constant injunction to maintain a winning attitude carries the offer the fantasy of omnipotence. And if you can achieve anything same message: look inward, not outward; the world is entirely what through your own mental efforts—just by praying or you will it to be.

concentrating hard enough—there is no need to confront the On the face of it, the Christian ideology that can be found social and economic forces shaping your life.

at so many events run by "career ministries" or eager Christian businessmen is a direct rebuttal of this EST-like philosophy. To Knowles and authors like Mike Hernacki, you alone are re-SUPPOSE THAT THE transition zone encouraged free-ranging sponsible for your fate. To the Christians in the job-search discussion. What might the topics of conversation be? For a start, business, it is God who takes sole responsibility. Hernacki rec-people might want to address the question of what is ognizes the conflict: "In the past, when I've expressed this happening in the corporate world today; in particular, why message, some people have reacted angrily and said that this does experience seem to be so little valued and accomplish-somehow denies the existence of God as the Source." But he ment so unreliably rewarded? Some may object that
the corporate
nimbly resolves it by observing, "If you believe God is the
world
is a vague abstraction, concealing a rich diversity of Source, and the Source is on your side, working through you, environments, but it was in common use among my fellow job you don't have an excuse to plead helplessness again."
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In seekers, who often expressed hopes of escaping from it—into a other words, prayer gives the believer access to the same kind of small business, for example, or what they saw as a more meaningful form of work. In saying that I was searching for a 64

corporate position, I seemed to be moving in the opposite di-Hernacki,
The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want,
pp.

55-56.

rection from many of my fellow seekers, who often expressed a I'm bitter and cynical about corporate America because I've seen far too many decisions just based on the bottom line. It's not just Enron and strong desire to get out.

WorldCom. I honestly think I lost my last job over ethics. I had someone

"Companies are colder these days" is how Hillary Meister actually ask me: "Are your values worth more than your paycheck?" They think you can be evil all day and then go home and live the American put it. "There's no sense of stability anymore. A lot has to do dream.

with greed." Donna Eudovique echoed her: "It's so cold-blooded now. There's no warning, no thanks, just 'take Corporations cannot of course offer a completely stable and your stuff and don't come back tomorrow.' " For all that nurturing environment for their employees: businesses fail; they missed their salary and benefits, no job seeker I met consumer tastes change; technology marches along. The ever expressed nostalgia for the camaraderie of the cheese, in other words, is always moving. But we do expect workplace, perhaps because they had experienced so little of corporations to provide jobs; at least that is the rationale given for it. In her most recent job, one of my informants felt she had every corporate tax cut, public subsidy, or loosening of regulations.

been marked for firing almost from day one, when she The most recent corporate tax break, for example, is provided by unwillingly confessed to having been treated for cancer.

the appealingly titled American Jobs Creation Act, although it During the interviews, everyone had been friendly, but after does nothing at all to encourage job creation. Elected officials learning of her illness, they started making her life "a living coddle the corporations for
our
sake, we are always told; there is hell":

no other way to generate jobs.

Once, not so many decades ago, the job-generating func-It was weird. They were like avoiding me. I think they were looking for tion ranked higher among corporate imperatives. CEOs were every tiny mistake . . . They didn't have an orientation. They didn't want me asking for feedback.

more likely to stand up to the board of directors and insist on retaining employees rather than boosting dividends in the Jeff Clement, who had worked in IT staffing and sales, told me: short-term by laying people off. Appalled by the mass lay-

offs in her family's firm, Claire Giannini, daughter of the CEOs who laid off large numbers of employees were paid better founder of the Bank of America, recalled the days when "exec-than those who didn't.
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In the last few years, outsourcing has utives took a pay cut so that the lower ranks could keep their reaped the greatest rewards for CEOs: compared to other firms, jobs."
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A corporation may be a "person" under the law, but we compensation has increased five times faster at the fifty U.S.

understand it to be composed of many hundreds or thousands firms that do the most outsourcing of service jobs.
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of actual people—which is what makes it
corporate
in the orig-Put in blunt biological terms, the corporation has become a site inal sense of the word.

for internal predation, where one person can advance by It is the corporate, or collective, aspect of corporations that eliminating another one's job. In his business advice book has fallen into disrepair. There are two legal ways to make
QBQ!
(which stands, mysteriously, for "the question behind the money: by increasing sales or by cutting costs. In most cases, a question"), John G. Miller quotes "a senior leader of a financial corporation's highest operating expense is its payroll, making institution":

it a tempting target for cuts. In addition, the mergers and ac-quisitions that so appeal to CEO egos inevitably result in lay-Sometimes people say to me, "I don't want to take risks." I tell them, "You and I had better take risks, because there are about a dozen people offs, as the economies of scale are realized. Or downsizing at their computers right now in this building trying to eliminate our may be undertaken as a more or less routine way of pleasing jobs! "
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the shareholders, who, thanks to stock options, now include the top-level managers.

So, by eliminating other people's jobs, top management can 66 Downs, Corporate Executions, p.28.

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raise its own income. The trend was clear in the midnineties: John Cavanagh, Sarah Anderson, Chris Hartman, Scott Klinger, and Stacy Chan,
Executive Excess 2004: Campaign Contributions, Outsourcing, Unexpensed Stock
Options, and Rising CEO Pay,
available at www.faireconomy.org.

68 John G. Miller,
QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: What to Really Ask
65 Quoted in Alan Downs,
Corporate Executions: The Ugly Truth About Layoffs—

Yourself to Eliminate Blame, Complaining, and Procrastination
(New York: G. P.

How Corporate Greed Is Shattering Lives, Companies, and Communities
(New Putnam's Sons, 2004).

York: AHACOM, 1995), p.31.

to the exhausted, insecure survivors.

And the management consultant David Noer observes: WHEN THEY REACH out for help, the unemployed enter an in-Organizations that used to see people as long-term assets to be sidiously manipulative culture—one that was utterly foreign to nurtured and developed now see people as short-term costs to be reduced . . . [T]hey view people as "things" that are but one variable me. I have some acquaintance with another kind of institu-in the production equation, "things" that can be discarded when the tional culture—that of the university—and had expected the profit and loss numbers do not come out as desired.
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corporate culture to be very different, with far less wasted ef-There are limits of course to this kind of Darwinian struggle.

fort, for example, in the form of tradition or self-indulgent perAt some point the survivors will no longer be able to absorb sonality conflicts. I expected, as I approached the corporate the work of those who have been eliminated, no matter how world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like hard they try.

the military—or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway—in So another question that the unemployed and the precari-its focus on concrete results. How else would companies sur-ously employed might want to take up is: Is this any way to do vive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture business? Some management consultants, while urging accep-riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the tance of the seemingly inevitable demise of the "old paradigm"

fact- and logic-based worlds of, say, science and journalism—a based on mutual loyalty between the company and its employ-culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, ees, nevertheless argue that the "lean and mean" trend ulti-and shot through with magical thinking.

mately undermines the business, as more and more work is left Of course, I was never officially accepted into the corporate world as a regular employee, but I have every reason to believe 69

that the transition zone occupied by the unemployed offers a David Noer,
Healing the Wounds: Overcoming the Trauma of Layoffs and
Revitalizing Downsized Organizations
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), p. 17.

fairly accurate glimpse into its culture. For one thing, the Perhaps the strangest aspect of the corporate world as I en-individuals who provide coaching, who lead group sessions countered it was the constant emphasis on "personality" and and facilitate networking events, are for the most part

"attitude." In the world of journalism, as in the academy, themselves veterans of the corporate world. In addition, many quirky, even difficult, people are commonplace, and no one transition enterprises serve not only the unemployed, but cor-complains as long as the copy gets in on time or the students porate clients as well, providing counseling and pep sessions for master the subject matter. But the path to the corporate world is current executives and other professionals. Hence the ideology lined with admonitions to upgrade or improve one's personality.

and expectations of the transition industry cannot be too far Coaches administered personality tests and talked about the out of line from those of the corporate culture at large—importance of being upbeat and likable; Internet and book-and much of what I found there was disturbingly loony.

based advice urged a thorough retuning of one's attitude; The reliance on empirically baseless personality tests, for networking events emphasized the necessity of staying "up."

example, and the deeper assumption that humans can be Other job searchers agreed that success depends on one's sorted into nine or so distinct "personality types," echo the ability to conform to the immediate microculture. As Hilary medieval notion of "humors"—"choleric," "bilious," et cetera—

Meister put it: "If they find someone who gets along with them determining mood and health. Then there's the almost nu-and who has the right personality, they'll like them. In an interview merological faith that things have been clarified once they have today, chemistry matters more than skills." Jeff Clement attributed been organized into categories and counted, as in the "seven success to

habits," the "four competencies," "the sixty-four principles of success." Lists may be useful as a mnemonic device, but they are personality, who you knew. If the boss was into golf, we were all supposed to be into golf. If he smoked cigars, we all smoked cigars. If he drank brandy, we not an analytic tool and, whether the subject is chemistry or all had to drink brandy. Eventually you saw some serious vices and then you marketing, do little to illuminate the world.

had something on him. Then, if you have the dirt on them, they'll keep you on. To survive, you need to know where the bodies are buried.

What does personality have to do with getting the job done? I am the facts. Humbug is their enemy. Dissent comes easily to them, as does complexity. These are traits that are not only unnecessary for most business jobs, still confident that I could have been, as Kimberly put it, a they are actually a handicap when it comes to rising through the ranks of

"crackerjack PR person," at least as far as job performance goes. But large companies.
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could I have played the requisite role, as prescribed by the coaches Worse, from my perspective, the same article tells of a woman in a and gurus? The rationale commonly given for the emphasis on senior position who was upbraided for revealing, in a personality test: personality is that today's corporate functionaries are likely to work