Are you looking for a job right now?
How long have you been looking?
Barbara Ehrenreich tried to find a corporate job for a year, and she wrote a book about it called “Bait and Switch” in 2005 which I feel is still relevant today.
She writes, “As my crisis management instructor, Jim Lukaszcwski, made clear: The CEO may be a fool; the company’s behavior may be borderline criminal, and still you are required to serve unstintingly and without the slightest question.”
This loyalty is not reciprocated.
After a year of constant searching, Barbara Erhenreich finally succeeded in getting two offers, at the end of that year, as an AFLAC representative or Mary Kay saleswoman. Did you know that AFLAC, although they sell insurance, don’t provide it to their own employees? Everyone is a contractor, who doesn’t get benefits or health insurance, and they work out of their homes. Talk about hypocrisy.
Mary Kay tells you that all you have to do is pay $100 and get a kit and you can start making money, but what they don’t tell you is that you need to buy $1,800 worth of makeup to sell at makeup parties, you must buy your own inventory from them. And they don’t offer health insurance either, just the fleeting dream of a pink cadillac. The false promises of these two companies made Barbara Erhenreich realize that even these so called careers for go-getters are doomed to failure from the start.
And yet, even the corporate world offers false promises. Barbara’s Mary Kay saleswoman relates: “I had a high-up corporate job for 31 years and one day I realized I was sick of it. The downsizing. Achieving so much and they can never afford a raise. You’re up against everyone for promotions. You can’t trust anyone. I never got encouragement from management or support from other women.” -Pg 187, Bait and Switch, Barbara Erhenreich.
Several other people chimed in:
“Companies are colder these days.”
“There’s no stability anymore.”
“A lot has to do with greed.”
“It’s so cold blooded now.”
“There’s no warning, no thanks, just “Take your stuff and don’t come back tomorrow.””
For all that these women missed their salaries and benefits, no job seeker she met ever expressed a nostalgia for the camaraderie of the workplace, perhaps because they experienced so little of it.” Pg 222, Bait and Switch.
Erhenreich concludes: “The failure of white collar workers to band together and defend their jobs and professional autonomy is usually attributed to individualism or to an unwarranted faith in the meritocratic claims of our culture. White collar workers lack dignity, they must sell not just skill and hard work, but themselves. “Personality” and “Attitude’ outweigh performance.”
“So the unemployed continue to drift through their shadowy world of internet job searches, lonely networking events, and costly coaching sessions. The tragedy is that they could be doing so much more. They could be lobbying for concrete improvements in the lives of the unemployed and the anxiously employed.”
“Topping the list would be an expansion of unemployment benefits, extending potentially for years. The entire debate about outsourcing would take a different tone if American workers had an adequate safety net to fall back on. Imagine if all 8 million unemployed people in America launched a concerted campaign for single payer health insurance.”
And now, of course, we can amend those numbers to 31 million unemployed. Imagine that. 31 million people.
It will take a change in attitude, a psychological transformation, to make the leap form solitary desperation to collective action. What unemployed people need is not “likeability” but the real ability to reach out to others and enlist them in a common project. What they need is not “a winning attitude” but courage-to come together and work for change, even in the face of overwhelming odds.
What can you do now, if you are unemployed?
Demand that Congress extend unemployment benefits.
Want to do more? Start a job club. Help people connect with each other. With 31 million unemployed, you are not alone. In Austin, Texas, you can attend the LPJC.
Do you know of another job club that helps unemployed people? Please write it in the comments.