Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Now to the serious part, beginning with a sheet titled “Immediate Income/Paid for Past Efforts/Lifestyle.” On the matter of lifestyle, “I don’t try to turn people into perfect AFLAC robots,” he assures me, though the tie, the shirt, and the vanity plate would seem to suggest that the botlike approach can’t hurt. There is a reason for this unusual level of tolerance, he explains: “If we were all the same, how could we open up new markets?” Also, I can work as hard or as little as I want; it’s up to me how much I want to “produce.” Low production, however, could lead to his flooding my market area with fresh, competing salespeople, and with this he gives me a narrow look. I will want to hit the ground running, he warns, because the first few months’ sales count for a lot.

  I remind him that, as I wrote in an e-mail, I am not interested in a sales job; I want to manage salespeople—motivate them, mentor them, and work with them to devise a strategic approach to our allotted terrain. This, I decide, is the moment for my bombshell: the articles in the business literature arguing that AFLAC has had problems managing its sales force. But if Larry is impressed by my knowledge, he does a good job of concealing it, continuing on unfazed like a tour guide who’s been through this museum a few too many times. Yes, yes, I can be a manager, though this seems to require recruiting my own salespeople to manage, just as he is apparently doing right now. There are in fact about ten blue folders spread out neatly on the table, attesting to a strenuous series of “interviews,” of which mine could be, for all I know, the eleventh of the day.

  On to the money part and a blinding sheet of numbers titled “Income Illustration” and showing that even a complete slacker can make $32,000 in her first year through a combination of commissions, bonuses, and policy renewals. Also, Larry ad-libs, “we have fun”—at company-sponsored trips to destinations like Las Vegas, Honolulu, and San Diego. As he returns to the numbers, highlighting here and there in brilliant yellow-green, I ponder my role in this “interview.” Looking interested would seem to be the main thing, and I try on various faces meant to convey agreement, concern, fascination. I must look as freakish as Lisa—the volunteer with the ever-changing expressions at the McLean Bible Church—just sitting here trying on masks.

  Business can only get better, he’s telling me. Why? Because health insurance deductibles and co-pays are rising steadily, and because “people have less disposable income than at any other time,” meaning they can’t handle those deductibles and co-pays themselves. I nod cheerily at the good news. Here we are, in a weird corporate niche created by the total failure of the American health-care system, and I am grinning with delight at the deepening misery.

  There occurs now the kind of physiological breakdown that could sink a genuine interview. A headache starts pinching in from my right temple; my throat begins to itch. When I break into an uncontrollable fit of alternating coughing and sneezing, he eventually notices and allows me to get some water from the cooler just outside the room. Either I’m allergic to something in the conference room, or carbon monoxide is being pumped in through the vents. Fortunately, we have reached the end of the sheets in the folder, and he asks whether I have any questions.

  Yes, I do, like what are we doing in this windowless room while the Blue Ridge Mountains undulate beckoningly outside? But instead I ask him something guaranteed to please: Has he made any inroads into the University of Virginia, which is Charlottesville’s largest employer? No, he says, and looks at me for the first time with something approaching interest. Good, I tell him. I have lots of contacts there.

  The next step? Some of the people he is interviewing this week will be invited back for a second interview—“that’s where we get to know each other.” He will let me know next week if I’ve made the cut. I tell him I’ll be away next week but will try to check my e-mail, at which point he says, “Well, why don’t we just make an appointment for the second interview right now?” So, just like that, I’ve made the cut.

  DESPITE THE PROMISE that this second interview, which occurs two weeks later, will be our chance to “get to know each other,” it proceeds exactly like the first one. Larry, again wearing an AFLAC shirt and duck tie, leads me through the still entirely unoccupied outer rooms to the windowless conference room, where the table is again stacked with blue folders. “I have a present for you,” I tell him—a new hardcover book about the advertising agency that created the spokes-duck, sent to me by a friend in the publishing industry whom I had told about my possible AFLAC job. I have read the crucial duck section, in which a young ad man wanders the streets of Manhattan, muttering “AFLAC, AFLAC” over and over to himself, until, in a stunning epiphany, he realizes he sounds like a . . . But Larry is too baffled by this departure from the script to thank me. He glances at the cover, then pushes the book aside with one finger, as if rejecting a bribe.

  Out of one of the blue folders (and this is a more advanced set than last time), he takes a bunch of stapled pages titled “Fast Track to Management” and begins highlighting phrases as he speaks them. I can become a CIT (Coordinator in Training) if I produce “a minimum of $50,000 AP” in six months, open a minimum of six new accounts, and recruit at least one other salesperson. Continuing with the “six” theme, I will have six responsibilities as a CIT, including “attending quarterly CDIs with the DSC, RSC, and SSC.” I must in addition acquire an insurance broker’s license and become “Flex and SmartApp Certified.” Any questions?

  Now he produces a Xeroxed calendar for July and begins highlighting the days I will spend in training classes, some of which will be conducted in another Virginia city, where AFLAC will pay for my motel room, assuming I am willing to share a room. A laptop will be required.

  “Will the company give me one?” I inquire.

  “No, but you’ll make the money to pay for it in no time at all.”

  So, not counting the laptop, that’s an initial investment of about $1,900 for the broker’s license and courses leading up to it. We move on through the content of the courses AFLAC will be offering me, including “L.E.A.S.E. Secretary and Approach Memorization (DSC 1-on-1 Reinforcement),” and “Account Servicing, Billing Reconciliation, and NOI Networking.” There will also be training in cold-calling, Larry adds, though this is not written down anywhere, perhaps because a cold call is the salesperson’s equivalent of a cold douche; most people would do almost anything to avoid having to make one. I note that the calendar, in which almost every weekday is now high-lighted, indicates both full and new moons, and cannot help but wonder what use an AFLAC associate might make of this information.

  He has taken on an increasingly bosslike tone, which I struggle to interpret positively. In the first interview, he was selling the job; now he’s directing it. There is the need to clear my calendar immediately, the need to get cracking on the broker’s exam, which will require mastery of a huge book. (Larry shows the book to me, though I will have to buy my own, and even he admits it’s “boring.”) “I hope you realize you’ve got the job if you want it,” he says out of the blue, with nothing more than a quick upward glance from the folder in front of him.

  He should smile at this point. He should shake my hand and offer a hearty “welcome to the team.” But Larry seems to be too emotionally defended to pause for celebration. In fact, he follows up with an implied put-down. Waving dismissively at a printout of my résumé, he says, “It’s not about this. I don’t even understand what this is about”—as if my career had been in astrophysics. “I make my judgment based on how a person communicates. Whether they have people skills. Whether they’re a good listener.” Then he gives me a little nod, for indeed I have been a good listener, though this would seem to be a pretty minimal requirement for an interviewee. He returns seamlessly to the need to “hit the ground running” and “make a total commitment.” Any questions?

  “What about health insurance?”

  “We’re independent contractors; we get our own.”

  So he has people selling health insurance who have none of their own? More tactf
ully, I ask whether I will have an office to work out of.

  “Umm, our associates use their home offices.”

  We shake hands and I set out to drive home, but some kind of monsoon strikes the mountains, forcing me off the road to sit and stare through the windshield wipers at the whiteout beyond. I have a job. I have been found fit to represent a major corporation to the general public, apparently on no other basis than my ability to sit still and listen meekly for two long and dreary hours. Or maybe I should give myself more credit for appearance and simulated enthusiasm; it’s hard to say. That, anyway, is the bright side. On the dimmer side, this “job” offers no salary, no benefits, not even an office with fax machine and phones. I might as well have applied at Wal-Mart and been given a pushcart full of housewares to hawk on the streets. I never call back, nor does Larry call me.

  THERE ARE THOUSANDS—tens of thousands—of “jobs” like this available to corporate rejects and malcontents. In 1995, 31 percent of the American workforce found themselves in some sort of “nonstandard” employment, characterized by a lack of benefits and weak bonds to their ostensible employers, and the number continues to grow.1 Many of these people are pink-collar temp workers and blue-collar day laborers—lawn workers and housecleaners, for example.

  But a growing number of the nonstandardly employed are former corporate employees, professionals and managers who have burned out or been expelled from their jobs. For the white-collar job seeker, the lures—or, as the case may be, snares—are everywhere. My inbox always contains one or two exhortations to “Be Your Own Boss!” and “Make as Much Money as You Want!” often accompanied by an eye-catching question like: “Sick of the Corporate Rat Race?” “Got a Case of the MONDAYS?” “Head Hurt From Hitting a Glass Ceiling?” “Lost That Loving Feeling for Your Job?” Recruiters to these quasi employments lurk at networking events, like the fellow I met at Fuddruckers who offered to match me to an appropriate franchising opportunity. I could have my own Merry Maids business, he assured me, and run it by remote control from the location of my choice.

  Selling real estate is one of the more respectable and traditional alternatives to the corporate world and offers no more of an initial hurdle than selling insurance: all you have to do is pay 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 geographically scattered friends and acquaintances.

  My brother is a corporate dropout and former owner of a motel in Arkansas; my brother-in-law came to real estate after a move to escape the high living costs in Hawaii derailed his career as a schoolteacher. When his teaching credentials proved nontransferable to Colorado without a several-thousand-dollar investment in further courses, he managed a Burger King for five years and spent a brief interlude as a paralegal before settling on real estate. One of my Atlanta contacts, a woman with a background in website design, has taken the real estate course and is considering taking the state exam. Clark Nickerson, whom I also met at Fuddruckers, had been an industrial sales manager for twenty-seven years and decided to enter the field after an “early retirement” proved financially nonfeasible and a yearlong job search bottomed out.

  By mid-April [2003] I was doing everything you should do—going to networking meetings, using the job boards—but I was really having a hard time staying motivated. My wife and I sat down—she struggles when 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, “What about real estate?”

  But as a default career for the white-collar unemployed, real estate is far from reliable. According to the respected industry magazine Realty Times, first-year realtors suffer an 86 percent failure rate, and of those who survive, 70 percent earn less than $30,000 a year. In my brother-in-law’s opinion, real estate “is too easy to get into. A lot of people don’t really see it as a profession, just an interim thing.” For an “interim thing,” though, he says the payoffs are slow to come.

  You need at least enough money to carry you for a year. I started with 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 commission check, you don’t realize at first that forty to fifty percent has to 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 taxes.

  Both my brother-in-law and his wife, my sister, toil away at his real estate business, grossing about $75,000 in 2004, of which half went for taxes and expenses.

  In his midfifties and still in the early, nonremunerative phase of his real estate career, Clark Nickerson is hopeful: “It’s going good, 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, was Cynthia, the woman who burst into tears at Patrick’s boot camp, and Richard, who appeared to be on the verge of doing so himself—two realtors who had been unable to stay afloat and were restarting their job searches from scratch.

  Another nonstandard form of employment held out to the unemployed is franchising, known to cynics as “buying yourself a job” because the initial fee for the right to use the corporate franchisor’s name is in the $15,000 to $40,000 range.2 In an earlier era, people were more likely to start their own small businesses; today you can buy a sort of prefab business, in which operating procedures, as well as any products used or sold, are supplied, for a monthly “royalty,” by the franchisor. About 400,000 Americans are franchisees, managing eight million employees and generating one-third of U.S. gross domestic product—everything from doughnuts and burgers to fitness centers. But as in real estate, the rewards are uncertain and the prospects of failure dauntingly high. In his study of franchisees in a variety of industries sociologist Peter M. Birkeland found a survival rate of only about 25 percent and average franchisee incomes of about $30,000.3

  Finally, as an option for the white-collar unemployed, there are thousands of commission-only sales jobs such as the one AFLAC offered me. According to the Direct Selling Association, 13.3 million Americans worked in such sales jobs in 2003, selling $25 billion worth of goods. In many cases, like AFLAC, these jobs offer rewards not only for selling the product but for recruiting new people to do so as well. On its dark side, the direct-selling world is filled with costly traps for the unwary—pyramid schemes in which the ultimate product is vague or nonexistent. An outfit called JDO Media, for example, enticed people to make money by enlisting others to sell a sketchily defined “marketing program”—for which privilege each recruit had to put up as much as $3,500.4

  Even the legitimate firms offer only scant remuneration, with only 8 percent of commission-only salespeople earning more than $50,000 a year and over half earning less than $10,000.5 Four years ago, an unemployed friend of mine got drawn into a vitamin-marketing scheme, in which the real rewards, again, came from recruiting others to the sales force. I went with him to a meeting led by a local doctor, and was impressed by the relative inattention to the vitamins’ merits compared to the emphasis on enlisting others to sell them. For his efforts, my friend lost $400 but gained a vitamin supply that will hopefully help compensate for his lack of health insurance.

  I GET A second “job” offer of the commission-only variety at a job fair, not long after my success with AFLAC. Mary Kay cosmetics was not one of the companies that attracted me to the fair,6 and, when I get there, my impulse is to avoid the Mary Kay table, which from a distance seems to be loaded with candy—actually pink cosmetics. But since no potential recruits are lining up, Linda, the table’s minder, is standing in front of it, and buttonholes me as I loiter in a moment of indecision as to where to make my next pitch. If I fill out a form, she tells me, I could win $25 and a free makeover: “Just what you need when you’re looking for a new job!”

  She is a large woman in a mauve suit with a white la
ce top underneath, mauve eye shadow matching her suit, and a pink rhinestone pin in the shape of a high heel attached to her shoulder. Again, I have to wonder why my tasteful silver brooch was rejected by Prescott, especially if Linda can get away with this whimsical display. I fill out the form, which wants only contact information, and reveal that I am looking for a PR job. “I had a high-up corporate job for thirty-one years, and one day I realized I was sick of it,” she says, her gaze drifting across the room: “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 the encouragement from management or the support from other women.”

  The “support from other women” part holds me rooted in place, trying to imagine this great valentine of a woman in the cutthroat corporate world she’s described. Now Linda’s problems are solved. “I work only twenty hours a week, and—you know what?—I make as much as I did before.” In addition, she works two days a week in a needlepoint shop, “and you know who that is—women,” in other words, potential Mary Kay customers. “Have you ever used Mary Kay cosmetics?” she asks me.

  “No,” I admit. “I guess I’ve been more into L’Oréal.”

  “That’s OK,” she says consolingly. “You can say it. You just haven’t tried Mary Kay yet.”

  We set a phone appointment for the following week, and she wishes me “an awesome day.” As instructed, I go to the Mary Kay web site and study the wisdom of Mary Kay herself, an elderly woman made up to resemble Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. I learn that high earners can win a pink Cadillac and that the corporate philosophy is “God first, family second, career third.” I also talk to Leah Gray, my unemployed acquaintance in Atlanta, because she had put in a stint with Mary Kay.

  When you join, there is a miniceremony in a dimly lit room in which the director lights each new consultant’s handheld candle and says some encouraging words. I have to admit I thought it was cheesy and overdramatic 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 hard sell and fell into this trap.