Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Page 19
With hindsight, I can see the potentially repellent features of my résumé—my upgraded one, that is. In it, I had eliminated the Gap by turning institutions and organizations previously listed as clients of my consultancy into actual employers. Instead of doing event planning on a freelance basis for a major journalism school, for example, I became a visiting professor who taught public relations students, which is actually a little closer to the truth (although I taught essay writing, not PR, and to journalism students). The idea was that I would be far more attractive as a person who had actually held various jobs, rather than one who had merely flitted through on short-term contracts, and, of course, that a teacher should be well qualified to be a practitioner. But my choice of this particular job may have marked my résumé for instant deletion. Only toward the end of my search did I learn, in G.J. Meyer’s book Executive Blues, of the “academic stench” that can sink a corporate career.1
Less mutable qualities, like age, may have worked against me too. My résumé revealed only that I was probably over forty. But even that relatively youthful status could have repulsed many potential employers. Business journalist Jill Andresky Fraser warned me that a forty-plus woman was unlikely to be hired except by someone seeking a “motherly secretary.” Katherine Newman, among others, has documented corporate age discrimination, quoting, for example, a Wall Street executive who told her, “Employers think that [if you’re over forty] you can’t think anymore. Over fifty and [they think] you’re burned out.”2 Yet more and more people are working, or seeking work, well into their midfifties and beyond, in part because pensions have become so rare. The Labor Department estimates that workers over fifty-five will make up 19 percent of the workforce in 2012, up from 14 percent in 2002.3
Another disadvantage arose from the artificiality of my situation. A normal job seeker of my age would have acquired a Rolodex of contacts to turn to when unemployment hit—people she knew through previous jobs and social contacts in the corporate world. Obviously, I could not turn to friends and ask them to help me go undercover within their firms or to expend their credibility on vouching for me to another firm. Far more than many job seekers, I was on my own and required to carve out new contacts within an alien environment.
But I gave it my best shot. I paid for coaches, I traveled far and wide to networking occasions and executive-job-search training sessions. I underwent a physical makeover and, although perhaps less successfully, attempted to soften my normally blunt persona into something more “likable” and “team player”-like. I spent long days hunched over my computer and working the phone. I read at least a dozen how-to books on networking, interviewing, and self-marketing in general. Yes, I could have given $4,000 to a firm like McCarthy and Company to polish myself even further and introduce me to its networking contacts. But as it was, I spent over $6,000 on my various coaches, trips, training and networking sessions, books, and positions on “elite” or “VIP” job boards. If there were other, entirely different, tacks to take, none of the job seekers I met seemed to know of them.
It is the existence of so many other luckless job seekers, many of them far more likely to succeed than myself, that makes me believe I probably did not do such a shoddy job of searching after all. Most of the people I met during my search had the advantages of being younger than I am, thoroughly familiar with the corporate world and its expectations, and possessed of relatively Gap-free résumés, at least until their recent bouts of unemployment. They had, in many cases, managed large numbers of people, handled impressive sums of money, nurtured important projects from start to finish—even, in some accounts, won lavish praise before being asked, usually out of the blue, to clean out their desks. Like me, they utilized the job boards, the networking groups, and the executive “transition” sessions. In fact, my guess is that in most cases they were much more disciplined than I was about turning the search into a fulltime, home-office-based job. But months later, most of them are no closer to a job than I am.
IN ONE SENSE, though, I was successful. If I did not get through the 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 think, were most of the other job seekers I encountered within it.
Middle-class Americans, like myself and my fellow seekers, have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security. This has never been true of the working class, most of which toils away at wages incommensurate with the effort required. And now, the sociologists agree, it is increasingly untrue of the educated middle class that stocks our corporate bureaucracies. As sociologist Robert Jackall concluded, “Success and failure seem to have little to do with one’s accomplishments.”4 Of the unemployed people I met during my search, some were innocent victims of mass purges; others had in fact been ascending in their careers at the time they were ordered to leave. Paul, whom I met at the ExecuNet session, reported being singled out precisely for his high earnings, which reflected prior accomplishments. Leah Gray said she received an adulatory evaluation shortly before being laid off from her last good job. Jeff Clement had been commended for his branch’s performance by the COO the very week he was fired.
Capitalism, as Marx observed—with surprising admiration for its dynamism—never promised stability, and it’s been a generation since blue-chip companies like IBM offered their white-collar workers a job for life. As the best-seller Who Moved My Cheese? advises, dislocated professionals must learn to adapt to new flavors of cheese as the old ones are taken away. But when skilled and experienced people routinely find their skills unwanted and their experience discounted, then something has happened that cuts deep into the very social contract that holds us together.
Bouts of unemployment, if nothing else, provide some time to figure out what it is. People used to working sixty to eighty hours per week, in the office, at home, and while commuting, suddenly find themselves with time on their hands. Time to reflect and ask not only what would I really like to do? —the question that the career coaches always urge you to ponder—but, more broadly, what’s wrong with this picture?
And this effort need not be undertaken alone. People have a natural—I would guess, hardwired—need to reach out to others in similar states of distress. Breast cancer sufferers, gambling addicts, and people squeezed by chronic debt, among others, routinely gather in support groups for comfort and practical tips. And today, perhaps more than at any other time in our history, white-collar victims of corporate instability have opportunities to confront their common problems together. Thanks to the “transition industry,” with its many networking events and coaching sessions, the unemployed and the precariously employed can get together on a regular basis, meet, and talk. These events could become settings for a wide-ranging discussion, leading, perhaps, to some kind of action.
But in my experience, no such discussion or action occurs.5 When the unemployed and anxiously employed reach out for human help and solidarity, the hands that reach back to them all too often clutch and grab. There are the coaches who want $200 an hour for painstakingly prolonged résumé upgrades and pop-psych exhortations. There are the executive-oriented firms that sell office space and contacts doled out one name at a time. And there are, in churches around America, groups that advertise concrete help but have little to offer beyond the consolations of their particular religious sect. In every one of these settings, any potentially subversive conversation about the economy and its corporate governance is suppressed.
I make no claim that this silencing is deliberate. No one has issued an edict warning about the revolutionary threat posed by unemployed and fearful white-collar workers, should they be allowed to discuss their situation freely. But, whatever the motivations of the coaches and organizers of networking sessions, the effect of their efforts is to divert people from the hard questions and the kinds of dissent these questions might suggest.
For example, the constant injunction to treat y
our job search as a job in itself, preferably “supervised” by a friend or a coach, seems designed to forestall seditious musings. Much of the job seeker’s “job”—Internet searches and applications—is admitted to be useless, and seems to have no function other than to fill the time that might otherwise be devoted to reflecting on the sources of the problem. Then consider what the coaches advise is a far better use of time than Internet searching: networking. It is networking that creates the possibility of solidarity among the unemployed, the excuse to come together, exchange stories, and perhaps discuss common solutions. But by its very nature networking tends to undercut any incipient solidarity with one’s fellow seekers, each of whom is to be regarded at best as a source of contacts or tips, and at worst as a possible competitor.
And even networking was discouraged at many of the events I attended. I was often frustrated to leave a gathering attended by ten to fifty other people knowing hardly anyone’s name, occupation, or career trajectory—unless, that is, I managed to snag some fellow participant on the way to the parking lot. Partly this was because most events consisted of such heavy “data dumps”—financial and Internet information, biblical instruction, and so forth—that no time remained for informal socializing. The effect, invariably, was to cut off any serious discussion or exchange of personal experiences. At the networking events and coaching sessions I attended, people often expressed their gratitude to have connected with others in the same boat. “At least now I know I’m not alone” was a common remark. But how little connection was offered!
Finally, consider the constant enjoinder to maintain or develop a “winning attitude.” It goes without saying that a smiling, confident person will do better in an interview than a surly one, but the instruction goes beyond self-presentation in particular interactions: you are to actually feel “positive” and winnerlike. By the same token, you are to let go of any “negative” thoughts, meaning, among other things, resentments lingering from prior job losses. As one web site I quoted warned, “If you are angry with your former employer, or have a negative attitude, it will show.” The prohibition on anger seems unlikely to foster true acceptance or “healing,” and it certainly silences any conversation about systemic problems. The aching question—why was I let go when I gave the company so much?—is cut off before it can be asked.
It is not only through the instructions given to job seekers that the transition industry narrows the range of the thinkable and forecloses the possibility of collective action. In books, coaching sessions, and networking events aimed at the white-collar unemployed, the seeker soon encounters ideologies that are explicitly hostile to any larger, social understanding of his or her situation. The most blatant of these, in my experience, was the EST-like, victim-blaming ideology represented by Patrick Knowles and the books he recommended to his boot-camp participants. Recall that at the boot camp, the timid suggestion that there might be an outer world defined by the market or ruled by CEOs was immediately rebuked; there was only us, the job seekers. It was we who had to change. In a milder form, the constant injunction to maintain a winning attitude carries the same message: look inward, not outward; the world is entirely what you will it to be.
On the face of it, the Christian ideology that can be found 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 responsible for your fate. To the Christians in the job-search business, it is God who takes sole responsibility. Hernacki recognizes the conflict: “In the past, when I’ve expressed this message, some people have reacted angrily and said that this somehow denies the existence of God as the Source.” But he nimbly resolves it by observing, “If you believe God is the Source, and the Source is on your side, working through you, you don’t have an excuse to plead helplessness again.”6 In other words, prayer gives the believer access to the same kind of infinite power Hernacki exercises through his thoughts. Different as they seem on the surface, the atheistic philosophy of individual will and the distorted Christianity I encountered both offer the fantasy of omnipotence. And if you can achieve anything through your own mental efforts—just by praying or concentrating hard enough—there is no need to confront the social and economic forces shaping your life.
SUPPOSE THAT THE transition zone encouraged free-ranging discussion. What might the topics of conversation be? For a start, people might want to address the question of what is happening in the corporate world today; in particular, why does experience seem to be so little valued and accomplishment so unreliably rewarded? Some may object that the corporate world is a vague abstraction, concealing a rich diversity of environments, but it was in common use among my fellow job seekers, who often expressed hopes of escaping from it—into a small business, for example, or what they saw as a more meaningful form of work. In saying that I was searching for a corporate position, I seemed to be moving in the opposite direction from many of my fellow seekers, who often expressed a strong desire to get out.
“Companies are colder these days” is how Hillary Meister put it. “There’s no sense of stability anymore. A lot has to do with greed.” Donna Eudovique echoed her: “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 they missed their salary and benefits, no job seeker I met ever expressed nostalgia for the camaraderie of the workplace, perhaps because they had experienced so little of it. In her most recent job, one of my informants felt she had been marked for firing almost from day one, when she unwillingly confessed to having been treated for cancer. During the interviews, everyone had been friendly, but after learning of her illness, they started making her life “a living hell”:
It was weird. They were like avoiding me. I think they were looking for every tiny mistake . . . They didn’t have an orientation. They didn’t want me asking for feedback.
Jeff Clement, who had worked in IT staffing and sales, told me:
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 WorldCom. I honestly think I lost my last job over ethics. I had someone 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 dream.
Corporations cannot of course offer a completely stable and nurturing environment for their employees: businesses fail; consumer tastes change; technology marches along. The cheese, in other words, is always moving. But we do expect corporations to provide jobs; at least that is the rationale given for every corporate tax cut, public subsidy, or loosening of regulations. The most recent corporate tax break, for example, is provided by the appealingly titled American Jobs Creation Act, although it does nothing at all to encourage job creation. Elected officials coddle the corporations for our sake, we are always told; there is no other way to generate jobs.
Once, not so many decades ago, the job-generating function ranked higher among corporate imperatives. CEOs were more likely to stand up to the board of directors and insist on retaining employees rather than boosting dividends in the short-term by laying people off. Appalled by the mass layoffs in her family’s firm, Claire Giannini, daughter of the founder of the Bank of America, recalled the days when “executives took a pay cut so that the lower ranks could keep their jobs.”7 A corporation may be a “person” under the law, but we understand it to be composed of many hundreds or thousands of actual people—which is what makes it corporate in the original sense of the word.
It is the corporate, or collective, aspect of corporations that has fallen into disrepair. There are two legal ways to make money: by increasing sales or by cutting costs. In most cases, a corporation’s highest operating expense is its payroll, making it a tempting target for cuts. In addition, the mergers and acquisitions that so appeal to CEO egos inevitably result in layoffs, as the economies of scale are realized. Or downsizing may be
undertaken as a more or less routine way of pleasing the shareholders, who, thanks to stock options, now include the top-level managers.
So, by eliminating other people’s jobs, top management can raise its own income. The trend was clear in the midnineties: CEOs who laid off large numbers of employees were paid better than those who didn’t.8 In the last few years, outsourcing has reaped the greatest rewards for CEOs: compared to other firms, compensation has increased five times faster at the fifty U.S. firms that do the most outsourcing of service jobs.9
Put in blunt biological terms, the corporation has become a site for internal predation, where one person can advance by eliminating another one’s job. In his business advice book QBQ! (which stands, mysteriously, for “the question behind the question”), John G. Miller quotes “a senior leader of a financial institution”:
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 at their computers right now in this building trying to eliminate our jobs!”10
And the management consultant David Noer observes:
Organizations that used to see people as long-term assets to be nurtured and developed now see people as short-term costs to be reduced . . . [T]hey view people as “things” that are but one variable in the production equation, “things” that can be discarded when the profit and loss numbers do not come out as desired.11
There are limits of course to this kind of Darwinian struggle. At some point the survivors will no longer be able to absorb the work of those who have been eliminated, no matter how hard they try.
So another question that the unemployed and the precariously employed might want to take up is: Is this any way to do business? Some management consultants, while urging acceptance of the seemingly inevitable demise of the “old paradigm” based on mutual loyalty between the company and its employees, nevertheless argue that the “lean and mean” trend ultimately undermines the business, as more and more work is left to the exhausted, insecure survivors.