Alas, there is no job fair at the Marriott. Bypassing the front desk and going straight to the ballroom, I find a sign saying “MetLife,” a generous buffet lunch spread out in the corridor, and a room full of MetLife functionaries sitting at parallel tables, many still nibbling from their plates. Why not just go in and sit down, as though I am one of them? Take a little rest before staggering back to the Holiday Inn, fantasize that I am employed and valued enough to be sent to an out-of-town meeting? In the French movie Time Out, an unemployed white-collar man never reveals his condition to his family. He gets up every morning, pretends to go to work, once even entering a corporate glass tower, where he wanders around with his briefcase, nodding at the busy people he encounters, and relaxing in an armchair in the atrium until he’s eventually challenged by a security guard. If you’re white and not pushing a shopping cart, you can go almost anywhere.
I fill a plate with a chicken wrap and salads and slide into the seat nearest to the door. The suited woman next to me is too busy multitasking to notice my arrival: watching the PowerPoint presentation going on at the front of the room while grinding her jaw and working a hangnail down to a bloody stump. Everyone else seems equally intent on the screen, which reads “Rating and Underwriting Rules and Algorithm, Experience rating spreadsheet, strategies, u/w guidelines.” Insofar as I can comprehend the questions and comments, they are discussing how many claims they can reject before they drive the client away. Far more interesting are the toys available on our tables: crayons on mine, crayons plus small containers of Play-Doh at the table in front of us. A man in his fifties has fashioned a kind of pumpkin out of his Play-Doh, with segments in different colors. So this is what it’s like on the inside—difficult and scary, yes, but with playful little encouragements to regress.
Then a man comes in the door from the corridor and walks straight up to me. “I’m Mike,” he says sotto voce, shaking my hand, “and you are?” When I give him my name, he wants to know where I’m from.
“Communications,” I tell him.
“Based where?”
“Uh, Denver.”
He gives me a knowing smile and walks off. Why didn’t I think to add, after Denver, “We’re starting a new project there”? Maybe he thinks I’m a spy from Aetna or Unicare and is about to summon security. I give myself ten more minutes to clean my plate and rest my feet, because the painful truth is: this moment of fantasy employment is as close as I’m ever going to get.
I continue to make applications and follow-up phone calls through September, until I am overwhelmed by a sense of futility. If this were my real life and my actual livelihood were at stake, I would be climbing the walls. But even in my artificial situation as a journalist-slash-job seeker, I cannot help feeling the rejection. All my life, my real life, that is, I’ve found myself in one strange situation after another, and always managed to succeed or at least survive. Am I not plucky, resourceful, even a wee bit charismatic? The answer, coming in the form of nothing at all—no responses, no nibbles, no interest of any kind—apparently is not.
Then, too, I will confess to having looked forward to my climactic and of course entirely voluntary exit from the corporate world. I would work for three or four months, according to the original plan—promoting my company’s new libido-enhancing drug or rationalizing the deaths from its painkillers—until I arrived at the hasta-la-vista moment when I would suddenly announce to my bewildered employer that I was going on to better things, meaning my actual life. And it is better, my freelance freedom, than anything I might find in an office or cubicle—I see that more clearly than ever now. But I can no longer imagine that it is mine entirely by choice. The corporate world has spoken, and it wants nothing to do with me, not even with the smiling, suited, endlessly compliant Alexander version of me.
FOR THOSE WHO can’t afford to be fussy about status or pay, there are of course plenty of jobs in America. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants crowd into the country every year to work in lawn maintenance, on construction crews, or as house-cleaners, nannies, and meat packers. Even in the absence of new job creation, high turnover in the low-wage job sector guarantees a steady supply of openings to the swift and the desperate. To white-collar job seekers, these are known as “survival jobs”—something to do while waiting for a “real” job to come along. But this designation may be overly optimistic.
In late September, my job search effectively over, I started trying to track down the job seekers whose cards I had collected for something approaching a serious interview. I told them I was writing an article on white-collar unemployment for a business publication, as a way of earning a little money while I continued my search. (Later, I contacted them again to tell them that the article had grown into a book and would be written under my usual nom de plume, Barbara Ehrenreich.) Eleven people responded; none had found “real” jobs yet; and even those who had been quite guarded in the settings where I originally met them were eager to talk about their strategies, most of which by now included taking survival jobs.
Not every unemployed professional has to contemplate taking a survival job, of course, at least not right away. Many of the people I met during my search had accumulated enough assets in the course of their working life to be able to coast along for a year or more, even while pouring money into coaching and executive-job-search firms. Others used a variety of strategies to stretch out their stay in the middle class. They sent a stay-at-home spouse into the low-wage workforce. They relinquished the perquisites associated with even minor levels of affluence, such as eating out and other entertainments. They sold off cherished possessions at yard sales or auctioned them on eBay; they downsized their living quarters. John Piering, a fifty-two-year-old laid-off IT professional with two small children, described his family’s efforts to hang on:
We limit how often we go out and stopped using the credit cards. Luckily, we have lowish mortgage payments [about $650 a month]. The big problem is utilities. They just go up and up. We cut down on the AC and leave the windows open. We still have cable TV for the kids and high-speed data access for job searching.
Piering’s five-year-old had to be taken out of pre-K, which cost $125 a month. He and his wife—who does temp work, “stuffing envelopes”—now divide the child care the same way many working-class couples do: “I do the day shift; she does the night shift.”
Unemployment insurance is the first fallback for the laid-off, but it provides only 60 percent of one’s former earnings and ends after twenty-six weeks. In 2004, 3.6 million unemployed Americans exhausted their unemployment benefits before finding a job,4 and when that happens, even the middle-aged often turn to their parents for help. Hillary Meister, a forty-five-year-old with a career in communications, moved back to the town where her parents live when an illness temporarily curtailed her job search. “Without my family,” she says, “I’d definitely be on the streets.” Steve, the former marketing man who was thinking of learning about wines to qualify for an upscale serving job, is giving up his current $845-a-month apartment for a room with kitchen privileges: “All I need is a place where I can plug in a computer.” Until now, he says, “my family’s been helping me out. Otherwise I’d be on the street, literally . . . But they keep saying, ‘What’s wrong with you? Just take a job, any job.’”
Unfortunately, there is no reliable information on the numbers of former white-collar workers who eventually succumb to this kind of advice. The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures “underemployment” only in terms of one’s hours; that is, you are officially underemployed only if you are working part-time and would prefer to work fulltime. In March 2004, the unemployment rate was 5.8 percent, while the underemployment rate, measured strictly as involuntary part-time work, was 10 percent. As to the proportion of people employed at low-paying jobs that make no use of their education or established “skill sets,” no reliable estimates are available.
I found plenty of people in this situation, though—people who had gone from unemployment to unde
remployment in the sense of having to work at jobs inappropriate to their skills. Steve, for example, tried Wal-Mart but found that “for a professional, it’s tough. They’re looking for someone at very little pay, like eight dollars an hour.” Now, as mentioned, he’s thinking of waiting tables in a fancy restaurant where he might, just possibly, be able to network with his customers. Gary, a former broadcast journalist and PR person, reports that he’s now looking for entry-level positions at Best Buy, Circuit City, and Home Depot. Once these men have landed their jobs as waiters or sales “associates,” they will no longer be visible, to the federal government, as members of the “unemployed.” Case closed, as far as the larger society is concerned—problem solved.
Others of the long-term unemployed sink even lower in status, to the kind of jobs normally undertaken by recent immigrants or the totally uncredentialed. John Piering went from being an IT professional to “working temp—moving furniture, laborer work,” whatever he could get. Hillary Meister tried grooming dogs at PetSmart, until her allergies caught up with her. Dean Gottschalk, a forty-one-year-old computer technician, has been driving a limo. Leah Gray, the former marketing executive I met at the Roasted Garlic, has been working at menial jobs since her first layoff in 2001.
I’ve done everything from scrub toilets to clean out apartments in this [apartment] complex for eight dollars an hour. I did that for eight months, and the only benefit was that I got twenty pounds lighter from doing it. It gave me a new appreciation for the predominately Hispanic employees who usually do that kind of thing.
Leah’s job search has been, at times, dangerously stressful, she wrote me in an e-mail.
The vast amount of duress has taken a heavy toll on me. I’ve had a few “first timers.” For the first time, I landed in the emergency room and was diagnosed as having a severe panic attack . . . I had to pull over to the side of the road and call 911. My heart started racing, my throat was swelling, my body was numb, my motor skills were so affected that I couldn’t keep my hands gripped on the wheel, and I began to shake profusely. It definitely wasn’t a pleasant experience. On a second “first timer,” I am very embarrassed to admit that I have been getting collection calls for the bills I incurred for treatment which are in the ballpark of $900 . . . My third “first timer” is that I am $73,000 in debt and have $16,000 until my credit cards are maxed out . . . So, I actually joke with people that I wouldn’t mind my identity stolen. I wouldn’t have to worry about my debt.
When I spoke to Leah in October, she had just started working at a retail chain “standing on [her] feet on concrete all day” for $7.60 an hour and no benefits. She felt she had little choice of jobs this time: “One reason I took [this job] is that I’ve tried to stay within five miles of where I live because I don’t want to waste money on gas.”
Wild alternations like these require a degree of flexibility undreamed of by the most creative career coaches. Take the case of Donna Eudovique, an African-American single mother of two, whose eight-year-long search transformed her into a remarkable jack-of-all-trades. When she moved to Georgia in the wake of a divorce, she discovered—as my brother-in-law had in Colorado—that her teaching credentials were useless without an expensive investment in further courses. Since then, she has done just about everything: driven a truck for Georgia Power, sorted mail for UPS, worked in a copy shop, laid tile and hardwood floors. When I talked to her in September, she was doing substitute teaching for $90 a day and, on the days when no subbing job came through, sewing custom-made dresses for sale (no small skill in itself). “When you get to be forty-eight years old,” she told me,
you expect to be well-grounded, be able to sit down and know where your money is coming from . . . But I’m just working off my wits . . . I’ve got children to feed. Yes, I get discouraged, but I’ll do whatever I have to to live. I qualified for food stamps, then they stopped. Now I’m trying to get them back.
Health insurance is a long-lost luxury: “I just make sure I stay really healthy”—she laughed—“eat well, take my herbs, and get an annual exam at a clinic where you pay on a sliding scale.” When I remarked on her ability to laugh, she said, “It’s the least I can do. I don’t have any more tears.”
The hope, as one sinks into the world of low-paid, menial jobs, is that either the long-awaited e-mail will finally come, offering a more appropriate professional job, or the survival job itself will provide a route to upward mobility. But the survival job may preclude the search for a better job. While I was skeptical about my coaches’ insistence that searching is a fulltime job in itself, it easily eats hours a day—hours that are no longer available to the survival-job-holder. “It’s hard to continue the search with ten- to fourteen-hour workdays,” Dean Gottschalk, the tech guy turned limo driver, told me. “I’ve had to cut back on interviews for now. What I bring in is just a notch above slinging burgers.” Steve, who had been about to study wines, has laid-off friends who are working at Home Depot and Lowes, “but they’re so tired after lifting all day, they’re too tired to do their searching.” Leah Gray encountered another problem familiar to the unemployed and underemployed: while she had lost weight doing manual labor, the stresses of this last year provoked a thirty-pound gain, and she can’t afford to buy a new suit for interviews.
Gary, whose pregnant wife had to give up her job for bed rest shortly after he lost his own job, is optimistic about the possibility of moving up the management ladder within a survival job at one of the big-box stores: “Just getting into the groove again would be good. It could lead to something big. You gotta get a foot in the door. You have to be positive.” Similarly, Steve believes that if the job as a server at a fancy restaurant doesn’t come through, a barrista job at Starbucks could lead to his becoming a shift supervisor at $10 an hour, although he knows “you have to burn a lot” to achieve that position. What many of the white-collar unemployed don’t realize is that their professional expectations and outlook can, perversely, hamper their success in a survival job. John Piering left a job at Radio Shack because he had his own managerial ideas and “didn’t like the way they did things.” Donna Eudovique was fired from one of her jobs because she refused to abandon her professional image: “The boss came and told me not to dress the way I do—I wear skirts and suits. They told me to wear blue jeans . . . He fires me and tells me it’s because of the way I dressed.” As Katherine Newman observes in Falling from Grace, “Without any guidelines on how to shed the old self, without any instruction or training for the new, the downwardly mobile remain in a social and cultural vacuum.”5 Trained for responsible positions requiring at least a modicum of leadership and innovation, they are unprepared for the sudden loss of status.
And no matter how upbeat they are—no matter how ingenious and flexible—the unemployed and underemployed understand that the clock is always ticking in the background. The longer you are unemployed, the less likely you are to find an appropriate job, and entries like “sales associate,” “limo driver,” or “server” do not make an attractive filling for the growing Gap in one’s résumé. At the same time, you are inexorably aging past the peak of occupational attractiveness, which seems to lie somewhere in the midthirties now. Experience is not an advantage; in fact, as Richard Sennett notes of corporate employment, “as a person’s experience accumulates, it loses value.”6 So once you fall into the low-wage, survival-job trap, there’s a good chance that you will remain there—an unwilling transplant from a more spacious and promising world.
In the midsixties, China’s Chairman Mao conducted a vast experiment in sudden downward mobility. As part of his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, thousands of managers and professionals—the very people one might have thought would be essential to the nation’s economic development—were abruptly sent to the countryside to work alongside the peasants in the fields. The idea, ostensibly, was that the displaced professionals would come to appreciate the backbreaking labor of planting and sowing that their own well-being ultimately depended on,
much as Leah Gray came to respect the Hispanic workers whose toil supports the North American economy. But whatever the socially redeeming value of downward mobility, the experience of a “survival job” can be devastating to those who have been groomed to expect far better. Mao’s transplants did not become better citizens; in fact many of them were left permanently embittered by their experience. Perhaps even more so, in a society where worth is measured entirely by income and position, downward mobility carries a sense of failure, 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 résumé on the job boards, that is, to insert some small change, even in the area of punctuation, that would send my résumé back up toward the top of the virtual pile. There were also many instances of incomplete follow-up, where I failed to follow my résumé 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, defining myself as an “executive” and, in some applications where current salary figures were required, weighing in at an overweening $60,000 to $70,000 a year. And, wisely or not, I failed to utilize services like “résumé blaster” that, for a fee, will send your résumé out to thousands of random companies—to their considerable annoyance, I should think.
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
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