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

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  But the theme here, I am beginning to see, is pain management and structured grieving. If you have been spat out by the great corporate machine and left to contemplate your presumed inadequacy, it makes sense to fill the day with microtasks, preferably supervised by someone else. Imagining one’s search as a “job” must satisfy the Calvinist craving to be doing something, anything, of a worklike nature, and Americans may be especially prone to Calvinist angst. We often credit some activity with the phrase “at least it keeps me busy”—as if busyness were a desirable state regardless of how you achieve it. As I later learn in Harvey Mackay’s business best seller We Got Fired!. . . And It’s the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us, job searching, properly undertaken, should be far more time-consuming than an actual job: “If you have a job, then you might have the luxury of working 9:00 to 5:00. If you’re getting a job, then plan on twelve to sixteen hours a day.”1

  The alternative to manufactured busyness is flat-out depression, as a large gray-haired man seems to confirm when, in an apparent non sequitur, he raises his hand to caution that “introspection can be very powerful if you do it in the right frame of mind. Otherwise it can get you down.” One wonders what dark nights of the soul he has endured in the course of his search, but for Merle and Joe, his comment serves only as a segue to “staying up,” which amounts to maintaining a winning attitude, even in the face of despair. Here the grim Calvinism of self-management suddenly gives way to a wan hedonism: We should go to the gym, networking with other gym-goers while we’re there. Have lunch with a friend. Make a list of things you enjoy. The dark-haired, somewhat exoticlooking woman sitting next to me, who has been looking for a communications job for six months, leans over and whispers naughtily, “I take antidepressants. Do you think I should shout that out?” We both giggle, although it isn’t really all that funny.

  We are on to “Fear” and Joe asks what we are afraid of. “Failure” comes up in various forms, and I add “rejection.” There’s no dodging fear. Joe exhorts us to “get in its face,” and a woman, who I later learn is a career coach herself, stresses the need “to really feel your fear.” This seems to delight Pamela, who has remained standing, like Merle, though off to the side: “That’s honoring your feelings!” But fear, once faced, is quickly abolished. As Joe summarizes the topic, “The point is, what is there to be afraid of? It’s Nike. Just do it.”

  Now Pamela has an idea: laughter, specifically, “artificial laughter.” At least you start with artificial laughter, which can magically evolve into the real thing. She produces a five-second-long laugh, followed by “See?” But the fake laugh fails to catch on; most people are looking at her with slight alarm. She tries again in a higher register—Ha ha ha ha ha, Ha ha ha ha ha—and out of solidarity I try to join in. Otherwise, though, there is an appalled silence.

  We move on through Health and Money to an obstacle Joe calls “the Gap” and identifies as a chronological defect in one’s résumé—caused, for example, by a spell of unemployment. This may be a measure of my extreme naïveté and longstanding distance from the world of regular employment, but I had not realized that being unemployed may in and of itself disqualify one for a job.2 Joe wants us to acknowledge the Gap, accept it, and emphasize the bright side of it, such as what we learned while enduring it. I raise my hand and ask, “What if the Gap was homemaking?” I’m expecting at least some nods of commiseration from the women in the room, but I might as well have announced that I’ve devoted a chunk of my career to collecting welfare. Joe looks away uncomfortably, forcing Merle to step forward and promise that this subject will be dealt with “in boot camp.” Ted, from his position near the wall, speaks up to suggest that I stress “the time management skills you developed while managing children.”

  Yeah, right, like I’m going to have résumé entries like “negotiated complex preteen transportation issues” and “provided in-home leadership to highly creative team of three”? I think of all the recent articles about upper-middle-class, professional mothers who opt to stay home with their children during the early years, fully expecting to pick up their careers at full stride later on. One of the Gen-X moms interviewed in a Time article “desperately hopes that she won’t be penalized for her years at home.”3 But the Mommy Track appears to end right here, in a support group for the long-term unemployed.

  At precisely 11:00, Joe winds up to hearty applause, and I choose this break to start edging toward the door. I have just reached it when Merle, who is now presiding over a little ritual honoring a boot-camp graduate who has actually found a job, calls out, “Barbara, it’s not time to go yet!” Stunned that she can read my name tag at this distance and mortified to have been singled out, I stand there and watch as a fortysomething Asian-American—he is today’s lucky job finder—takes a mallet and hits a large metal bell, making him a “bell ringer.” I take a step backward through the door frame, but Pamela is directly behind me, blocking the way. “You’re losing your name tag,” she whispers to me. I smooth it down obligingly, if only because I am beginning to lose confidence in the physical possibility of egress. If I were to take another step toward freedom, I might get jumped by some of the beefier cult members.

  Because that’s how it’s beginning to look to me. If profit is not the aim, and it can’t be, since everyone in charge is a volunteer, then what could it matter if one potential recruit leaks away after the formal proceedings? I get the paranoid sense that I have fallen into the Cult of Merle, and what happens next only seems to confirm this. New people like myself—there are only six of us—are to repair into a side room for a special session of their own, suggesting that the reason for Pamela’s concern about my name tag had to do with the ease of sorting out who is new.

  The special gathering for new people turns out to be a heavy sell for the boot camp, which costs close to $600 for three weeks of eight-hour days. Ted and Pamela officiate, beginning with some videotaped testimonies to the effectiveness of the boot camp, while we new people sit in frozen expectation. It will be an intense experience, Ted advises, ranging from résumé development to body language and elevator speeches. Among other things, we will each star in a three-minute videotape sales pitch for ourselves, which will be revised until perfect. He is standing next to where I am sitting, going over a poster describing the boot camp’s syllabus, when suddenly he bursts into tears.

  My mind had wandered during his presentation, so I have to do a quick rewind to recall the emotional subtext of what he had been saying at the moment of breakdown—something about a neighbor of his who had been laid off and not said anything to Ted about it for months. A broken friendship? Or just a reminder to him of how lonely the first months of unemployment were? And how did he get the black eye anyway?

  I have to restrain myself from reaching out and putting my hand on his arm, but Pamela is impatiently insisting that she take over the poster presentation. Thus rebuked, Ted struggles and pulls himself together, although the tears are still running down his cheeks.

  I finally get up to leave, resigned to never knowing what was up with Ted or whether Merle, our charismatic leader, is a saint or a demon. No doubt there’s nothing cultish going on, and the only reason the volunteers push the boot camp so insistently is that it gives them something to do: better to immerse yourself in Forty-Plus activities than to sit home alone waiting for the phone to ring. But Ted’s breakdown does reinforce the impression that, whatever is going on in the corporate world today, whatever wild process is chewing up men and women and spitting them out late in life, damage is definitely done.

  AT MY NEXT session with Kimberly, I report that I’ve been successfully networking. “So did you make some contacts?” she wants to know.

  “Just the people I networked with,” I admit, explaining the context of the Forty-Plus Club.

  “But they’re unemployed! There’s no point to networking with unemployed people unless they have contacts in companies you want to work for!”

  So much for my people, then,
the great army of the white-collar unemployed. They’re not worth the time of day. You are encouraged to go to networking events, only to be told that you’ve been wasting your time.

  “Look,” she says, trying a new tack. “What companies do you want to work for?”

  I’ve had a new insight into this, so I tell her, “I’ve been thinking . . . I’ve done a lot in the health field, maybe I should emphasize that more. Maybe like a drug company.”

  “A drug company—good! And what else?”

  “A medical supply company?”

  “And what else?”

  “Uh, I don’t know.”

  “A hospital! What about a hospital?”

  I have to admit that I didn’t know or had forgotten that hospitals maintain PR staffs—another reason for resentment when perusing the medical bills. So how would I network with hospital people?

  “You have a doctor, don’t you?”

  I acknowledge that I do.

  “So network with him!”

  “But she barely has time to tell me my blood pressure, much less talk about my career.”

  “Does she have a receptionist?”

  I acknowledge this too.

  “So network with her!”

  I don’t tell her, and I’m not proud of this, but I find the suggestion insulting. Here I am, a “seasoned professional” according to my résumé, and I’m supposed to be pestering the clinic receptionist for job leads? Not to mention the fact that the receptionist appears to be even more distracted and rushed than the doctor. Meanwhile, Kimberly is going on about the need to network everywhere, like with the person I’m sitting next to on a plane. Almost anyone seems to be worth my smiling attentions except my brothers and sisters in the job-searching business.

  Session over, I refill my iced tea and sit down to reflect on my aversion to Kimberly, which seems completely out of proportion to the circumstances. I hired her; she was my choice; she’s supposed to be helping me. Beyond that, of course, this is only a journalistic venture anyway, in which I have no real-life emotional stake. Yet the dislike is reaching hatelike dimensions, and it seems to me that if I could get to the bottom of it, I would be a leg up on the whole job-search process. She represents something about the corporate world that repels me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness. In fact the “mask” theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, and Robert Jackall, in Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers, refer repeatedly to the “masks” that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces.4

  Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness, and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to “get in the face” of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me.

  ALL RIGHT, DISTASTEFUL as the idea may be, I do have to structure my job search in some joblike fashion. I determine that my daily plan will be as follows:

  7:30 A.M.: Get up, eat breakfast, read the paper, check CNN for major disasters—terrorist attacks, asteroid hits, et cetera—that may foreclose the possibility of finding a job for the immediate future or at least call for a revision of the daily plan. I refuse, however, to dress up as if heading for a real office, clinging to my usual preclothes, meaning a cross between the T-shirt I wore to bed and the gym clothes I will need in the afternoon.

  9:00–12:30: Proceed to desk for the bulk of the day’s work—read e-mail, revise résumé, visit the various national job boards, and whatever else I can think of to do. Thanks to the Atlanta Job Search Network I have signed up for, which showers me with several dozen job possibilities a week, e-mail alone can take up to twenty minutes. Why Atlanta? Because it’s a happening place, job-wise anyway, with an unemployment rate of only about 4 percent—far lower than Boston, for example, or New York. That and the fact that it’s one plane ride away from home qualify it as an appealing target for me. Unfortunately, the job tips that come to me by e-mail from the Atlanta Job Search Network are almost always in irrelevant fields like “systems management” and “construction oversight,” but there are sometimes more interesting things to read—brief waves, or cries for help, from my fellow seekers. Trinita, for example, writes sadly (to me and everyone else in the network):

  I have finally found a position, but again it is temporary with no benefits . . . I lost my apartment in Atlanta and had to move home with my mother at the age of 26 after being laid off and unable to pay my bills. I owe everybody and their mama’s but I guess I am back on the right track to daylight.

  Some of the homespun advice from fellow seekers is equally suggestive of desperation. Mark, whose subject line is “What To DO After You Stop Crying!,” lists thirteen activities beginning with “1. Hug your significant other. (Family Must be First!!!)” and ending with:

  13. LAST BUT NOT LEAST—Hug your significant other AND KIDS. (REMEMBER—Family MUST be FIRST!!!)

  In between, there’s the usual enjoinder to network “WITH EVERYONE,” including “Aunts, Brothers, Sisters, Cousins, Classmates . . . Accountant, Hair Dresser, Barber, Etc., Etc.” and “KEEP A POSITIVE ATTITUDE. DO YOU WANT TO TALK WITH ‘DOWN’ PEOPLE OR THOSE WHO LIFT YOU UP?”

  For weeks, the core of my day’s work consists of revising my résumé to meet Joanne’s exacting standards. We agree eventually on the opening, which, after every comma has been vetted, reads:

  SUMMARY: Seasoned consultant with experience in Event Planning, Public Relations, and Speechwriting is prepared to provide leadership advancing company brand and image. Special expertise in health policy and health-related issues, with a track record of highlevel national exposure.

  To my chagrin, she informs me that my education is a little scanty. I’ve listed a BA in chemistry, which I in fact possess, and earned in my maiden name, Alexander. But this is not enough. Surely I have at least audited some relevant courses along the way? So I make up a list of courses I have taken, hoping that they resemble plausible educational offerings, with the idea that I can revise them to suit the situation:

  • “Marketing Social Change” (Progressive Media Project, 1991)

  • “The Media and New Technology” (New York University, 1995)

  • “Writing to Persuade” (New School for Social Research, 1998)

  • “Women’s Health Issues and the Media” (Long Island University, 1999)

  • “The Social Psychology of Event Management” (University of California at Berkeley, 2001)

  More vexingly, Joanne wants my résumé to get longer; hers occupies a remarkable four pages. But this is beyond my fictional capacity, so I argue that, no, the résumés posted on the Public Relations Society of America’s web site, which I visit daily, are all a terse single page, and that this seems to be the industry standard.

  The résumé is still far from perfect, a condition which may take several more weeks of costly coaching to achieve, since both Joanne and Kimberly keep coming up with minor permutations of the latest draft, dithering at length, for example, over what “volunteer community activities” to list. I am beginning to suspect that the process is being artificially prolonged for purely commercial reasons: each half-hour session, which can focus entirely on issues of punctuation and format, earns the coach $100.

  Even with an imperfect résumé, as judged by my coaches, I can’t resist applying for some of the jobs that pop up on the PRSA web site. It’s easy enough: I just scroll through the PR job offerings—there are usually more than a dozen a week—and send along my résumé-in-progress. I can also apply directly to a company by going to its web site, click
ing on “careers,” searching for PR job listings, and then submitting my application online. I’ll go for anything except the jobs that require technical knowledge—computer networking or video production—or lengthy experience in a particular industry. If all the company seems to want is the ability to think and write, backed by five years of experience, I consider myself a highly qualified candidate, whether the emphasis is on internal communications, publicity, or public affairs. And of course I am admirably flexible, applying at one point for a job as PR director of the American Diabetes Association and then switching sides and offering myself to Hershey’s. In most cases, I have the satisfaction of receiving an e-mail automatically confirming my application, and giving me a multidigit number to refer to the job by, should I care to continue the correspondence.

  12:30–1:00: Lunch and further newspaper reading, justified by my need, as a PR person, to stay on top of trends, new technologies, business scandals, and the like.

  1:00–3:00: Back at the desk for more leisurely or more reflective forms of labor, such as learning more about my chosen fields—PR and event planning—and casting about for further tips and leads. Sometimes the effect of my afternoon labors is to undermine whatever I accomplished in the morning. For example, one day I spend the morning on my résumé and the afternoon reading Don’t Send a Resume: And Other Contrarian Rules to Help Land a Great Job, by Jeffrey J. Fox, who informs me bleakly:

  A résumé with a “for everyman” cover letter is junk mail. A résumé without a cover letter is used to line the bottom of the birdcage . . . All unexpected and standard résumés go from the IN box to the trash box. Some may generate a rejection form letter; most get ignored; 99.2 percent get tossed.5