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

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  When I enter the restaurant at 7:32, a speaker has already begun. Around forty people sit around at little tables surrounding the makeshift lectern—the usual mostly white, almost all-male group. Since our speaker is a lawyer, he leads off with lawyer jokes: What’s the difference between a dead dog on the freeway and a dead lawyer? There are skid marks in front of the dog. A fiftyish man in business casual—this is, after all, Friday—is introduced to give us another “testimony,” this one going all the way back to childhood. He attests to having had loving parents, “but there was not much personal relationships or communication” in his natal home. Hence, after sports, college, meeting a nice girl, et cetera, et cetera, his marriage fails, plunging him into depression. He marries again but knows that he hasn’t changed.

  Now things get vaguer and somewhat more complex. He makes a friend, who is really smart and “takes an interest” in him. They argue a lot, to the point where his wife worries that he might offend the friend. But it is this friend who introduces him to the Bible: “I couldn’t argue with the Bible. It just makes sense—good common sense.”

  I try, and fail, to think of what parts of the Bible can be reasonably accused of making “good common sense.” Perhaps our speaker is referring to some alternative Bible that has been purged of miraculous content for easier consumption by the business community, because it is not, as far as I know, the business of religion to “make sense.” Now he digresses into the story of Daniel, whom “God took an interest in and got involved in his life.” If God could do things for Daniel, our speaker concluded that maybe he could help him too. “The concept that God might be interested in giving me a free gift just dawned on me, and I’m always interested in something free.”

  Unfortunately for the audience, no striking transformation occurs, no blinding revelation. The narration continues in what appears to be real time—how he prays, argues with his friend some more, always hoping for a freebie from God. Finally, our testifier winds up with the good news that, thanks to his spiritual awakening, he is now “able to have relationships” and remains married to his second wife.

  In the testimonies I have heard so far at Christian gatherings, God is always busily micromanaging every career and personal move: advising which jobs to pursue, even causing important e-mails to be sent. In one conversation, a job seeker implied to me that God had intervened to prevent him from selling his house; at least he took the house’s failure to sell as “a sign.” Thus everything happens “for a reason,” even if it is not immediately apparent, and presumably a benevolent one. This vision of a perpetually meddling deity satisfies what Richard Sennett calls the need for a “narrative” to explain one’s life. Narratives, he writes,

  are more than simple chronicles of events; they give shape to the forward movement of time, suggesting reasons why things happen, showing their consequences . . . [But] a world marked . . . by short-term flexibility and flux . . . does not offer much, economically or socially, by way of narrative.3

  What we want from a career narrative is some moral thrust, some meaningful story we can, as Sennett suggests, tell our children. The old narrative was “I worked hard and therefore succeeded” or sometimes “I screwed up and therefore failed.” But a life of only intermittently rewarded effort—working hard only to be laid off, and then repeating the process until aging forecloses decent job offers—requires more strenuous forms of explanation. Either you look for the institutional forces shaping your life, or you attribute the unpredictable ups and downs of your career to an infinitely powerful, endlessly detail-oriented God.

  The crowd has doubled in size by this time; maybe the newcomers knew enough to avoid the testimony. Some of the new people are women, even a few women of color—all of them done up in their corporate best, heavy on the red. After a musical flourish supplied by computer, the moderator gives a brief spiel about the need for a relationship with Jesus Christ, and several volunteers rush around from table to table passing out pocket-size versions of the New Testament including psalms and proverbs. We are now to go into our “breakout groups” in various corners of the room, according to whether we are interested in “how clutter can be an obstacle to God’s grace,” “finding peace and bliss,” or “God’s way to a successful life.” Of course I should go to “clutter,” I say laughingly to my tablemates, three extremely glum middle-aged men, but none of them rewards me with a smile.

  Clutter turns out to be the most popular breakout group, so I move on to “successful life,” led by the Reverend Jack Pilger, where at least I can find a seat. I attempt a networking-type smile at my new tablemate, Pat, but its only effect is to make him get up from the table and dash off. He returns in a minute, though, with a copy of the handout for me, the famous passage from Corinthians on love, with the stirring line: “And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” Maybe it was a successful smile after all.

  The Reverend Jack calls one of the job seekers up to read the Corinthians text aloud for us, and invites us to renew our vows at his church this Sunday. I am hoping for more on love, perhaps an elucidation of the mysterious and beautiful part on how you can throw your body into the flames and have it count for nothing if you do not love, but Jack wants to talk about “excellence,” which is illustrated by the story of a completely crippled man who was called to the ministry and succeeded brilliantly by creating his own special telephone ministry. Jack isn’t much to look at himself—short and pudgy—but the point is that, with the telephone ministry, people don’t have to look at this crippled guy, whose deformities are “distracting.” If there is a message here for disabled job seekers, it is not an entirely encouraging one.

  Meanwhile, a possible networking target arrives. A young Asian-American, identified on his name card as “Tom It,” takes the seat next to me, smiles, and extends his hand. We exchange whispered introductions, in which I learn that his surname is Chang and “It” is for IT. While Jack continues on the theme of excellence, Tom busily scribbles in the margins of his handout containing the Corinthians passage. I can see that he’s a tidy-minded, IT-type of fellow, since he has drawn a circle enclosing the word You and another around God, with arrows connecting the circles in both directions. Suddenly, he leans over and stares at the protein bar I am nibbling on: “How many of those can you eat in a day?” he whispers. I point out the calorie content to him, which is 220, and suggest maybe up to ten. “So,” he asks, “it’s the amount of calories that determines it?”

  Now, between the calories and the Corinthians, I am completely confused. But Tom and I exchange cards and agree to share any relevant contacts that should come our way. Now it’s almost 9:00 A.M. and time to reassemble in the main space, where I notice Laimon Godel, who has perhaps been here all along, operating the computer that produces the musical flourishes.

  We newcomers get to say a few words apiece, just our names and what kinds of jobs we’re looking for, so I learn I’ve been among account managers, systems architects, financial service providers, systems testers, and other people whose daily tasks I can only foggily imagine. The introductions go on and on, with perhaps eighty people in all standing to announce their professions.

  In this, the final half hour, a carnival mood sets in. The moderator is presiding over the dispensation of job tips, almost all of which deal with IT, and Laimon is embellishing them with sound effects—trumpet blasts, honking noises, canned laughter—to the apparent delight of the men who are running the meeting from the front of the room. At some point the word Massachusetts comes up, as a job location, and elicits a hearty laugh, I suppose because the Massachusetts state legislature has been discussing gay marriage this week. The moderator joins in the laughter, saying, “I’ve done worse. I used to live on a farm.”

  General laughter at this—what?—proud assertion of bestiality? I glance over at a somewhat effeminate man at a neighboring table who had caught my attenti
on earlier with his flamboyant—given the setting—outfit of black leather jacket, high white turtleneck, and slim-cut black jeans. He has a thin, strained smile on his face.

  After a final blessing I make my way across the room to a familiar face. It’s Ken, the quiet guy from Patrick Knowles’s boot camp, and he sort of recognizes me too. I tell him I’ve seen Patrick since the boot camp and that he doesn’t seem to be doing too well. “He can be his own worst enemy,” Ken responds complacently. “I mean, he’s brilliant, but . . .”

  How’s his search going? Ken says he’s got a job and is starting Monday. So why is he here today? To thank some people, say good-bye. I tell him I kind of resent all the religion at this event.

  “It’s fine with me,” he says. “I’m religious myself.”

  “So where will you be working?” I ask.

  “At my old place, where I got laid off a year ago.”

  “How do you feel about going back there? I mean after they laid you off.”

  “Oh, no problem.” He smiles beatifically. “They didn’t need so many people then, and now they do.”

  So this is the new ideal Christianized, “just in time,” white-collar employee—disposable when temporarily unneeded and always willing to return with a smile, no matter what hardships have been endured in the off periods.4 Maybe one of the functions of the evangelical revival sweeping America is to reconcile people to an increasingly unreliable work world: you take what you can get, and praise the Lord for sending it along.

  As we are all milling toward the door, I am approached by an intense-looking man of about forty-five. “You’re looking for something in PR?” he asks. I nod eagerly. “You should join the Georgia state branch of the Public Relations Society of America,” he advises. “They have a group for PR people in transition.” At last, a meaningful tip; maybe enough to redeem this long, strange morning of bowdlerized Christianity leavened with down-home homophobia.

  My taxi driver back to the Atlanta airport is an immigrant from India who hopes to become a Pentecostal preacher. When I admit to not being a Christian, he squints back skeptically at me in the rearview mirror, as if he might have missed some telltale facial flaw.

  “It’s too hard to be a Christian,” I explain. “Jesus said that as soon as you get any money, you have to sell all you have and give to the poor.”

  “Where does it say that?” he asks, genuinely curious.

  six

  Aiming Higher

  Home again, I sit down to confront the fact that my résumé, which has been posted on Monster.com and HotJobs for over two months now, has netted not a single legitimate inquiry. Oh, I get plenty of e-mail, most of it from “executive job search” firms professing to see great promise in my résumé and offering to guide me toward a job in exchange for several thousand dollars. But the health and biomedical companies I have pelted with applications maintain their supercilious silence. I am a fairly compulsive person, at least when it comes to deadlines, and can’t help but feel anxious that the one I set for finding a job is bearing down on me with merciless speed.

  An ordinary job seeker might despair, but I have a unique advantage: I can simply upgrade my résumé. The key to the upgrade is the knowledge, gained from chatting with other seekers, that many in the PR field are failed journalists—no shame in that, since most newspapers pay shockingly low wages and hardly anyone manages to support him- or herself as a freelancer these days. What this means is that I can draw on more of my actual life as a skeleton for Barbara Alexander’s. I cannot cite articles I have written, of course, because someone might ask to see them, but I can truly claim to have taught at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Graduate School of Journalism, where I have a faculty friend willing to confirm, if anyone asks, that Barbara Alexander taught a course called “Writing to Persuade” that was wildly popular with students.

  Furthermore, the event planning has to go. I thought that having two “skill sets” would double my attractiveness to employers, but it may have the unfortunate effect of making me look “unfocused.” Besides, I’ve been coming to see event planning as a somewhat sketchy profession, too closely related to catering, and my networking has led to the impression that few companies maintain an in-house event-planning capability anyway. To replace it, I expand on my imaginary PR experience, which now blooms into some fulltime jobs, rather than mere consulting. All of these fake jobs are, lamentably, within the nonprofit sector, and although I humiliate myself (my real self that is) by trying to find someone to lie for me within one of the actual for-profit PR firms I’ve had dealings with over the years, I am stuck with a shady nonprofit past.

  Still, it seems to me, the new résumé is impressive. There are no Gaps to cover over with ingenious stories, only a life of solid toil in the service of press relations and image management. I retain my recent history as an independent consultant, but gone is the last trace of Barbara the dabbler and displaced homemaker, replaced by a highly focused, if not workaholic, professional. I post the new résumé on Monster, HotJobs, CareerBuilders, guru.com, workinpr.com, prweek.com, a few job boards in my own state, and the Public Relations Society of America web site—warning myself not to rush to my e-mail the next morning expecting a blizzard of responses. But I must be a glutton for disappointment, because of course that’s just what I do.

  Next on the agenda is follow-up. I have a stack of business cards from my various trips, and now I e-mail every one of these contacts, inquiring as to how their searches are going, and asking if they have come across any leads for me. Not everyone answers, and no one has a tip. Billy, the guy I had clashed with at Patrick’s boot camp over Clinton’s homicide record, invites me to the new job seekers’ group he has established. Leah, the marketing person I met at the Roasted Garlic, is growing increasingly desperate. Another boot-camp veteran, Richard, the realtor with the permanent wince, surprises me by writing that he has been trying to reach me by phone, because he “just really wanted to talk.” He hasn’t gotten through because he’s been trying my cell phone, which I tend to ignore when I’m at home. Could he take me out to dinner next time I’m in Atlanta? I let his ardor cool for a few days before replying that, yes, dinner would be delightful, but by the time I get back to him he has relocated to Chicago and found a job, the nature of which I cannot elicit, something makeshift, he says, meaning a little bit shameful and hopefully temporary.

  MY NEXT, and far more intimidating, follow-up target is Ron of ExecuNet and, before that, the Republican National Committee. I write him a sucky but fairly honest e-mail about how edifying his workshop was and how much I appreciated his straightforward approach, as opposed to the mushy, semitherapeutic offerings of your typical career coach, and I remind him of his promised contact for me. This summons forth a gracious enough response, ending with a request to refresh his memory re my situation and skill set. I should send him a résumé, but which one? I had taken the old one to the ExecuNet session and don’t dare send him the new one, in case he compares it to the first one and notices how much my experience has expanded in just a few weeks.

  So the old résumé goes out to him, along with a renewed reminder about the contact, and when this gets no response, I write again, asking if he can spare just twenty minutes of his time for a chat. That was one of his own recommendations: anyone can be imposed on for twenty minutes of face time. An e-mail comes back listing several openings in his schedule on the day I plan to be in Washington, including some noonish possibilities, so I brazenly offer to take him to lunch, and, improbably enough, he accepts.

  The obvious site for the rendezvous is the restaurant in the hotel where I’m staying on Ehrenreich business, which I scout out at breakfast time and determine to be, if not a reliable food source, at least a soothingly pseudo-upscale environment. I prepare meticulously in my room: tan suit, black pullover, gold earrings. My face gets the full Prescott treatment: foundation, blush, eyeliner, lip-liner, mascara. I force myself to slow down and make small, fretful movements w
ith the various pencils and brushes, since, for some unknown anthropological reason, bold, broad-stroked face paint has the undesirable effect of suggesting savagery or sports mania. Examining myself in the full-length mirror, I conclude that I rock, and that, with the addition of a gold necklace and lapel pin, I might, in Prescott’s judgment, even pass for a Republican. “Clear mind, skillful driver,” I recite to myself from Morton’s little koan. “Sound spirit, strong horse.”

  Ron, too, is looking far more “accessible” than he had been—tie-less, with the top button of his button-down pale blue shirt undone. As soon as we are seated, I launch into a summary of my job-search findings, keeping things at the sociological, rather than personal, level, to indicate a lack of desperation. “I get the impression that the whole executive life cycle has changed a lot in the last few decades,” I tell him, “and that a lot of people just aren’t prepared, emotionally or any other way.” Hoping to establish my hereditary membership in the executive class, I cite my father, who worked for Gillette for over twenty years and identified so deeply with the firm that no competing products were allowed in the house. Now, however, people seem to be churned out of their companies every three years or so. Ron confirms my impression; an executive today can count on having eight to nine jobs in a lifetime. “You always think the next job will be the last one, but it never is.”

  When it comes time to order, I make the mistake of being friendly to the waiter. The correct, Ron-like stance toward the waitstaff, I see, is one of indifference, laced with hostility. He complains, for example, that his water glass is too full, and, although it would be no big trick to sip off the offending excess, he has the waiter bring him a new, less generously filled, glass of water. No apology for this shameless fussiness, no “please,” not even a moment’s eye contact, accompanies the request, leaving me to give the waiter a covert roll of the eyes, a sort of “See what I have to put up with?”