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

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  The last thing I remember before falling into a narcotized trance that may have been actual sleep is a long personal digression into the history of the seated posture. When did chairs come into common use? Certainly no more than a few thousand years ago, well after our muscular-skeletal structure achieved its modern form. We are designed for running and walking, squatting and lounging, not for sitting upright day after day.

  I don’t think I actually pitch forward in my seat or otherwise betray my attention deficit, but there is a moment at least of absolute discontinuity, from which I awake to a slight shuffling in the room. We have finally gotten to what we’ve all been waiting for: the chance to do some problem-solving ourselves. Each of us is handed a number, from one to five, assigning us to a new table, and each table will undertake a different “crisis.”

  Lurid as they are, Jim insists that each one is based on a real situation: A company runs a free Christmas gift program for needy children, and one of the wrapped presents turns out to be a porn tape, provoking much righteous indignation in the community, especially the churches. A corporate jet crashes into a neighborhood containing a daycare center. A company doing community cleanup work in south-central L.A. gets caught in a shoot-out between the Crips and the Bloods. A company finds that its baby products cause rashes. I’m in the group whose company faces a wave of sexual harassment charges that has attracted the unwelcome attention of a national women’s organization (the activists).

  Here we are at last, sitting face-to-face instead of all facing Jim, free to interact, and within minutes I am seriously annoyed. My tablemates, among whom middle-aged males from the insurance industry are heavily represented, seem to be uniquely clueless. Someone proposes that we (the company) provide medical care and counseling for the victims, leaving me to explain the difference between sexual harassment and rape, and how an offer of psychiatric counseling to a victim of sexual harassment might easily be construed as an insult.

  But mostly I’m irritated by their flounderingly unsystematic approach. Jim gave us a general outline to follow, beginning with establishing a timeline of events, but no one seems to have been paying attention. Without thinking, I find myself morphing into ENTJ mode, pounding the table and insisting on a thorough investigation: “We’ve got to get the timeline down. We’ve got to know why these allegations got to the press before they got to us!”

  Someone writes timeline on our flip chart, where it joins a series of disconnected entries like meet with victims and sensitivity training, then we move on to the issue of what to do about the national women’s organization that has arrived on the scene. One of the guys at the table suggests that we offer the group a sizable donation to go away. Fools! I picture the redoubtable Kim Gandy, current president of the National Organization for Women, responding to a proffered bribe.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I interject forcefully. “We’re talking about people with principles.” Then I proceed to outline how we might go about co-opting the national women’s organization more cleverly: Set up an independent commission to investigate the allegations, or pretty independent anyway, and put representatives from the women’s organization on it. They’ll feel like they’re doing something, and it’ll make the company look like the best thing that’s happened to feminism since Roe v. Wade.

  Blinking slightly, my tablemates accept this plan. But what am I doing? I’m not here to save Mitsubishi, which went through a major sexual harassment scandal in the nineties and is, I suspect, the prototype for our particular crisis. I’m here to network, which means being likable, as opposed to being successful or right. Everyone else at the table seems happy enough to get along by going along. Abashed, I pull back and content myself with nodding encouragingly as my tablemates continue to spatter their uninspired, nonstrategic entries on the flip chart. Without me, I can see, they have no plan. So yeah, I can do this PR thing, without any further training than what life has already afforded me. But only if I’m in charge.

  As soon as I get home from Boston I rush to update my résumé on the job boards, adding the impressive-sounding PRSA Crisis Communications Seminar, and start to rethink my cover letters and general approach. What I’ve learned from Jim is that corporations are scared, if not actually paranoid, and for good reason. Give me an industry, and I can think of a “crisis” menacing it: an angel-of-death nurse in a hospital; a whistle-blower in a chemical company; dissatisfied or injured customers—“that is, victims, heh, heh,” as Jim had put it in his presentation—anywhere. Thus every company needs a crisis communications plan, whether it knows this or not, as well as a person—that is, me—to design it. In my new cover letters—which go out to all the pharmas I have applied to so far—I explain that the function of PR “is not only to light fires, but to put fires out.” If I can sell the threats—the homicides, the lawsuits, the face-painted, anarchistic, antiglobalization activists—I can sell myself as the knight on the white horse, savior of corporations.

  And I’m sure now that I can do it. My entire life experience is part of the skill set I will bring to the firm that eventually hires me. Jim makes the perfect role model: Naturally he’s a nice guy—that’s just part of the job. He’s spent hours explaining how challenged corporate management is in the area of values and compassion; so of course it’s his job, as a PR person, to compensate. I have some of the same advantages: compassion, empathy, a familiarity with unions and community groups, some notion of the principle-driven life. I can carry all this to the throne, just as Jim has, and set it at the feet of the king.

  BUT THE FACT is that no takers are presenting themselves. My one big lead, given to me by Ron in exchange for a $35 lunch, collapses ignominiously. My letter to Qorvis, which asked for no more than a twenty-minute “informational interview” in which to learn about their business, received an encouraging response. But by the time of my follow-up call, the Qorvis guy has gone cold.

  “Am I to understand that you’ve been operating for the past three years as a one-person consultancy?” he asks.

  “Well, yes,” I tell him, and mindful of Ron’s advice that a beggar has to have a good story, go on to burble about how “I’ve taken an unusually entrepreneurial approach, I admit, and done extremely well with it, but now I’m looking for the camaraderie and shared mission of a firm blah blah.”

  “Ah” is all he says.

  He gives me the names of two others on the “hiring team,” whom I diligently pursue with e-mails and phone messages, to no response at all. A consultancy, no matter how energetic and profitable, must count as a Gap. Meanwhile, in addition to maintaining my résumé on the job boards, I am of course applying for every job that shows up on the Public Relations Society of America web site or that comes to me through the Atlanta Job Search Network, and one of the latter suddenly shows a flicker of promise. Locum Tenens, a small company that serves as a temp agency for physicians in the central Georgia area, is looking for a PR director, so I write back emphasizing my extensive involvement in the health-related field and my veritable passion for working with physicians. When I make my follow-up call, Deborah—the designated hiring agent—picks up the phone herself and asks whether I have any questions. Indeed I do, since this encounter will be a test of my expanding skills.

  “Do you have any philanthropic involvement in the community?”—the idea here being that a company’s philanthropic activities should be seen, somewhat coldheartedly, as an extension of its PR efforts, and even small companies, to my certain knowledge, can afford to buy a couple of tickets to the annual YWCA or Big Brother, Big Sister luncheon.

  Deborah says she’s not sure, and seems uncertain as to what “philanthropic involvement” might involve, so I press on, armed by my training with Jim: “Do you have a crisis communications plan? For example, if there were to be complaints about one of your physicians? You know, sexual harassment or an unusual number of deaths.”

  Again, she’s not sure, and while I attempt to alarm her with the absolute necessity of a crisi
s communication plan, which I am uniquely prepared to create and implement, she must be fishing for my résumé, because she says, “Oh, here you are,” and then, after a pause, the familiar rejection: “There’s a Gap.”

  I’m not sure whether she has my original, Gap-ridden résumé, or, like Qorvis, is interpreting the consultancy in the new one as a Gap, and there’s no way to check my records while we’re on the phone. One thing I’ve learned, though: a Gap of any kind, for any purpose—child raising, caring for an elderly parent, recovering from an illness, or even consulting—is unforgivable. If you haven’t spent every moment of your life making money for somebody else, you can forget about getting a job.

  The brief encounter with Qorvis, the nibble from Locum Tenens—these are the exceptions in what is becoming a life of unrelenting rejection. I have, by this time, applied for over 200 advertised and posted jobs, even branching out from health and pharmaceuticals to banks and the trade association for the modular construction industry, which latter at least yields a pleasant phone conversation about the unfortunate down-market image of modular buildings and how this might be corrected by creative PR.

  But it is the rare application that generates human contact of any kind. When I can follow up with a phone call, which is not always possible, since named contacts are seldom given, I might be told, as I was by a firm called IR Technologies, that my résumé had entered some complicated industrial batch process, along with hundreds of others, which process could take weeks to resolve. Or I might get a recording saying that “due to the volume of applications, we are unable to verify the status of your application.” G.J. Meyer, in Executive Blues, reports from his job search in the late eighties that

  unless you’re luckier than most or the job market gets a lot better than it has been lately, you’ll discover that it’s possible to send off five hundred résumés with five hundred customized cover letters and not get a single reply more substantial than a preprinted postcard saying thanks.2

  That was in a more genteel era. I have received, for all my efforts, only one such preprinted postcard. Usually an automatic response appears in my inbox seconds after electronically submitting my résumé and cover letter, but it offers no thanks, just an acknowledgment of receipt and a code number to use should I be pesky enough to follow up. Mostly there is nothing at all, and it is this—the unshakable, godlike, magisterial indifference of the corporate world—that drives my fellow job seekers to despair. Neal, whom I met at the ExecuNet meeting, told me:

  You ring people and no one returns your calls, or apply by computer and just get an automatic response. I had got to the stage where I’d just get up and sit around and drink coffee until it’s time for lunch, really do nothing all day. Dealing with the rejection is quite difficult.

  But rejection puts too kind a face on it, because there is hardly ever any evidence that you have been rejected—that is, duly considered and found wanting. As the New York Times reported in June 2004: “The most common rejection letter nowadays seems to be silence. Job hunting is like dating, only worse, as you sit by the phone for the suitor who never calls.”3 The feeling is one of complete invisibility and futility: you pound on the door, you yell and scream, but the door remains sealed shut in your face. I remember once reading a complaint about the invisibility of middle-aged women in our society, and thinking, bring it on. Because invisibility is something every child aspires to—the chance to flit around snatching cookies and making gargoyle faces, immune from punishment. But now, like all those fairy-tale characters who are unfortunate to get what they wished for from an overly literal-minded wish granter, I am left frantically trying to undo the spell. Is it my résumé that consigns me to darkness or, in the case of the people whom I encounter at networking events, something about my physical appearance?

  I start fantasizing about ways to bring myself to the attention of the faceless executives, the “hiring managers” on whom the outcome of my search depends. I should develop a new circle of friends, more usefully connected than the existing ones. I should get out to parties, like the glitzy one I read about in the Washington Post where the CEO of Qorvis was sighted chatting up the political machers. Steve, a marketing man and fellow member of the Atlanta Job Search Network, is taking a similarly creative approach to hobnobbing with the decision makers.

  I’m interested in a waitstaff job in the Capitol Grill [an upscale restaurant in downtown Atlanta] . . . where serving gives you a chance to network with the big shots by giving them your business card with the check. The most expensive bottle of wine on the menu costs eight hundred dollars. So I’m going to take a three-day course on wines.

  This could be me in a few weeks or months—a cocktail waitress or member of the catering staff, deftly slipping résumés to my customers.

  seven

  In Which I Am Offered a “Job”

  In late May, six months into my search, I get an e-mail request for an actual interview. AFLAC, the insurance company, is looking for sales reps in the central Virginia area, with opportunities for management positions, and my résumé—which they must have come across on one of the job boards—suggests that I may be just the woman for the job. This is not, of course, the first job offer that has found its way to my inbox. There was the one from a verbally disabled firm looking for female models, for example, stating:

  Whats good fam its your boi JR . . . Check us out you wont be sorry. Plenty of pics and video, and guess what? We need new talent so you ladies in Washington DC, Baltimore, Virginia, Atlanta, Ga. and Houston, Texas that are interested in joining our team and ready to make some real money send me a short email along with a photo or two.

  I have also been solicited to sell insurance against identity theft, and spent twenty-five minutes on the phone listening to a recorded “conference call” in which two male voices concurred happily that the problem is “growing exponentially.” I got a bite from Melaleuca, a United Kingdom-based firm specializing in eco-friendly cleaning products and cosmetics and now seeking sales reps in the United States. In a phone conversation, Melaleuca’s Steve assured me that “it’s not one of those multilayer marketing-type jobs where you have to put a lot of money up front. It’s really a matter of spreading the word in your social life.”

  “I get paid just to spread the word?” I asked.

  “That’s right; there’s no pressure to perform. It’s a word-of-mouth-type business.”

  I briefly try to envision a social life in which the subject of cleaning fluids would naturally arise on a regular basis, but the money aspect is less than appealing. Steve says he puts twenty hours a week into selling Melaleuca products and grosses about $300 in U.S. dollars, but he has to spend $75 to $80 a month for the products he sells—for a net wage, I calculate, of around $11 an hour.

  AFLAC, however, is a highly reputable and successful organization, as far as I know. Everyone has seen its irritating commercials, in which two people are complaining about their insurance problems while, completely unnoticed by them, a duck keeps proclaiming the solution: AFLAC. In preparation for my interview, I visit the AFLAC web site, where I learn that the product is “supplemental insurance” to round out the nodoubt inadequate health insurance your employer provides. Then I turn to Google and Nexis, where I hit pay dirt after less than thirty minutes: AFLAC has had problems with the training and management of its sales force. I will stun my interviewer with this information, followed by the unique management contribution I am prepared to make. Furthermore, there are suggestions that AFLAC has overplayed the duck. It’s fine for attracting initial attention, but you need a more mature and serious approach if you’re selling insurance. That’s me—serious and mature—the antiduck.

  It’s a gorgeous drive over the Blue Ridge Mountains to Staunton, where the AFLAC office is located, but my perilous speed of fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit allows for no scenic appreciation. At the last minute before leaving home, I discovered a dim, archipelago-shaped stain on one sleeve of the tan suit, wh
ich required a quickie home drycleaning session, but I manage to arrive only five minutes late. The office occupies a far more humble rural site than I expected: half of a one-story building across from a rundown shopping center. Only one car is parked outside, and its vanity plate reads “AFLAC.”

  Despite my tardiness, Larry greets me enthusiastically and ushers me into a windowless room containing a table and a half-dozen chairs. To enhance the entombment effect, he shuts the door behind us, although, oddly enough, there is not a soul around to disturb us. Where is the bustling, high-energy team promised by the AFLAC web site, the “fun” atmosphere and instant camaraderie? Larry is about fifty, with pale blond hair, wearing a white shirt embossed with the word AFLAC and a yellow tie featuring many small ducks. Maybe it would be unwise to bring up the company’s alleged overreliance on its barnyard spokesperson, since the only decoration the office contains, in addition to a large photo of the post-9/11 Manhattan skyline, is a rubber ducky on what appears to be a receptionist’s desk.

  What ensues is not what I would call an interview. Larry offers me a blue folder containing colored sheets of paper starting with one titled “A Career Opportunity with AFLAC” and starts reading aloud from his own folder while I attempt to follow along in mine. This seems to be the preferred method of corporate communication: reading aloud, either from paper or a PowerPoint, while the person being read to reads along too. Is there some fear that no one will pay attention unless at least two senses—auditory and visual—are engaged simultaneously? Occasionally, Larry departs from the script, to tell me, for example, that although AFLAC is “huge,” that is not something they dwell on anymore: “You know, after Enron and WorldCom, we don’t emphasize the bigness. We’re a family-run operation.”