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

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  When we finally connect, Linda is ebullient. “It’s a very supportive business. It’s awesome. It’s hard for me to describe it without sounding like a nutcase.”

  “What do I need to spend up front?” I ask.

  “Just one hundred dollars for the startup kit, plus thirteen dollars for sales tax and shipping. You can’t start any business in this world for just a hundred dollars! Barbara, I am going to get real. I’m sure you’ve thrown away a hundred dollars for something that’s hanging in your closet.”

  She goes on about how easy it is to learn to do the “skincare classes” at customers’ homes. “I teach you everything and provide you the words to say in the class. They don’t care if you read it or memorize it.”

  It’s hard to get a word in edgewise as Linda prattles on, but Leah warned me that she ended up spending over $700 on cosmetics before realizing that this was not for her. So I ask Linda how much I will need to spend on inventory in order to have enough to sell.

  “Inventory,” she responds meditatively. “I don’t usually get that question. Of course, you don’t have to buy one ounce. I don’t recommend it, though. I suggest eighteen hundred dollars to start. Do you have to? No, but personally this is how I feel. Women don’t want to wait for their lipstick and mascara.”

  So, $1,900 just to get started. “What do you do for health insurance?” I throw in, recklessly.

  “You’re totally on your own. I have coverage of my own, which I’ve had for years. It’s a big problem for the country, so it’s not just us.”

  I have gotten the drift now and attempt to cut the call short by claiming an impending appointment. “Look,” Linda says in summation, “don’t overanalyze this. It’s just a fun business and a great opportunity. I can’t explain it to you more than that.”

  SO, AFTER ALMOST seven months of job searching, an image makeover, an expensively refined and later upgraded résumé, and networking in four cities, I have gotten exactly two offers: from AFLAC and Mary Kay. But these are not jobs, not in the way I defined a job when I started this project, in that no salary, benefits, or workplace is provided. Surely there are plenty of actual sales jobs offering a salary and benefits in addition to commissions, but a real job involves some risk taking on the part of the employer, who must make an investment in order to acquire your labor. In real estate, franchising, and commission-only sales, the only risk undertaken is by the job seeker, who has to put out money up front and commit days or weeks to unpaid training. Then she is on her own, ever fearful that the market will soften or that the quasi employer will flood the area with competing sales reps or franchisees.

  No one, apparently, is willing to take a risk on me. Is the fear that, if given health insurance for even a month, I will go on an orgy of body scans and elective surgery? The most any corporation seems willing to give me is the right to wear its logo on my chest and go about pushing its products.

  I had pictured the corporate world that I seek to enter as a castle on a hill, outside of which the starving vagrants wander, set upon by wolves and barbarian hordes, begging for entry into the safety of the fortified towers. But now I see there is another zone out here: a somewhat settled encampment, where people toil for uncertain rewards at minor tasks invented by the castle dwellers. There is an advantage to occupying this zone: you are free of the rigid conformity required of those who dwell inside; you can actually “Be Your Own Boss!” A few do very well, acquiring pink Cadillacs or fortunes from real estate deals. Many more are ruined or pour themselves into efforts that generate near-poverty-level earnings year after year. There is no safety out here; the wolves keep circling.

  eight

  Downward Mobility

  The fact that I am attending job fairs at all is a measure of my declining expectations. None of my coaches ever recommended job fairs, or even mentioned them, and I got the impression that many are pitched to entry-level workers rather than professionals.1 On a web site advertising a Los Angeles job fair, I find advice confirming this somewhat downscale orientation:

  Don’t forget to wash up before you arrive—you may be nervous, and a little scented soap can mask light perspiration. We recommend avoiding colognes and perfumes, as some people may be allergic. This is probably not the right forum for maximum personal expression: try to avoid clothes and jewelry that are gaudy; covering up tattoos is a good idea, as well.

  In an environment where people have to be reminded to shower in the morning, I may, with my tan suit and a sufficiently confident manner, just stand out as the dynamic professional I still halfheartedly aspire to become. In fact, there are all kinds of job fairs, some aimed more at entry-level workers, some for professionals, some for both, and some narrowly targeted at a particular industry, like security. And the undeniable advantage of a job fair, compared to an Internet job application, is that you get a moment of face time with someone who is actually employed—a nanosecond chance to make an impression.

  I find one promising job fair listed on the web site for the military contractor CACI International, which I was visiting because the alleged involvement of some of CACI’s employees in the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib seemed to make the company an ideal candidate for my “crisis communications” approach. Its web site urged job applicants to apply in person at the fair in August,* and the web site for the fair itself guaranteed that over 100 other companies would be recruiting there too, some of them, surely, looking for professionals like me.

  The fair occurs in Maryland at a cheesy-looking suburban catering joint, where you enter into a two-story-high atrium featuring a giant chandelier, sprays of pink and white fake flowers, and a couple of neoclassical plaster sculptures of partially clad boys holding up light fixtures. Beyond the atrium, there’s one of those cavernous spaces cut through with rows of booths, the kind of scene I associate with the annual booksellers’ convention. There are over 100 booths, from ABC Supply Company to Weichert Realtors, including AFLAC, Home Depot, Men’s Wearhouse, as well as government agencies like the Border Patrol, the Air Force Reserve, and the Newport News Police Department. Some of the booths display little souvenirs of their corporations: ballpoint pens, key chains, baggies of golf tees. Many are staffed by people dressed in company logo-ed polo shirts, which suggests they are pretty low-level functionaries, though who knows?

  By 10:30 A.M. there must be 500 people crowding the hall, and some booths—the management-consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in particular—have attracted long lines. I am, fashion-wise, at the far corporate end of the spectrum, standing out from the many job seekers in casual clothes, even, in some cases, taboo items like tank tops and capris. But class confers no advantage here. The fair, I realize, is the fleshly analog of the Internet job boards, where, instead of sending our résumés to vie for attention, we have come in our actual bodies, to what looks like equally little effect. All “interviews” are conducted standing up; even the people staffing the booths lack chairs—the better to speed up the process. I try to have a copy of my résumé out of my tote bag (I know, it should be a briefcase) and ready to present when I reach the head of the line, along with an eager, but not desperate, smile. Each encounter takes a minute or less, with the conclusion being signaled by a handshake.

  For a warm-up I go to the Border Patrol and study the attractive posters showing men on horses. “Will I get to ride a horse?” I ask the uniformed man staffing the booth. He informs me that the maximum age for BP agents is thirty-seven, which I confess to having exceeded some time ago. Then off to Sodexho, a major supplier of campus food services, for a more serious practice run. I shake hands with one of the two men in the booth, then hit him, a little too bluntly, with “You could use some help with PR.” The recipient of my handshake looks taken aback, but I forge on: “You’re aware of the campus campaign against Sodexho?”2 Now the other guy raises an eyebrow and admits to having heard of it.

  “I could help you with that,” I tell them, offering my crisis communications mantra. “You know PR isn’t ju
st about lighting fires; it’s about putting them out.”

  I try the same confrontational approach, only a little more smoothly, at CACI. The young woman who is accepting résumés—dressed, I should mention, in a distinctly noncorporate flounced skirt—looks blank at the mention of PR and passes me along to a suited man lurking behind her. The company web site didn’t list any PR openings, but that is no barrier to me; the point is to convince them that they need my services whether they realize it or not. I know I have less than sixty seconds to wow this man with my knowledge and skills, so I cut to the chase.

  “You might want to rethink your PR approach,” I suggest to him as gently as possible, citing CACI’s PR director Jody Brown’s responses to the allegations of torture in the New York Times, which I had studied in advance.

  “What did she say?” asks the suit.

  “It’s a matter of language,” I tell him. “She called the allegations ‘irresponsible and malicious.’3 In other words, she brushed them off. You need gravitas, dealing with these things—like ‘We take these charges very seriously and are doing a full investigation, et cetera.’ ”

  He looks actually interested; at least the eye contact lingers, so I rush on. “See, a response like hers can be like pouring gasoline on a fire. One of the functions of skillful PR is to put the fires out.”

  By now we have gone well past my allotted minute. He takes my résumé and urges me to FedEx, not e-mail, my résumé to Jody Brown.

  “Don’t tell her what I said, OK?” I ask with a smile as I leave, and when I glance back, he is still following me with his eyes, which should be a good sign but, given the nature of his business, creeps me right out. I hasten toward the coffee table, now thoroughly plundered of refreshments, where, in a rare moment of moral lucidity, I face the fact that my professional flexibility does not extend to defending torture allegations. Jody will be getting no résumé from me.

  The CACI interaction, I soon see, was exceptional for its depth and duration. What I am realizing is that most of the company representatives here are not empowered to deal with professionals; they are indeed fishing for frontline, entry-level personnel. At Blackwater, which provides security staff to American companies and civilian personnel in Iraq, two women in Blackwater polo shirts look utterly blank at the term PR and quickly résumé their trick of chewing gum in unison. At NAID, a provider of “management services in IT,”

  I am told that there might be an opening in its Baghdad operation, but that this is not the place to apply for it. I wait in line after line, leaving résumés at Beta Analytics, Bowhead Support Services, Camber Corporation, Custer Battles (“an international business risk consultancy”), EDO Corporation, EG&G Technical Services, Independence Air, Inova Health System, SRA International, Telos Corporation, Unisys, and Lockheed Martin. Everywhere the response is the same: PR is a “corporate function” for which I should apply on the company web site.

  Most of my attempts to strike up conversations with other job seekers in line fall flat; we are, after all, competing for the same limited number of opportunities. In the EDO line, though, I find myself next to a stoop-shouldered man of about fifty, whose suit and tie suggest he’s a fellow professional. Yes, he is a manager, a systems manager in fact, and has been searching for four months. “Do you think this is worthwhile?” I ask.

  “Well, they just send you to their web site. So I apply on the web site and call a week later, and they have no idea who I am.”

  “So there’s no point to these job fairs?”

  “I go to them anyway.” He shrugs. “It makes me feel like I’m doing something.”

  THE FAILURE OF the Maryland job fair to net a single positive response to my follow-up applications at the company web sites, combined with the perpetual desolation of my inbox, points to the sorry conclusion that I have been aiming too high. I blame Kimberly, of course, for encouraging me to imagine myself as a VP of public relations or similarly titled executive. The truth is, I seem to be more like AFLAC material, which, in terms of real, salaried jobs, would put me somewhere down near the clerical level. So I swallow my executive pride and start thinking of more realistic possibilities. Since I type slowly and lack the software skills now required of secretaries, I apply for a couple of receptionist jobs—again, to no effect. I even pursue a job wanding air travelers with the Transportation Safety Administration, until I note that the penalties for dissimulating to the federal government make that one unworthy of the risk. I resolve to go to another job fair, in a humbler frame of mind, this time—open to anything.

  The next job fair, announced on Jobexpo.com, again with no clue as to what sorts of jobs may be offered, turns out to be even more “a complete waste of time,” in the words of a young south Indian IT job seeker, than the one in Maryland. Held in the ballroom of a Holiday Inn in Edison, New Jersey, it resembles a high school prom gone horribly wrong: there are only seven companies represented—at tables around the wall rather than booths—and a maximum of thirty job seekers drifting around at any one time. Does the small number of job seekers mean the economy is improving, or does the paucity of potential employers mean that it’s worsening? But the configuration of the ballroom, with the employers up against the wall, has a strangely empowering effect on me. They are the wallflowers; I am in the center of the dance floor.

  In line with my reduced expectations, I have dropped the difficult “PR” designation and broadened my capabilities to “communications”—or, as I now put it, “anything involving words”—including “speech writing, speech coaching, internal communications, press relations.” My first stop is AIL, an insurance company which turns out to be looking for sales reps, and, agreeably enough, the man behind the table invites me to a “group interview” next Wednesday. “10:15 Wen,” he writes on a card, proving that this firm could indeed use some help with words or at least abbreviations. At AT&T Wireless, they are also looking for sales reps, though here too a word person might find adequate challenges. The company’s blurb in the job fair program reads:

  Are you a Natural? Are you ready to put your skills to work. Like the way you’re a quick study. How you’re good at finding solutions. And how you’re able to relate to people in a professional way.

  When I give the AT&T guy my line about how I do “anything with words,” he responds, “So you’re a people person,” and accepts my résumé.

  I float from table to table, meeting Mike from Ciber, with whom I chat about crab cakes (he spent his vacation sailing in the Chesapeake Bay), and, once again, some folks from the Border Patrol, who have a lot to say about wines. (Napa gets all the attention, but the Southern California ones are right up there too.) Finally, exhausting my supply of benevolence as well as of tables to approach, I wander into the corridor, where an older African-American woman and light-skinned young man are sitting on one of the backless couches. Neither has bothered with corporate dress; in fact the man daringly sports fringed pants and a rhinestone earring. “Any luck?” I ask them, to rueful looks and exasperated hand waving. “All they want here is salespeople,” the guy, who introduces himself as Mark, says. “And I hate sales.”

  They invite me to sit down between them—“Come on, dear, give those feet a rest”—which is a tight squeeze, bonding me to the older woman at the hip. Mark describes himself as an administrative assistant, but he seems to have done a little of everything: producing promotional videos, fielding complaints from prescription drug users, not to mention PowerPoint and Excel. “I don’t want to change the world,” he says airily. “Let the CEOs do that. Just give me a job, and I’ll get it done.” All of his work appears to have come his way via temp agencies. “I guess that’s what they want us all to be,” I speculate, “temps.”

  “Right,” says the woman, “so they don’t have to pay for your insurance.”

  Mark insists that temping is a good way “to get a foothold” in a company but then contradicts this with a story about how he completed in two months a project that his employer had
thought would take six. “They called me in and said ‘bye-bye.’ I’d worked my way out of the job.”

  “So maybe you need to slow down a little?” I venture.

  “Yeah,” adds the woman. “Drag it out a little.”

  They both break out laughing. I laugh too, and for some reason we can’t stop laughing, pressed thigh-to-thigh there on the invisible outer border of corporate America. Even the anxious-looking Asian-American man on the next couch, who has been poring over the list of companies at the fair, joins in with a guilty smile. I am sorry when they have to leave—it emerges that Mark is one of several job seekers on a bus tour of local job fairs provided by the state employment agency, and that his female companion is the bus driver. It occurs to me that in almost a year of searching, this is the first time I have shared a real laugh with a fellow job seeker, and he was far below my imagined “executive” status.

  Maybe I should have asked if I could go along with them. But they mentioned another job fair at the Marriott “right down the street,” and I decide to set out for it on foot. The trouble is, there are no sidewalks, this being a kind of diffuse industrial park area, and the slight heels on my shoes keep getting caught in the squishy grass, giving me a tipsy gait. No one walks here except for a few Hispanic men—day laborers, I suppose—and none of them remembers seeing a Marriott around. A light rain develops out of the dirty late-summer sky, speckling my tan suit, and I am about to turn back when a Marriott suddenly emerges on the left. But it’s only a Marriott Courtyard, and the front-desk people tell me that any job fair would likely be back at the full-service Marriott in the other direction. So I stumble back past the Holiday Inn to the real Marriott, passing a few more pedestrian representatives of the class that requires muscle instead of résumés. If the corporate world is a fortress, I have been reduced to circling it on foot.