American social commentator Barbara Ehrenreich, in her 50s, went looking for a job. Bait and Switch is the story of her 10-month exercise in futility.
Ehrenreich spoke with Democracy Now! Some excerpts:
BARBARA EHRENREICH: I went undercover this time as a, well, PR person -- right? -- because I’m a journalist, that goes with PR, to see if I could get a job. I knew I wasn't, you know, perhaps the best test of the job market, because I have no corporate job experience and older than most companies want, but I wanted to see what was happening, what happens to people when they get downsized, laid off, outsourced. What world do they enter, and how do they go about getting a job, and what do they experience? I found it's very, very difficult to get a job. They -- in fact, right now, 44% of the long-term unemployed are white-collar people, which is a historical change.
AMY GOODMAN: You started off by aiming for what, $50,000 a year and health insurance?
BARBARA EHRENREICH: That way my goal, and then I -- over a few months, I began to realize I was aiming too high.
AMY GOODMAN: And you ended up -- you went for ten months --
BARBARA EHRENREICH: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: -- looking for a job.
BARBARA EHRENREICH: Yes. And this involves internet searching; there's a lot out there to do. I mean, you can spend hours and hours and hours a day applying online or posting a resume online. It involves career coaching to get -- I even had a physical makeover to look more corporate. I -- what else did I – oh, networking. Networking. That's the big thing. You know, you go out to events where there will be other people, hopefully some of them employed, and you push your business card on them; a boot camp for job seekers. I did everything I could think of.
AMY GOODMAN: Testing?
BARBARA EHRENREICH: Well, yes. Testing. I kind of got distracted, I must say, by things I did not expect. I, you know, come from the world of journalism; before that, science. I, you know, deal with facts and logic, as you do.
AMY GOODMAN: You have a Ph.D in biology?
BARBARA EHRENREICH: Yes. But the corporate world is not like that. Right off, first clue, everybody wants to give you a personality test. Now, I had personality tests in the blue-collar world, but really all they want to know is whether you are a stoner or a thief in the blue-collar world. ...
AMY GOODMAN: So, you refrained from telling them that you were this New York Times best-selling author, columnist, essayist? You were undercover.
BARBARA EHRENREICH: Yeah. I went undercover. No, I just slouched onto my next career coach. But, you know, the theme that begins to emerge in all this, as you search for a job, as you go to these networking events, you don't have to be alone anymore if you are unemployed, because there's so much you can go to.
But a theme is that it's really your own fault if you have lost a job and if you are still searching after six to ten months, because you control everything with your attitude. You know, if you're positive and upbeat, all good things will come to you. And if you've lost a job, that means you must -- there's something wrong with you. So that, here you have, you know, approximately a million people who lose a job every year. That's not counting Katrina this year. That would bring us up to 1.4 million, but -- and so many of them are wandering in the world looking for advice, looking for help and being told, ‘It's you. Don't think about the economy. Don't think about corporate policy. Think about your own attitude and how it could be perkier and bouncier and more positive.’
AMY GOODMAN: Perky?
BARBARA EHRENREICH: Perky.
AMY GOODMAN: That's a big word in what you do and what you try to achieve in this time.
BARBARA EHRENREICH: Well, they say positive, upbeat, and also likable. Very important to be likable is a theme. And the lack of emphasis on skills and experience really startled me. You know, why talk about personality in the first place? How come that's the first thing all of the career coaches want to do? Why are you warned that that's what hiring decisions are going to be based on?
AMY GOODMAN: But it's not only personality. You point out that you were encouraged to not say what your experience was.
BARBARA EHRENREICH: That's right. Yeah. I was advised to eliminate all but the last ten years of experience in my resume so that I could, you know, pass for somebody who was in their early 30s, at least on the internet, with my resume. And think about that. That's saying -- it's something about age discrimination, that it is really a complete devaluing of experience. We don't want -- they don't want the experience. They don't want that. They want somebody young, pliable and cheap.