Bait and Switch, The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Barbara Ehrenreich, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2005, 237 Pages
Even though it's a growing societal problem, middle-age, middle-class unemployment is a subject still little-considered beyond departments and journals of Sociology. This work of investigative journalism by a best-selling author brings to the mass market a needed discussion of the frustrations of mid-life job-hunting.
Its humor alone is worth the cover price. Evelyn Waugh could not have fictionalized a better scene than Ehrenreich's actual visit to a pathetic and pointless support group for the unemployed, Forty Plus of Washington, DC:
Pamela, who's about fifty and dressed in a long, close-fitting skirt that creates a definite mermaid effect, greets me in the corridor and directs me to a table where Ted, also about fifty, is presiding over the name-tag distribution. He wears a wrinkled suit and tie set off, intriguingly, by a black eye.
No, he instructs, I am not to take a red name tag; as a "new person," I am assigned to blue...
Most of Bait and Switch is about the rip-offs, boiler-room operations and queer customers that set up for middle-aged job-seekers and sucker them into wasting money and time on image and resume consulting and seminars that convince them that their predicaments are their own fault. "If anybody's to blame, it's you" is also often the theme of propaganda handed out by companies as they prepare their workforce for layoffs.
Such indoctrination is to be expected in a society where objective truth, objective morality and personal responsibility are denied. If you have a problem, it's all in your head and that's where it needs to be worked on, not in society, but in your head.
Ehrenreich also found faith-based seminars inculcating the idea that one's misfortune is "part of God's plan" for one, also a standard piece of crap flung at victims these days. It's just another line that distracts people from uniting and organizing and stopping professional managers from playing with the lives of workers and consumers for profit.
That this book is mostly about the boiler room operations and queer customers is also one of its major shortcomings. The seminars and consultants are only a small part of the sheer nonsense, fraud and adventures in futility that confront middle-aged job-seekers.
A more comprehensive investigation could have looked at adult-education and training rip-offs that are offered even by prestigious universities. These teach little that is useful while they devalue the universities' reputations along with the traditional bachelor's and graduate degrees that intelligent people worked for years to obtain.
Then there are also the idiotic personnel practices of companies in which barely literate clerks with community-college degrees pass judgement on better-educated candidates for jobs the personnel clerks know nothing about.
I swear this is true: A friend of mine was told in an interview that he needed to have 5 years experience in JavaScript. He answered that JavaScript had only been around for two years and that not even the inventor of JavaScript had five years experience in it!
When it comes to idiotic personnel practices and imbeciles at the gate, no corporation surpasses the United States Government. A better Bait and Switch could have included material about federal job announcements with contradictory or incorrect information, about poor souls who prepare 50-60-page applications for government jobs that are filled even before the announcements are published or who pay ghost-writers $180 per KSA statement(1).
I won't say that one is more likely to win the lottery than to get a government job (without "knowing somebody"), but I will say that one is more likely to become a Fortune 500 CEO.
Another thing that diminishes Ehrenreich's work is her own cover. The best she could do as herself is pose as a PR person without a portfolio of projects done or list of clients. Even in the fairest of job markets, such a PR person isn't worth much.
It is also true that some unemployed middle-agers really don't have the experience--especially in software such as Word or Powerpoint--that today's white-collar jobs require. The days of having secretaries and other subordinates do the grunt work are over.
Social skills are another thing middle-aged jobseekers may lack. Again, Ehrenreich's passage on Forty Plus is a glimpse at this handicap. If you sit off in a corner with your nose in a paper or wear your politics proudly on your sleeve, you're not only likely to be the last one hired but the first one fired.
Ehrenreich's product would be stronger if she had tracked and chronicled the efforts of a team of job-seekers with impressive resumes, those who can make a solid case that they really did everything right. I'm sure, however, that her conclusions would be largely the same: that achievement really doesn't matter in corporate America [It really doesn't matter in the rest of society either, Barb.] and that "getting a job is like gaining acceptance into an eighth-grade clique."
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(1) KSA Statements = Knowledge/Skills/Abilities statements that must accompany most government job applications. The most commonly required of these supplemental essays is one describing one's oral and written communications skills.
Copyright © 2005 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.