A journalist tackles a scary assignment: Corporate job-seeker.
An accomplished journalist and author, Barbara Ehrenreich successfully infiltrates the world of corporate unemployment for this follow-up to her popular blue-color exposé, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Posing as middle-aged job-seeker "Barbara Alexander"actually her maiden nameEhrenreich reports that she did not receive a single job offer that met her modest income and benefits requirements, despite ten months of searching, three career coaches, and dedicated networking. Unlike most other job-seekers, however, she could calmly exit the quest for corporate employment when her pre-arranged ten-month search limit ran out. Her experiences in the white-collar wilderness are not likely to surprise many sophisticated readers, but they add up to a compelling contemporary drama.
The experiment began in 2003 when Ehrenreich legally reverted to her maiden name. As Barbara Alexander, her ground rules were simple: She would travel anywhere for an interview, consider work in any industry in any locality, and accept the first reasonable job offer. She allotted herself $5,000 for travel and other related expenses.
The trickiest part of changing her identity was falsifying a resume to match her persona and lining up suitable references willing to play along. Although Ehrenreich had never worked in a corporation, her extensive writing background (including twelve books and numerous articles) most closely fulfilled the corporate world's definition of public relations or communications. She also hoped to capitalize on her activism background organizing and chairing meetings, and so also sought work as an event planner.
Her next step was to hire a career coachthree, as it turned out. As Ehrenreich tells us, there are about 10,000 such coaches in the United States, but as a field it is unregulated and demands no specific credentials. Their services for Barbara Alexander ranged the gamut from self-assessment tests and personality evaluations (which located her "three centers of intelligence" using metaphors from The Wizard of Oz) to instructions for imagining herself as a product or brand to be marketed.
Her foray into networking was no less depressing. She traveled to various events focused on executive-level job-seekers "in transition," such as the Forty Plus Club, ExecuNet, and ExecuTable. Rather than finding leads, however, she mostly met other frustrated white-collar folks who were either unemployed or anticipating a layoff. These networking programs invariably featured a motivational presentation or workshop that walked participants through the same silly advice she had been hearing from career coaches.
After ten months, once Barbara Alexander's search time was up, journalist Ehrenreich got to work. In a small but telling sample of eleven unemployed people she had met under her assumed identity, none had yet found "real" jobs. Furthermore, they described for her the degrading experiences of the downwardly mobile as they waited. Their temporary "survival jobs" included housecleaning, babysitting, limo driving, and retail sales.
Ehrenreich concludes that she, like most of her fellow job-seekers, was not prepared for the reality of an arduous, long, and depressing search. Most middle-class Americans like her were raised to believe hard work would be rewarded with material comfort and security. Increasingly, as she writes in Bait and Switch, this notion is proving quaint in corporate life. In addition, people whom she met were laid off for reasons unrelated to their individual performance. As sociologist Robert Jackall wrote in Moral Mazes (quoted by Ehrenreich), "Success and failure seem to have little to do with one's accomplishments."