From Sheelzebub the Pinko Feminist Hellcat ( via Avedon Carol) comes this review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Bait & Switch, containing some horribly familiar personal insights into the nature of white-collar unemployment in the US:
November 22, 2005
Elevator speeches
I’ve just started reading Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich, and I’ve already got mixed feelings about it. I’m on Chapter Two.
It’s a very funny book–she should have written a novel spoofing the whole job-seeker culture and the psychobable-spouting parasites that bottom feed as personal/career coaches. Heck, since she didn’t do it, I might do it. And it is troubling–something you intuit by seeing all of these ads about networking events and job coaches and articles by the same coaches is that there sure are a lot of people out there profiting from others’ misery. And I have yet to find anyone who was actually helpful.
A lot of the stuff she points out is already known to those of us who haven’t worked most of our lives as full-time writers or academics: enterence into the corporate world requires fakery that Satan himself would have trouble with. It’s the weak resume puffing, constantly-networking, glad-handing optimism or die attitude that makes me twitch, but you have to fake it, you have to use the jargon in the industry in which you want to work, you have to adopt the stupid pseudo-spiritual and fake-philosophical platitudes (Sun Tzu and leadership! The Tao of the Career!), and you have to basically play the game. No matter how insipid it is. Some nightclubs don’t let you in if you’re not glam or hip enough, some corporations won’t let you in if you’re not blandly bubbly enough.
And her inexperience comes out in other ways: when one of her job coaches asks her to cite her three biggest fears, she lists “being too old to find a job” and “living in poverty” (she couldn’t think of a third one). I smacked my hand against my forehead because you never say that. You just don’t. You never, ever admit fear about things like jobs or life or money. Everyone in the shiny happy office has no financial woes and no worries about their employability. The things one worries about and speaks of are “being unchallenged by my job” or “spending too much time at home.” Okay, maybe not the latter, but you get the picture. It’s like talking about salary and being upfront about the fact that actually, you’d like more of it. Can you imagine!
It made me think of my two plus years in graduate school, where our professors tried to lead us into finding our ambition and dreams. I’m rolling my eyes even thinking about it now, since most of the students there were single parents looking for a leg up in cubicle world. Job flexibility, our profs would cry, money isn’t everything! And we’d nod and smile very politely. Until the third or fourth time, when someone would point out that negotiating a raise for a pink collar job wasn’t done, nor was telecommuting. You showed up and accepted your salary and shut up. And when you had a kid to feed and clothe, and skyrocketing rent to pay, money was pretty major, if not everything. Admitting that, though, was bad, bad, bad.
Ehrenreich went to a networking event at the exhoration of her coaches, and met a whole bunch of unemployed people. I remembered thinking, Well, what is hanging out with people with no connections to jobs for you going to do, besides waste your time? Her coaches told her the same thing when she reported that she went to the event, but they’re the same people who told her to go. Maybe their mission is to make people chase their tails? It’s possible.
She was also struck by the corporate mask that everyone must affect. I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about–the bland but cheerful, professional and calm, busy but engaged, schmoozy but focused personna that becomes Everydrone. You don’t let your real thoughts or feelings be known. Everything is pleasant. Everydrones have their own language, with dialects specific to their industries and companies. Everydrones manage to promote themselves and be humble at the same time.
Everydrones manage to promote themselves and be humble at the same time… Eureka! That’s it, the explanation for the meteoric rise of the incompetents that infest the ranks of the Bush administration. Apart from the humble bit.
