[While economic opportunity may be dwindling in the US, there is certainly mushrooming opportunity of another kind -- i.e., for blaming victims, whether dispossessed by hurricanes or the marketplace.]
No Help Wanted Author Exposes How the American Dream Turned Into a Middle-Class Nightmare By Bob Thompson Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, September 7, 2005; C01 CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.--Maybe it was the missing lapel pin that doomed Barbara Ehrenreich's search. She couldn't get a job and she couldn't figure out why. She'd hired job coaches, haunted Internet job boards, endlessly massaged her résumé and networked, networked, networked. She'd paid an "image management" consultant to help her upgrade her wardrobe. But she never got around to replacing her sedate silver pin -- deemed "not corporate" by her clothing guru -- with the recommended gold. Well, fine. Her job search flameout wasn't such a big deal personally, though she confesses that not being wanted by anyone was a little hard to take. But Ehrenreich knew that when she finished researching "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream" -- a Dantesque tour through the world of the white-collar unemployed for which she posed as an out-of-work professional -- she'd have a well-established career as an independent writer to go back to. The beaten-down, middle-aged job seekers she encountered along the way, however, lack the luxury of such a fallback position. And as for still-employed fiftysomethings, fortysomethings and thirtysomethings who will likely make up much of her book's readership, Ehrenreich's failure story is a chiller. She might as well have called it "This Could Happen to You." ... The decreasing economic security of the American middle class has been the subject of considerable journalistic attention. "Over the last 25 years," as the Los Angeles Times summed up the situation in one lengthy 2004 report, "economic risk has been steadily shifted from the broad shoulders of business and government" and placed on the backs of individual employees. This development can be spun positively or negatively, depending on your point of view. Considered as a whole, the Times noted, the transformed economy has performed well. At the same time, "a broad array of protections that families once depended on to shield them from economic turmoil -- among them "stable jobs, widely available health coverage, guaranteed pensions" -- have been either sharply reduced or eliminated. Leah Gray knows all this firsthand. An unemployed marketing specialist Ehrenreich met while working on "Bait and Switch" -- she's one of the few subjects who agreed to have her real name used -- Gray said in a telephone interview that she'd gotten used to hearing things like "Leah, this is really difficult, you did a superb job and you're really well liked, but . . . " as she was being let go. "I've never been a woe-is-me kind of person," she said. But she has no health insurance. She cried when she had to cash in her 401(k) plan. And she has sometimes gotten too depressed to look for work. "Bait and Switch" was inspired, in part, by letters Ehrenreich received from people in situations like Gray's. We've done everything right, the message was -- gotten an education, worked hard -- and we still can't find stable jobs. Why not write about us ? So she decided to investigate what she calls "this tremendous churning in and out of the corporate world." She wanted to know how it feels to be scrambling for work because you've been downsized, outsourced or restructured out of your white-collar job. The plan was to portray herself as a PR professional, an area where she had plausible skills, and go looking for a job with health insurance and a salary of maybe $50,000 a year. She figured it would be easier than scrubbing toilets. She was wrong. Deciding to begin by hiring a "career coach" -- she'd been freelancing all her life, after all, and was a little weak on corporate job-hunting skills -- she found herself in the bizarre world of the "transition" industry, whose self-appointed experts spice up their coaching presentations with Elvis dolls and characters from "The Wizard of Oz." She paid one coach $200 an hour to polish her résumé, only to notice that, somehow, the job was never quite finished. "The white-collar unemployed have become a market," Ehrenreich explains, because unlike their blue-collar counterparts, they have assets -- at least for a while. Before long, other coaches were bombarding her with dubious tests -- of the same type used by many personnel departments -- designed to reveal her personality type and what kind of job would be right for her. The results were mixed, to put it mildly. It was nice to hear that one test scored her as "original, effective, good and loving." But the same test indicated that, besides being "overly sensitive and prone to melancholy," she probably didn't write well and would need "intensive journaling workshops" to compensate. She began attending public support groups and networking events for white-collar employees in transition (the term is preferred over "laid off" or "unemployed"), where she started to encounter her fellow seekers -- a disproportionately depressed-looking lot. At one session, she learned that she'd need a darn good explanation for any gap in her résumé whatsoever. Even if it was from taking time off to raise children? "The challenge is to be a beggar with a great story," she was told. The full saga of Ehrenreich's adventures in Transitionland is too long to summarize here. But in the end, what outraged her the most was the pervasive blame-the-victim ethos she encountered. Personal responsibility is a fine thing, she says, but it's not the same as omnipotence. Yet over and over, the newly unemployed were told: You totally control your own fate. At an "executive boot camp," the leader hammered the core message home: "It's never about the external world," he said. "It's always between you and you." So never mind if you're on the street because your job was transferred overseas, or because the whole industry you work in went under. Never mind if it's because you've done too well, achieving a salary high enough to put a cost-cutting bull's-eye on your back. In Transitionland, Ehrenreich found, it's all about attitude -- and if you can't stay positive and focused, you don't deserve a job. "I find that inexcusably cruel to people," she says. "When they're down, when they've sustained what may have been the worst blow in their adult lives -- and you tell them that it's their fault!" A corollary is that white-collar job seekers are constantly required to hide their emotions, to fake an eagerness they rarely feel. This is what Ehrenreich found harder than cleaning toilets or waitressing. "You can't fake being a waitress," she says. "The food gets to the table or it doesn't." But in the world of the white-collar unemployed, "you're constantly being told to be something different than you are. You have to be upbeat, positive, perky, obnoxiously self-confident." The corners of her mouth twitch grimly upward. "I know!" she says when this is pointed out. "I'm trying to put the smile on right now!" ... <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/06/AR2005090601923_pf.html> Carl
