Archive for November, 2006

Each of us, no matter how intelligent or experienced, quickly becomes “gullible” when faced with an endless (and heartless/shameless) parade of “professional” parasites. In “Bait and Switch,” these included career coaches, personality tests, résumé writers, networking groups/events, boot camps, image managers, how-to/pop psychology books, direct contact with target-company gatekeepers, proselytizers, crisis managers, real estate/commission-only sales, pyramid schemes and job fairs. The lesson: 95+ percent of what you try will be a complete waste of money, time and effort – and over time, the number of potential rescuers will dwindle to a precious few.

Which of the seven stranded castaways should you turn to in helping you get off the island of misfit job seekers? In addition to yourself (“Gullible”), there’s Web/online navigation (“Skipper”), ne$t egg (“Thurston”), family/faith/friends (“Mrs. Howell”), “network” (“Ginger”), counselors and HR screeners (“Mary Ann”), and information sources/databases (“Professor”). A proven comedy-show formula – and B&S was tongue-in-cheek funny, tinged with the bitter realization that the author had a lifeboat moored at that same island.

Why not use the above castaways to your advantage? For yourself, I would suggest reading Po Bryson’s “What Should I Do With My Life?” (sample chapters). You can pick it up at any library, and it’s extremely readable, consisting of real-life stories that will help you determine your search for true meaning and passion. You will also recognize some of your blind spots and rationalizations through the learning experiences of others. If you would prefer the personality-test approach, you can plunk down $16 for Nicholas Lore’s “The Pathfinder,” or about $520 for the next level of testing (http://www.rockportinstitute.com/). Bolles is another resource (http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/).

For Web/online navigation, you may find John Lucht’s Web site, free newsletter and book especially valuable (www.ritesite.com). Find out what companies you’re most interested in, and create job agents right on their Web sites. The Web site www.Indeed.com is simple, yet effective.

As for your finances, you would be smart to keep your debt low and your savings high. In an ever more fickle field such as corporate communications – the field that Barbara Ehrenreich attempted to enter – “there is no transparent way to judge [our] performance, and no protection from capricious firings.” [B&S, p. 234] Sooner or later, the “fickle finger of fate” will be pointed at you. Be prepared.

Family, faith and friends (pets, diet and exercise also) are your emotional and psychological bedrock when all around you is seemingly crumbling. Schedule time and prioritize accordingly.

“Networking” is a way for outplacement services to keep their overhead costs down. Old guides (www.superjobsearch.com) rave about it; more enlightened sources (http://www.rsronline.com, Irv Pfeiffer) claim that a direct-mail campaign is far more effective. The Five O’Clock Club (http://www.fiveoclockclub.com) is a relatively inexpensive alternative.

Counselors and HR screeners are usually beholden to their own interests or the company’s, not yours. The free initial consultation is usually worthwhile – and Problem-Action-Result (PAR) should be part of your repertoire (http://www.careermarketing101.com/methodology.html).

Finally, regarding information sources/databases, get a library card and familiarize yourself with your local library (also see: http://www.refdesk.com ). It’s the most cost-effective resource available (already subsidized by your tax dollars). Many offer seminars for effective job/career searches – and research on your target companies can differentiate you from other job candidates.

By getting people to share their experiences in an organized way, United Professionals is a promising concept. Recognize, however, that some cover or anonymity may need to be provided, so that avowed members are not stigmatized by the whiff of “union-organizing” or “quasi-socialism.”

The takeaway? Refuse to be taken for granted – and stay proactively connected.

– Name Withheld by Request

By Barbara Ehrenreich

After their roaring two-house victory, the Democrats are squeaking about micro-policies. There’ll be no impeachment, we’re told, though maybe a bit more oversight of Halliburton-style war profiteering. No withdrawal from Iraq, only a “phased redeployment.” And, the New York Times assures us (11/12/06), that the Dems “ have largely dropped … talk of a Canadian-style national health insurance.” Instead, they might try to reverse the Medicare drug plan’s ban on bargaining for drug price discounts.

They’ve caught the can’t-do spirit that hovers over that former malarial swamp, Washington D.C. Well, maybe they caught it long ago, when the Republican congressional sweep of ‘94 sent Bill Clinton into long policy ruminations on school uniforms and midnight basketball. Since then it’s been non-stop can’t-do, with the initial exception of war: Can’t do Social Security, can’t do universal health insurance, can’t do hurricanes. Then it turned out that we couldn’t do war either, at least if that meant whipping the Taliban or finding an honorable way out of Iraq.

Well, here’s a “phased redeployment” plan: First, bus the troops to the nearest functioning airport in Saudi Arabia, then put them on regular commercial flights to the U.S. According to Travelocity, the airfare part would cost about $1500 a person (coach class), or $225 million for 150,000 troops. If the government won’t come up with the ticket price, I’m sure thousands of ordinary citizens would happily dig into their own pockets. Hell, I’d spring for first class.

When it comes to health care, the more cautious Dems trace their can’t-do spirit to the great Hillary health reform debacle of 1993. We tried, they say, and it didn’t work. But what did they try? The Hill health plan would have created a vast new level of bureaucracy to contract for health insurance from the existing health insurance companies, thus tightening their evil grip over American health care. I described that plan in a 1993 essay in Time as “the ultimate medical nightmare:”

You slip under the anesthesia confident that your problem will be solved with some simple procedure — a polyp excision, for example, or tubal ligation. But when you wake up you find your breasts are missing or your intestine now terminates in a plastic bag.

Look, millions of voters didn’t swing toward the Democrats because they wanted a $15 discount on their statins and beta-blockers. They voted out the can’t-do Republicans in part because health costs are an immediate threat to ordinary Americans’ livelihoods and lives. They want a solution, and they want it now.

How could we do that? The cautious way would be to expand Medicare to cover everyone. No new program would have to be devised, and the fight over whether Medicare would lead to socialism was resolved over 40 years ago. Just extend it to everyone of any age.

The only problem with that is that Medicare is as full of holes as the Bush rationale for the Iraq war. It’s not enough to have Medicare Parts A and B, you need supplementary health insurance to cover the co-payments. As for Part D, aka “Part Doughnut Hole,” no one has as yet been able to comprehend it, though it seems to work fine for people who are willing to substitute shark cartilage and lemon grass tea for prescription drugs.

So the most sensible plan is the one put forward by Anna Burger, head of labor’s Change to Win coalition. She proposes extending the health insurance plan that currently covers Congress to everyone. “If it’s good enough for [congress],” she asks, “Why isn’t it good enough for every American?”

Hey, we can do it, or at least something very similar. Recall that as of a week ago, raising the minimum wage was another “can’t do” issue: Can’t do it because it might lead to inflation or unemployment, might offend the Chamber of Commerce or, god knows, cause acne. But six states just raised their minimum wages and Nancy Pelosi has promised to raise the federal minimum in her first 100 hours as Speaker of the House.

If the Dems can do that, they can do health care. Just renounce the can’t-do spirit and start echoing the little blue engine: “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Work just got a little more rewarding in Arizona, Montana, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio and — according to CNN projections — Colorado. Voters in these states just approved increases in their minimum wages — from $5.15 an hour all the way up to $6.85 an hour in Ohio. The six new states join the enlightened 18 that had already raised their minimum wages, for a total of 24 states where it’s beginning to be worthwhile to get up and go to work in the morning.

I’m especially proud of my home state, Montana, which a decade ago was best known for its white supremacist militias. I feel like the Abe Lincoln character in the Rozerem ad: “Welcome back,” I want to say, “We missed you.” Except that the Montanans aren’t falling asleep – they’re waking up from their weird, scary, claustrophobic dream.

If the U.S. electorate was as heavily skewed toward the upper middle class this time as it has been in recent years, many of the people who voted to raise their states’ minimum wages were not in a position to benefit directly. In fact, some of them may end up paying a little more for their landscapers and restaurant meals. In other words, these voters saw the minimum wage as a moral or “values” issue. They decided that restaurant meals don’t taste all that good when they’re served by people who have trouble feeding themselves.

In Colorado, the group opposed to raising the minimum wage — Stop42 — tried to seize the moral high ground for itself, with an ad depicting God Himself warning against an increase. The ad shows a Santa-like Moses addressing the Big Guy:

MOSES: We need divine intervention. They want to chisel Amendment 42 into Colorado’s constitution where it doesn’t belong.
GOD: What on earth are you talking about?
MOSES: An annual minimum wage increase in stone for eternity!
GOD: When inflation and recession come, it will be a catastrophe!
MOSES: It’s a plague we’ll face every year.
GOD: We can’t let the people make this mistake. Go. Spread the word. Vote no on 42!

It’s odd that God, for all His omniscience, hadn’t noticed that the states that already had higher minimum wages haven’t yet plunged into “inflation and recession.” Or that the 1997 hike in the federal minimum wage wasn’t followed by nationwide economic calamity. It’s stranger still that the deity would choose to weigh in on the side of the Colorado Restaurant Association and against the poor and downtrodden.

Two weeks ago, in San Francisco, I attended a conference of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice in California (CLUE for short.) The hundred or so assembled ministers, priests, rabbis and imams probably didn’t agree on a lot of issues, like abortion rights, gay marriage, embryonic stem cell research, or the divinity of Jesus. But they were solidly united on one thing: The moral responsibility of all citizens to improve the lot of the down-and-out. This week’s vote shows that the word is getting out.

A recent Associated Press article titled “More wages, no more work” reprinted in my local newspaper, set off my “HUH??” alarm. This article bemoaned the risk to our standard of living posed by the flattened productivity of Ameican workers in September as against the wage increases that we were (doubtless undeservedly) enjoying. Hello?!

I am simultaneously an employee of a medium-sized company and an entrepreneur with my own consulting practice. I know the theoretical factors of the wages and productivity and “standard of living” and inflation equation. I also know the economic reality I and many others live every day.

Some Perspective

That article didn’t accurately represent the recent comparables found in articles such as “Real wages fail to match a rise in productivity” by Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt in The New York Times, August 28, 2006, Section A; Column 6; National Desk; Pg. 1. and other local newspapers’ business sections in August and September that carried the same quarter’s statistical information with related local corporations’ profit and local workers’ wage stats.

I’d ask of the current AP article, what about the “only so much blood from a person, much less a turnip” factor in worker productivity? And, trust me, employers have turned employees into turnips over the past five years. You know what companies call experienced, well-compensated workers who raise issues of common sense in the face of foolish executive-driven tactics? “Fat.”

Too many companies have in the past five years, when their profits and CEOs’ salaries soared while workers’ salaries flat-lined, saved on the cost of productivity-tools (such as automation of rote activities) for their workers while demanding longer hours of salaried workers who don’t get overtime pay. Those employers who have borne the cost of productivity tools have compensated by cutting back on the number of workers beyond the truly proporitonate ratio of increased output those tools provide. If the tool enables 20% more work per worker, cut the staff by 30% and demand 10% more hours per remaining employee — heck, they’ll be glad they weren’t laid off. What has in fact happened is that workers have worked longer hours for flat wages, and (with or without productivity tools) the workers’ production capability is now maxed-out.

Try telling such a worker that “rising productivity is the only way you get a higher standard of living”! Yes, I know, in economic theory, that’s true. But you’ve got a 50/50 chance of he’ll either laugh at you or punch your lights out. He knows that the way his employer has been squeezing higher productivity out of him for the past 5 years (with layoffs everywhere, you’re lucky to have job so just work longer/harder at it for the same salary) has diminished his standard of living. He sleeps less, sees family less, and–against the inflation already in insurance and energy costs–is providing less well for his family.

That AP article says “Increased output means that companies can pay their workers more without having to raise the cost of their products….” But during the previous five years of increased output, those wages did not increase. Energy cost increases have driven the rise in product prices. Nor did employers bear the increased costs of healthcare for their employees; more companies shunted the insurance rate increases onto the employees themselves. And they reduced or eliminated both fixed-pensions and 401K-matching.

In fact, one of the few factors driving employers to increase hiring and wages now is the back-firing of the “outsource to India” movement that has made the quality of American companies’ customer service and software a laughing stock. It’s only their customers’ fury that is forcing companies to in-source some service and product-production again. The companies are recruiting the very skillsets (often the same people) they laid off over the past five years. And those new-hires or re-hires are driving a harder bargain.

The “Achieve Balance” Law of Physics, Economics, and Educated Workers

I’ve seen enough situations in physical nature and human nature achieve balance as the pendulum swings, to know that it must be some kind of law. Companies are finding out what happens when you mistreat your best and brightest. We learn from th experience. We start being as smart for ourselves as we used to be for our employers — we’ve had to just to survive the last five years. And then paybacks really are hell. Remember when companies started calling their layoffs “rightsizing”? That’s exactly what I’d call the current leveling off of productivity and increase in wages. I’d also call it “too little too late” — but better than never. If white-collar workers were unionized, I’d swear it was an organized work-slowdown. But they’re not, so it’s just nature and the laws of economics taking its course.