8-30, Thursday

Not Keeping Up

Well, I’m not taking the time to keep up here — I will keep up.

Job Interviews

I have been interviewing for jobs. I have mixed feelings about a job, enjoying my freedom from the iron cage of an imposed daily schedule, but I want to do useful work and don’t find many volunteer opportunities to which I am attracted. My earlier plan for work didn’t work out as I had hoped so I continue to look around at other kinds of jobs — things I’ve never done before. I’ve interviewed recently with British Airways, with the State of Florida Elder Affairs department for a job ensuring quality long-term care facilities, and with the local community college for an administrative job.

Reflections on Looking for a Job

I ran across a classic Louis MacNeice poem: dependence on meter, avoidance of metricality, irregular rhyming schemes, the odd evocations (From the chandeliers the snow begins to fall) the crystallization of a revealing, islanded moment.

But I like the directly communicated desire to regain something lost, let it form within my hands once more. MacNeice nicely evokes a time lost, realized in that moment and keenly felt.

Only let it form within his hands once more-
The moment cradled like a brandy glass.
Sitting alone in the empty dining hall…
From the chandeliers the snow begins to fall
Piling around carafes and table legs
And chokes the passage of the revolving door.
The last diner, like a ventrilo-quist’s doll
Left by his master, gazes before him, begs:
“Only let it form within my hands once more.”

———–The Brandy Glass from Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice

That is to some extent what looking for a job at the end of a lifelong career is like. I’m lucky, though. I don’t need to work but would like to make a positive contribution with a part-time job providing a needed service. But employers, I think, see an old fart at the end of his productive days, with a lifetime of bad habits and, perhaps, a little bit too much of a sense of self, and either never respond to my application or don’t call me back after the first interview.

I don’t long for work or feel particularly diminished by the experience. Good practice, all these attempts. But I wonder what impact this sort of reaction to older workers has on those needing the paycheck, or whose own identity is bound tightly with a job title.

Three recent books examine these impacts on identity and self-worth.

The Social Life of Information by John Brown and Paul Duguid

Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Culture of the New Capitalism by Richard Sennett

All three books describe the unexpected prevalence of top-down management systems in the new digital economy. Rather than knowledge workers whose pay should increase in lockstep with increased education and productivity, pay has actually dropped when inflation is included while productivity has soared.

They document how workers are valued less for their unique skills then they are for skills of working in a team and jointly contributing toward corporate goals. These attitudes are operationalized through the use of Enterprise Systems, documented in the Sennett and the Brown/Duguid books. These software systems have given top managers much greater latitude to direct and control corporate workforces, while at the same time making the jobs of everyday workers and professionals more rigid and bleak. The call centers of the “customer service” industry, where up to six million Americans work, provide an egregious example of how these workplace rigidities can make life miserable for employees.

Call center workers must follow rigid scripts, each element timed and matched against other employees. Not a single moment of daily work is free from this overbearing and crushing oversight. At the same time managers can speed up or reconfigure this digital assembly line simply by throwing a switch and reprogramming the software—specifying less time per call and between calls—much as Henry Ford controlled the line at his Detroit plants in the 1920s.

“An organization in which the contents are constantly shifting,” Sennett writes of the new-model corporation,

requires the mobile capacity to solve problems; getting deeply involved in any one problem would be dysfunctional, since projects end as abruptly as they begin…. “I can work with anyone” is the social formula for potential ability. It won’t matter who the other person is; in fast-changing firms it can’t matter. Your skill lies in cooperating, whatever the circumstances….

As we have seen, in the workplace [these changes] produce social deficits of loyalty and informal trust, they erode the value of accumulated experience. To which we should now add the hollowing out of ability.

And workers, at least those who are not consultants, systems specialists, and management experts well-compensated to put such systems into place, become interchangeable, indistinguishable from each other, automatons in the mold of early 20th century efficiency expert visions of ideal workers.

When the victims of “downsizing” and “reengineering” are pushed out of their jobs, they often turn to the “career coaches” of the “transition industry” who are supposed to restore their morale and send them back in good shape to the corporate suite. One of the high points of Bait and Switch is Ehrenreich’s account of her dealings with these coaches. They rely on personality tests to find out what kind of jobs she might be best suited for. In one such test, Ehrenreich’s answers to two hundred multiple-choice questions apparently revealed that she was Original, Effective, Good, and Loving, but also Melancholy, Envious, and Overly Sensitive. The test concluded that she probably didn’t write very well, and should attend intensive journalistic workshops to “polish her writing skills.” After a ten-month search the only work Ehrenreich could find was selling insurance or cosmetics on her own—jobs with no office, no salary, no benefits, and for which income primarily depends on elusive sales commissions.

These coaches teach their out-of-work students how to be “cheerful, enthusiastic, and obedient.” They need to be little else in these new systems where processes rule and individual identity is a barrier to producitivity.

Or maybe it’s just sour grapes on my part.