THE INTERVIEW

A short scene about the roller coaster ride that is a job interview, based on some of the most wild and crazy interviews I have had the pleasure to endure.

THE E.D.-middle aged woman with short hair, well put together, stiff and terse

PROGRAM MANAGER- slightly younger man or woman, more informally dressed, works under the Executive Director, feigns interest but had more of an attitude

ALICE LATE- at 25 the youngest of them all, over dressed compared to the other two, visibly nervous, trying to seem competent, serious, honest, attentive, experienced, good humored, and more.

SETTING

A small room without windows lit by fluorescent lights, which contains a small round table surrounded by three chairs, in two of which sit the THE E.D. and PROGRAM MANAGER. They are looking through documents spread out on the table. Stage left of the room, as if separated by a wall, is the lobby where ALICE sits waiting in one of the three chairs preparing for the interview.

THE E.D.

Well, what did you think of that last one? More legal experience than anything else, but certainly a dedicated volunteer and supporter.

(Hearing these words, ALICE looks up from her notebook and looks around. The rest of the lobby and office is empty. She is puzzled. Is she hearing her interviewers?)

PROGRAM MANAGER

Yes, I agree. She has been attending nearly all our community meetings and rallies, and I really appreciate that she has so much life experience. I prefer that to one of these 23 year olds right out of college with maybe one or two years of work experience.

.

(ALICE slides into the chair closest to the other room and cranes her neck, straining to pick up every word of the conversation. With each sentence she becomes more and more agitated.)

THE E.D.

Indeed. Well, do you think we should still call a few of the other people in? I mean, is it necessary, or have we found our woman?

PROGRAM MANAGER

Well, Ma’am, wait.  We still have one more appointment scheduled today. For right now, in fact. The candidate is probably waiting in the lobby.

THE E.D.

Ah, shit - excuse me. I forgot all about that one. Pass me her information. (She looks disapprovingly down at a piece of paper and sighs.) All right, call her in and we’ll go through the questions, but lets try to make this one quick.

PROGRAM MANAGER

              Alice Late!                        (ALICE springs out of her chair and runs over to the table)

THE E.D.

 (stands up, flashes a quick forced smile, and shakes hands with ALICE)

Hello, welcome, please sit down, I am The E.D., this is Program Manager, we will both be asking you questions. Lets get started. What does citizen participation mean to you?

ALICE LATE

Umm, well, citizen participation is when the members of a community are educated and involved in decision making about government services and other things that affect their lives. I think this participation is extremely necessary in a functional democracy…And, um, it’s extremely important to me.

(There is a long, awkward pause as the THE E.D. stares hard at ALICE and the PROGRAM MANAGER scribbles down her response in black ink and then takes a red pen and puts an X next to the response. ALICE notices the X. After each of ALICE’s responses PROGRAM MANAGER repeats this action.)

THE E.D.

Right. What is your communication style and do you feel comfortable around others and what have been your experiences dealing with conflict and what challenges are there and what recommendations do you have?

ALICE LATE

Umm, that’s a tough question. I, I think I am pretty direct and I feel comfortable collaborating with people from all kinds of diverse backgrounds who have very different communication styles from myself and, well… conflict resolution, well, yes, I have experience handling some difficult people, so--

THE E.D.

You didn’t really answer that question, but we will move on. Program Manager, go ahead.

PROGRAM MANAGER

How do you deal with stress, and relax and enjoy yourself in your free time and what does your intimate partner think of this organization’s mission and you working in this neighborhood?

ALICE LATE

(Thrown off by the odd question, stumbling to respond.)

Oh, umm, well, I, to relax I watch movies, educational documentaries of course, and I write…My boyfriend? He is supportive. He is also very dedicated to social justice so…

(Both PROGRAM MANAGER and THE E.D. seem unimpressed by this answer. THE ED gives ALICE a tight smile.)

PROGRAM MANAGER

Uh huh. If you were any animal in the great animal kingdom what would you be?

ALICE LATE

(More confused and unsure of herself.)

Huh. Uh, maybe a bird? Like a hawk or a pigeon. No, no a dove, because, um, they can fly and are a symbol of peace.

THE E.D.

(Pushes her chair back from the table, frustrated by this answer)

But what does the dove contribute? And what makes you think you, as a dove, could fit in to a jungle full of cheetahs and hippos and crocodiles? Can doves really understand and bring together such diverse, robust animals, animals so unpredictable?

ALICE LATE

(Stunned into silence for a moment)

Yes. I mean, because doves fly all over the world, they see life from above and learn from that and they have seen first hand--

THE E.D.

Ok, that’s enough. I would like you to do a role play. You are trying to recruit Program Manager here, who will play a member of the community, to come to meeting, while also being informative about our organization’s work. Imagine you are knocking on her door and she answers. Go!

ALICE LATE

Ok, hi, my name is Alice. Are you interested in learning about--

PROGRAM MANAGER

No, I am not interested. I’m busy. I am not buying anything from you.

ALICE LATE

I’m not selling anything. I am from a local community organization and I wanted to invite you to join us--

PROGRAM MANAGER

Lady, I said I am busy and I meant it! I’ve got four kids and three jobs. Why don’t you leave me alone!

ALICE LATE

I don’t mean to bother you, but we really need the involvement of people like you to make this campaign success—

PROGRAM MANAGER

Listen you fat white bitch, didn’t you hear me? I said no, so fuck off!

ALICE LATE

(Dropping her role-play character)

Oh my goodness. I think maybe I am talking to the wrong person. Was this how it was supposed to go? I was trying to bring her out, you know, to--

THE E.D.

Program Manager may have gotten a bit carried away, but you really have to be ready to think on your feet in such situations. The members of this community face great challenges in life.

PROGRAM MANAGER

Do you have any customer service experience? That would help you. My sister works at Borders, and I hear they are hiring. Maybe you should apply.

ALICE LATE

Oh, um, thanks, I guess, but, I am hoping to get a job here.

PROGRAM MANAGER

Yeah, right. Here is our final question. We work with people from a variety of different religions, many are devout Catholics. What religion are you? Do you regularly attend church? Do you pray?

ALICE LATE

(Taken a back again)

I, um, well I was raised--

THE E.D.

It’s illegal to ask that question, PROGRAM MANAGER. Let’s move on. Well, do you have any questions for us?

(Pause as ALICE looks through her notes to try to find the questions she prepared.)

THE E.D.

(shaking ALICE’s hand and ushering her out with another tight smile)

No? Ok, then we should be contacting you by the end of next week. Very nice to meet you, thank you for your time, good luck in your continued search, the door is that way.

ALICE LATE

Nice to meet you both.  

(Moving toward the door and then turning to see THE E.D. throw her resume in the trash.)

Thank you. Thank you for your consideration.

New York Times Readers on "The Jobless in the New Economy"

Published in the New York Times February 27, 2010

          I couldn't have said it better myself:

Re “Despite Signs of Recovery, Chronic Joblessness Rises” (“The New Poor” series, front page, Feb. 21):

You write, “Call them the new poor.” That might just be me. I’ve worked all my life for companies with management that wouldn’t know loyalty if it bit them.

Layoffs, new jobs and career changes have been the American way for decades. So, this long period of joblessness should be no surprise — but the “let them eat cake” attitude coming from government is.

You quote Allen Sinai, the chief global economist at the research firm Decision Economics, as saying: “American business is about maximizing shareholder value. You basically don’t want workers. You hire less, and you try to find capital equipment to replace them.”

If that’s how business defines profits, then we desperately need to redefine our priorities and our business laws. Deregulation has made us a lawless society again. It seems as if we have rebuilt a new robber-baron class that feeds on an ever-growing population of poor people. If this is the New American Dream, would someone please wake me up?

John Thomas Ellis

Kentfield, Calif., Feb. 24, 2010

To the Editor:

In a workshop for the recently unemployed and long-term unemployed, the first question asked by the instructor was “Why do we work?” The responses were obvious: income, benefits, self-esteem, satisfaction and planning for the future. The response the instructor wanted to convey was not as obvious. The instructor explained that “work is something to do — work is a place to go each day.”

In addition to the devastating loss of income and benefits, the recession has created a different kind of loss, loss that does not have a monetary value. The unemployed have lost a sense of place, a sense of belonging and a sense of permanence.

Such loss has been replaced by not having clear purpose and direction, by not having social interaction with people and by not knowing what the weeks, months and years ahead will bring.

While the economic recovery may be a sign of progress, it will come with enduring memories of great hardship.

Harold Langus

Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Feb. 22, 2010

To the Editor:

In the 1960s, it was predicted that automation would radically change the job market, and it was suggested by some that we plan then to shift more to service jobs as well as prepare for increased leisure hours, to ease the inevitable socioeconomic transition.

Instead, the hours of today’s working class have greatly increased, and salaries have not kept pace.

The wealthy, however, a class that has greatly increased in both size and assets, enjoy the benefits of automation and of having funds for entertainment and for hiring help to free even more of their time.

Given these realities, it seems unrealistic to look only at financing more jobs. We must be honest about the situation, and we must address the increase in service-sector jobs with appropriate training and the corresponding need for increased pay for those jobs from those most able to afford it.

Failure to address this imbalance is leading us toward a modern form of serfdom.

Diana Morley

Talent, Ore., Feb. 21, 2010

To the Editor:

The well-reported article about the economic effects of unemployment did not spend enough time on one of the real problems that people face today, whether holding a job or living on a fixed income, as Jean Eisen is doing with her husband. With approximately $19,000 a year from her husband’s disability, Ms. Eisen said she feared becoming homeless.

How is it that in much of America a decent apartment can’t be found for less than $1,000? Maybe what Ms. Eisen and millions of others need in addition to a job is more affordable housing.

Douglas Robinson

Sterling, Va., Feb. 22, 2010

Jose's Long Walk to Work

 
Originally published on the Working In These Times website

I first met Jose Naranjero* this July in a dusty little Mexican town called Naco, which lies just across the border wall from Bisbee, Arizona.  I'd been working nearby as a volunteer for No More Deaths, a Tucson-based group that tries to help immigrants passing through the dangerous Sonoran desert.  I was part of a team that left supplies of food and water out for them, in places where many previous border crossers have gotten lost and then perished from hunger, thirst, dehydration, or other hazards.

 In Naco, I retraced the steps of many such job-seekers to the door of an immigrant resource center run by folks from Bisbee.  This center provides temporary assistance to people dumped backed in Mexico, after being collared by the U.S. Border Patrol.  On my second day working in this tiny, crowded facility, two friends of Jose Naranjero showed up looking for him. All three men had tried to enter the U.S. but had the bad luck to run into "la migra." 

As Jose's fellow travelers sipped the black coffee that the center offers, they spoke shyly, in a slow, stilted kind of Spanish.  Coming from the distant Yucatan, their first language is Maya.   They had last seen Jose while they were all still in custody at the Border Patrol detention center in Bisbee.  They feared that their friend might be in more than the usual amount of trouble; he had been issued a black wristband, usually a sign that the wearer is suspected of being a convicted criminal or a documented repeat violator of US immigration laws.

 Within 24 hours the missing man had been located and Jose himself came into the center accompanied by his two friends.  He had been released by the Border Patrol at midnight and, immediately, all three compañeros tried to slip back into the U.S., with no more success than before.  With a wide brown face and a big smile, Jose told me he was headed for my own adopted city of San Francisco, where he had work waiting for him as a line cook at an Italian restaurant.  He had decided to leave that job briefly and return to Mexico to see his family.  Like many others who visited the center, he had assumed, mistakenly, that it would be as easy to get back into the US now it was several years ago.

 On each subsequent night that I spent in Naco, Jose and his friends tried again to enter Arizona.  And each time, they were caught, returned to Mexico, and showed up back at the resource center in time for coffee and a hot cup of noodles the next morning, saying "Hola, Alexandra!"  "Otra vez?" I would ask, and they would nod and we would all laugh at the absurdity of this daily cycle of activity.  Jose taught me a few words in Maya and we made a pact that if he did succeed in getting back to San Francisco, we would meet up again to exchange English lessons for continued tutoring in Maya.  When I left Naco a few days later to catch a flight back to California, I seriously doubted I would ever see Jose again.

 Yet, two days after I arrived back home, I got a call on my cell phone and heard a familiar "Hola, Alexandra."  It was Jose.  He was back in the Bay Area, but not without the scars and debts accumulated during his latest passage.  He had fractured his foot, but nevertheless returned immediately to his chamba (Mexican slang for work) at the same Italian restaurant where he had cooked before.  Only now, he owed five thousand dollars to the coyotes who had finally smuggled him across the border successfully and he was desperate to find a second full-time job so he could pay them off faster.

 We met for his first English lesson, the focus of which was "vocabulary for the job seeker."  Jose had me write down what "Help Wanted" looked like in English.  He asked me how to say, " Are you hiring?" and, to assert with confidence: "I can cook pizza and salad, and clean."  We also reviewed key words that would help him better understand the barked commands and impatient questions of his current jefe -- like "sweep the floor" and "are you done yet?"  Jose attended ESL classes at S.F. City College at my suggestion, but he soon stopped so he could devote more time to finding a second job and the extra money he and so many others need to send back home.  As he explained that mission: "We are here for a short time, just to work.  We want to get back to our families."  Jose often asked about my own family in Massachusetts.  He was baffled that I willingly chose to live so far away from them, when there was apparently no economic need for us to be separated.

 One day on his way to work, a few months after his difficult return to San Francisco, Jose had an experience that truly spooked him.  As he recounted it to me, he saw a woman walking toward him on a downtown street who was as one of the Border Patrol agents that nabbed him and his friends prior to his successful return to the U.S.  The woman stopped and said, "Hey, don't I know you from somewhere?"  Jose replied with a mumbled, "No," and tried to walk away quickly.  But the woman persisted: "I do know you.  I caught you in Arizona. . . .  Well, I am happy to see you here.  How are you doing?  Are you working?"

 Already scared and shaken by this bizarre encounter, Jose didn't tell her that he was working illegally in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant nearby.  If this woman was so "happy" to see him in San Francisco, why did she and her co-workers make it so hard for him to get back there?

 Jose's run-in with this off-duty member of la migra reminded him of all the other times he had felt afraid in our country, like when he was riding a city bus and San Francisco police officers came aboard to check bus passes or remove rowdy passengers.  We both had met a man in Naco who had lived in the Bay Area with his family for 20 years; one day, on his way to work, he was pulled over for a routine traffic violation, detained, and then deported.  For Jose and many other undocumented workers, San Francisco is not always the "sanctuary city" it claims to be. 

 After months of searching, Jose called one day to report that he had finally found additional employment at a "restaurante de sushi."  A friend of a friend was already working there so Jose was happy to join a kitchen crew of "puros Mexicanos."  Now, he prepares pizza and salad six evenings a week in his original job and sushi rice and chicken teriyaki, five days a week, on a morning shift at his second job.  He has very little time to sleep between jobs and only one day a week to do his laundry and other chores.  But he is grateful to be earning two paychecks.  Now he  has no time to improve his English or have any kind of fun, and his experience of this great city is so different from the young people I know who have the time and resources to enjoy themselves, whether they are employed or unemployed.

 I try to regard my current unemployment, which has not lasted 6 months, as a chance to use my free time to help people like Jose, even if I can't get hired to do it.  No More Deaths, ESL tutoring programs, and all the rest of the "non-profit" world are not exactly flush with "stimulus" money these days.  Since leaving Arizona last summer and walking San Francisco's streets since then, with resume in hand, the basic injustice of our economic system -- in which so many people, whether native- or foreign-born, have to struggle so hard just to make a living -- is clearer to me than ever before.  In my own quest for employment, I've endured scrutiny and then rejection by potential employers many times, whether face-to-face, over the phone, or via the internet. I know I'm not alone in feeling this but the experience of joblessness makes me anxious and doubtful about my own worth.

But at least I don't have to watch my back every moment like Jose does.  For Jose, the pursuit of "Help Wanted" ads in California has already taken him across a very hazardous stretch of an increasingly militarized international border, on multiple occasions.  He has left his family, risked his life and health, and willingly accepted the difficult and precarious job conditions that go with being undocumented. 

In America and Mexico, deeply flawed "labor markets" have left Jose and me and millions of others in a place we don't want to be, whether it's on an unemployment line or working illegally far from home.

* Not his real name.

What a Jobless Recovery Means for Young Workers Like Me

By Me
Originally printed October 8, 2009 by the Progressive Media Project.

I’m glad to hear that the stock market is up. But, frankly, my own household doesn’t feel it.

My under-30 partner and I don’t own any stocks, so we’re not benefiting from Wall Street’s recovery. We’re both still jobless and searching for full-time work — in my case, for three months now and, in his case, for much longer.

We’re almost on the verge of leaving the country. At least in a less-developed nation, the cost of living would be lower and we might be able to put our past job experience, bachelor degrees and foreign language skills to better use.

In California, where unemployment reached a 70-year high in August, I have more advantages than many job seekers. I am a U.S. citizen and am able to speak both English and Spanish fluently. I have a computer with Internet access, and so I can spend all day searching Craigslist and checking e-mails from various job search listservs.

Yet I have applied, unsuccessfully, for nearly 50 jobs so far — not even reaching the interview stage in most of them.

I have filled out applications and sent in my resume to become a community organizer, after-school teacher, administrative assistant, personal assistant, baker’s assistant, nanny, women’s shelter desk clerk, coffee shop cashier/barista and a dog walker.

Since I graduated from college just two years ago, I haven’t been working in any industry for very long. My longest stretch of prior employment, since graduation, was 11 months spent in a decent-paying job as a union representative in the Bay Area before I was laid off, along with many others, due to an internal political dispute. (The appearance of the word “union” several times on my resume could explain why I haven’t heard back from some employers.)

I am thankful, of course, for the unemployment check I receive every other week. And for the extra $25 per week tacked on to it as part of the stimulus package. And for the COBRA subsidy, for my health coverage, that was part of the same legislation last winter. But jobless benefits don’t make me feel useful and they won’t last forever; already, many other people around the country have exhausted theirs.

My partner — who comes from El Salvador — has a degree in industrial engineering, but he isn’t eligible for unemployment benefits. His experience mirrors that of many other recent immigrants, with far less education. Working as a day laborer in painting and construction, he’s been left unpaid, on several occasions, by unscrupulous contractors.

So, if this jobless recovery continues, we’re thinking of going back to his country.

Amazingly, it seems there are more opportunities for a do-gooder like me in schools or development projects in poor, tiny El Salvador than here at home.

For millions of us in our 20s and many other unemployed folks, the federal government’s economic stimulus initiatives don’t seem to be trickling down fast enough. We, the unemployed, want to contribute our time, our skills, our ingenuity and our sweat. We could be rebuilding parks, painting murals, tutoring kids or doing lots of other socially useful things — if the government would only create these jobs.

But, instead, Time magazine—in its Sept. 21 cover story — explains “why double-digit unemployment may be here to stay — and how to live with it.”

I’ve lived with it long enough — and that’s why I may not be staying.