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Sino Melo

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“Today, white-collar job insecurity is no longer a function of the business cycle--rising as the stock market falls and declining again when the numbers improve. Nor is it confined to a few volatile sectors like telecommunications or technology, or a few regions like the rust belt or Silicon Valley. The economy may be looking up, the company may be raking in cash, and still the layoffs continue, like a perverse form of natural selection, weeding out the talented and successful as well as the mediocre. Since the midnineties, this perpetual winnowing process has been institutionalized under various euphemisms such as "downsizing," "right-sizing," "smart-sizing," "restructuring," and "de-layering"—to which we can now add the outsourcing of white-collar functions to cheaper labor markets overseas.”

WorkBusinessWorkersOutsourcingDownsizingRestructuringLayoffsFiringsJob Insecurity
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“But the white collar workforce seems to consist of two groups: those who can’t find work at all and those who are employed in jobs where they work much more than they want to. In between lies a scary place where you dedicate long hours to a job that you sense is about to eject you, if only because so many colleagues have been laid off already.”

JobsWorkBusinessWorkersWorkforceOverworkDownsizingPsychological SafetyLayoffsWhite Collar Workers
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“Robert Jackall’s book [Moral Mazes] impressed on me that corporate dress serves a far more important function than mere body covering. “Proper management of one’s external appearances,” he writes, “simply signals to one’s superiors that one is prepared to undertake other kinds of self-adaptation.” By dressing correctly, right down to the accessories, you let it be known that you are willing to conform in other ways too—that you can follow orders, for example, and blend in with the prevailing “culture.”

WorkDressClothingAttireCorporate LifeConformingWork AttireMoral MazesRobert JackallSelf Adaptation
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“The career coaching industry can only expand. Whether or not the economy improves. And this is because the corporate world has changed. Today, in the wake of the last recession, companies are intent on being permanently lean; they churn people in and out as needed, so that the average executive or professional can expect to hold—what?—about ten or eleven jobs in a lifetime whether he or she wants to or not. And it’s interesting, isn’t it, that our society is so unprepared for this change. College, for example, prepares people for jobs, but not for the trauma of job change.”

ChangeWorkBusinessExecutivesDownsizingCorporate WorldProfessionalsLayoffsCareer CoachingJob Changes
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“I had pictured the corporate world that I seek to enter as a castle on a hill, outside of which the starving vagrants wander, beset upon by wolves and barbarian hordes, begging for entry into the safety of the fortified towers. But now I see there is another zone out here: a somewhat settled encampment, where people toil for uncertain rewards at minor tasks invented by the castle dwellers. There is an advantage to occupying this zone: you are free of the rigid conformity required of those who dwell inside; you can actually “Be Your Own Boss!” A few do very well, acquiring pink Cadillacs or fortunes from real estate deals. Many more are ruined or pour themselves into efforts that generate near-poverty-level earnings year after year. There is no safety out here; the wolves keep circling.”

JobsWorkBusinessCareersConsultantsJob SeekingCorporate WorldProfessionsJob HuntingMulti Level Marketing
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“I have come to see clearly that life is more than self. It is more than doing what I want, striving for what will benefit me, dreaming of all I can be. Life is all about my relationship with God. There is no higher calling, no loftier dream, and no greater goal than to live, breathe, and be poured out for Jesus Christ." --Jamie in Brother Andrew's "The Calling”

GodPurposeSacrificeHighest CallingLiving For ChristBrother Andrew
Book:The Narrow Road: Stories of Those Who Walk This Road Together
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“And no matter how upbeat they are—no matter how ingenious and flexible—the unemployed and underemployed understand that the clock is always ticking in the background. The longer you are unemployed, the less likely you are to find an appropriate job, and entries like “sales associate,” “limo driver,” or “server” do not make an attractive filling for the growing Gap in one’s résumé. At the same time, you are inexorably aging past the peak of occupational attractiveness, which seems to lie somewhere in the midthirties now. Experience is not an advantage; in fact, as Richard Sennett notes of corporate employment, “as a person’s experience accumulates, it loses value.” So once you fall into the low-wage, survival-job trap, there’s a good chance that you will remain there—an unwilling transplant from a more spacious and promising world.”

WorkBusinessExperienceAgingEmploymentUnemploymentWorkingResumesGapJob Searching
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“Less mutable qualities, like age, may have worked against me too. My résumé revealed only that I was probably over forty. But even that relatively youthful status could have repulsed many potential employers. Business journalist Jill Andresky Fraser warned me that a forty-plus woman was unlikely to be hired except by someone seeking a “motherly secretary,” Katherine Newman, among others, has documented corporate age discrimination, quoting, for example, a Wall Street executive who told her, “Employers think that [if you’re over forty] you can’t think anymore. Over fifty and [they think] you’re burned out.”

JobsWorkCareersAgingEmploymentEmployersJob SeekingMiddle AgeAge DiscriminationJob Hunting
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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“Middle-class Americans, like myself and my fellow seekers, have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security. This has never been true of the working class, most of which toils away at wages incommensurate with the effort required. And now, the sociologists agree, it is increasingly untrue of the educated middle class that stocks our corporate bureaucracies.”

WorkEffortRewardsEmploymentMiddle ClassWorking ClassWorkingAmericansProtestant Work Ethic
Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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