At the kinky extreme, laid-off white-collar people are advised to further simulate the office environment by finding someone to play the part of a "boss" -- a spouse, a friend, a paid career coach -- to whom you report every few days on your progress.
Is it any wonder there's no time left over for lobbying for universal health insurance or reading Marxist tracts on the "reserve army of the unemployed"? It's all a person can do to keep up with the relentless pressures of an imaginary job.
The blue-collar unemployed are subjected to gerbil-like exercises of their own. While white-collar layoff victims are encouraged to polish the "brand called you," blue-collar people are told they have nothing to offer unless they start all over with "retraining." Hence, in part, the current surge in community college enrollments.
But in his 2006 book, "The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences," Louis Uchitelle raised the obvious question: "Retraining for what?" At the beginning of the decade, computer skills were all the rage; then the low-level computer work vanished to India. Air-conditioner repairing is popular right now, and big-rig truck driving is a perennial favorite. There are no guarantees, of course, of eventual jobs. In a recent report for the organization Food AND Medicine on laid-off manufacturing workers in Maine, Steve Husson, who himself had been laid off as a DHL driver, found paper mill workers stuck with intermittent seasonal work and low-paid service-sector jobs despite their stints of retraining.
Even two or three years ago, when the economy was apparently healthy, average layoff victims "landed" in new jobs paying 17% less than the old ones -- if they landed at all. Today, with the country losing more than half a million jobs a month, both white-collar job searching and blue-collar retraining are becoming surreal exercises in futility. No matter how smart you are -- how flexible, personable and skilled -- you can't find a job that isn't there. At least until the unemployment benefits run out and the credit cards are canceled, you might as well devote yourself to Madden and "Minesweeper."
