The New York Times describes the survival jobs of a number of people in Forced Down the Job Ladder. The new “survival job” is one that pays some of the bills and is only taken after searching for a much higher paying, higher prestige job:
Interviews with more than two dozen laid-off professionals across the country, including architects, former sales managers and executives who have taken on lower-paying, stop-gap jobs to help make ends meet, found that they were working for places like U.P.S., a Verizon Wireless call center and a liquor store. For many of the workers, the psychological adjustment was just as difficult as the financial one, with their sense of identity and self-worth upended.
“It has been like peeling back the layers of a bad onion,” said Ame Arlt, 53, who recently accepted a position as a customer-service representative at an online insurance-leads referral service in Franklin, Tenn., after 20 years of working in executive jobs. “With every layer you peel back, you discover something else about yourself. You have to make an adjustment.”
It’s worth noting how much competition there is for these “survival jobs.” They are not necessarily easy to get.
March 1st, 2009 at 11:00 am
To have your pay cut by more than half has to be difficult, in ways big and small that I can’t imagine. And not just difficult, but when the new, lower paying job comes without health insurance benefits, potentially deadly too.
What’s also troubling about this article is the tacit assumption of the guy who lost his $70,000 per year managerial job that, in healthier economic times, only lowlifes take low-paying jobs. “I broke down thinking, ‘This is what I’ve become,’” grieves the new janitor.
This makes me cringe, thinking of some of the noble people I work with who clean the bathrooms, sweep the carpet, empty the trash, and perform other tasks no less important to the existence of our organization than those performed by those in higher paying positions.
It’s clear from the article that he and his wife intend to persevere. As they struggle to hold onto their sense of worth and dignity, hopefully they will also come to see that these qualities are not linked to a job title.
March 1st, 2009 at 11:06 am
Those are good points, Charlie.
There does seem to be a bias across the NYT in terms of assuming that we all come from families that earn 200K a year, and that when we earn that much, we deserve it because we work hard. I suppose it’s a bias of meritocracy.
Also, we should note that none of this is particularly “new” as the article claims. People have always had to work jobs of all sorts that they didn’t necessarily feel compelled to love.