The harsh truths of job-hunting amid a robust economy
WASHINGTON: On the morning she would try to change her circumstances, Donna Maria Osborne did everything she thought she was supposed to. She woke up early, lifting herself off her sister’s couch, where a permanent indentation was starting to form in the cushions.
She said her prayers, making sure to say “thank you” before asking, again, for what she wanted most. She dressed in a black suit, paid US$ 2 ( RM9) to ride the bus and arrived at the Washington ( D.C.) Convention Center at 8.30am The job fair started at 10.
“Am I in the right place?” she asked a security guard, looking for what she thought would be a long line of people who wanted to work.
“First one here,” he said, and so Osborne started the line, and waited. She scoped out a list of employers who were expected to show up, highlighting the ones with potential and crossing out all the places she had already applied.
On her right, a TV was showing CNN. The anchors were going on about the stock market, something Osborne, who is 59, had never chosen to give much of her attention to. On this morning, the Dow Jones industrial average was about to set a set a record high. It was another sign of the moment the country’s economy was in. President Donald Trump had been boasting about it all week: The stock market was up. The job market was growing. Unemployment was low.
By the numbers, it was a good time to be a job seeker in America. And now, a few hundred of them - black, white and Hispanic, young, old and middle- aged - were lining up behind Osborne, each person hoping that this would be the day when they would no longer be among the 4.3 per cent of people in the country who counted as unemployed. She waved to one of them, motioning for him to come cut in line beside her.
“Same old, same old,” her friend Durward Jones said. They had both been here at Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton’s annual job fair last year, too.
“You never know,” Osborne said.
“You never know,” Jones agreed. “Something good might happen.”
Something good: That would be a full-time job she could count on.
Something Benefits, really good: retirement, consistency.
Something great: Hired today, on the spot.
But if she were honest with herself, she would settle for just something.
For two years she had been patching together work from temporary job placement agencies, never earning the US$ 13,000 a year she had when she worked for her church - her last steady job - and not coming close to the US$ 42,000 a year she once made as an administrative assistant. She had no debt, and only herself to support.
But at the moment, her finances amounted to a bus card loaded for the week and US$ 2.50 in change. And that’s why she showed up too early, and accepted a secondhand suit from the associate pastor at Trinity AME Zion church, and prepared a stack of 20 resumes touting her trustworthiness, initiative and all the volunteer work she’d been doing to remind herself that she still had something to offer.
A sharp- dressed man in his 20s waved to the line. “All right,” he said, and Osborne hurried forward. She and Jones rode an escalator down into the large hall where 113 booths were set up, 113 potential somethings good.
A few steps off the escalator, Osborne clutched her lower back. The ache was so strong, she had to sit down. The other job- seekers rushed past her. She stretched forward, thinking about her US$ 600-a-month room in a District group house she couldn’t afford anymore. She didn’t know how much longer her back could take sleeping on a couch.
Up again. She squinted at the numbers above the booths.
“What’s that? An 81, or 61?” she said.
At the booth for the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, she introduced herself.
“Do you know if they have any open customer service positions?” she asked.
“They do,” the representative answered. “It’s a call center type of environment.”
“Right,” Osborne said, nodding to show her enthusiasm and picking up a flyer.
“They are looking for a background in call centers,” the representative said. “Billing, and so forth. So if you worked in a doctor’s office or something like that, that’s customer service, but it wouldn’t be on the scale of this call centre environment.”
“Oh,” Osborne said. thank you.”
She handed back the flyer. She had no billing experience. She headed for a booth with a sign that said “40Plus of Greater Washington.”
A gray-haired man greeted her. “We don’t hire,” he said. “We help you get hired.”
Her smile drooped. She already had a resume. She already learned how to answer “Tell me about a time when you faced a challenge at work” and “What’s your greatest strength and weakness?” “I mean, I get interviews,” she told the man. “I don’t have a problem with that. But I think it’s my age.”
Ken Schoppmann understandingly.
He, too, was unemployed, or “OK, nodded “in transition,” as he preferred to call it. 40Plus was just a volunteering opportunity for him, a chance to hand out flyers that said “LinkedIn: It’s Not Social, It’s Business” and “Network! Network! Network!”
The job market, Schoppmann had come to learn, was like the rest of the world: Always looking for the new, next thing. He used to be a CEO. Now he was overqualified for most positions. At the job fair, he was meeting the people who were usually underqualified, like Osborne, who doesn’t have a college degree. If she had handed him her resume, he would have explained to her yet another challenge in her way: The job she had spent most her life doing - administrative assistant - was being replaced by technology. He would have advised her to change her wording to “Operations Specialist.” Instead, she picked up a flyer, thanked him, and walked toward the other booths.
“I hope I didn’t make him feel like I wasn’t interested,” she said. “But I just need a job.”
She stopped at a hotel management company, whose representatives told her she’d need to apply online. She thanked them and took a free pen with their logo branded on it. Next, the Library of Congress. Apply online, she was told. The same at Two Roads Hospitality.
How many hours had she already spent hunched over her laptop submitting applications? She had purchased it four years ago, when she was working fulltime.
She envisioned herself back at it the next morning, entering her information over and over again. Or maybe she would start tonight after she stopped at the assistedliving community on 14th Street to check on her 85-year- old mother. — WP-Bloomberg