Flawed SystemFlawed Self by Ofer Sharone

Author:Ofer Sharone [Sharone, Ofer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology, Business & Economics, Careers, Job Hunting
ISBN: 9780226073675
Google: GZKvAAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 18497982
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

A Cross-Class Comparison

The Blue-Collar Diligence Game

Reggie’s first words to me were, “My mind is about to explode. Not having a job, it can drive you to go use drugs, can drive people to hit their wife, drive people crazy. I’ve seen it. I have seen a lot.” Two months earlier, he had lost his job working in a warehouse. Like the American and Israeli white-collar workers discussed in prior chapters, Reggie had repeatedly hit frustrating roadblocks in his search for a new job. Yet his experience of unemployment, and that of most blue-collar American workers I interviewed, followed a different pattern. It was the product of a different job-search game.

The prior chapters described the workings of the chemistry game in the American context and the specs game in the Israeli context. Although these chapters described the specific labor-market institutions that underlie each of these games, a question may remain about the role of broader national cultures in ultimately shaping unemployment experiences. For example, it may be suggested that it is the American culture of individualism that explains the focus on chemistry and the personalized self-blame. The cross-class comparison described in this chapter will show a group of American job seekers—those seeking blue-collar jobs—who are not playing the chemistry game and who have a very different experience of unemployment. This comparison provides further evidence that it is the job-search games and the specific institutions that underlie them, and not a widely shared national culture, that drives the unemployment experience.

The American blue-collar job search does not focus on interpersonal connection, as in the chemistry game, or on the job seeker’s list of objective skills, as in the specs game. Instead, it focuses primarily on whether the job seeker is an eager, compliant, and hard worker, a filter I summarize with the word “diligence.”

True, as in the chemistry game, the focus is on an intangible attribute, but it is a very different attribute than the interpersonal fit sought in the chemistry game, as we will see below. In the diligence game, chemistry may in fact be a liability. The diligence game and the labor-market institutions dominant in the American blue-collar context ultimately generate a search experience that in important ways resembles the experience of playing the specs game. In a surprising finding, the job-search experience of blue-collar American job seekers is closer to that of white-collar Israelis than to that of their own white-collar compatriots. This suggests that to understand job-search and unemployment experiences, more important than culture or class is the specific job-search game one must engage in when looking for work and the concrete labor-market institutions that structure it.

The data presented in this chapter were gathered through in-depth interviews with job seekers who made use of a state-funded One-Stop job-search support center in the San Francisco Bay area (which I will refer to as “WorkSource”). This center is one of many similar One-Stop centers across the state of California and the United States and is part of the larger support structure that also encompasses AmeriSupport.

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