This is probably not the best reading material for the un- or under- employed. It’s a bleak, bleak picture of the job market for mid-to-high level professionals in the United States. Barbara Eherenreich is an experiential journalist who previously made her name with Nickel and Dimed, for which she took a series of blue-collar jobs to see if she could make a living. This time, she decides to try out life as a white-collar job seeker. She tries out two personas, the first a woman seeking to re-enter full time corporate work after freelancing/consulting while raising her family, and the second a more traditional PR professional. The long and short of it is that half a year of rigorous job seeking yields her no more leads than commission-only sales jobs with Mary Kay and AFLAC. It’s scary stuff. There was a bit, and I wanted to quote it, from her conclusion (but I’m at work still and I can’t find it skimming) that basically stated that the whole thing comes down to the fact that payroll is always going to be the biggest expense at any corporation, and cutting jobs is the CEO’s best strategy to make more money for himself and stockholders, leaving countless people on the dole, and the remaining workers picking up, increasingly, more slack than they could ever imagine keeping under control.

I think the situation in Canada isn’t quite as dire… but we’re catching up. But then, here I am, you know?