The Metamorphosis: No-Job Job Fair

Like Gregor Samsa, I’ve turned into a giant beetle. In The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka tells the story of Samsa, who awakens one morning to find himself as a big cockroach. His voice has changed. His family no longer understands him and is repelled.
Samsa tries to adapt. His room is cleared so he can more easily scuttle up and down the walls. But everyone he comes in contact with is driven away. Unable to work, his family’s finances are crippled and they try to bring in boarders. The tenants get a glimpse of Gregor and run.
He comes to the conclusion it would be best for everyone if he died. So Gregor withers away. The giant dead beetle is discovered and disposed of.
That’s what the job market, the current economy, does to you. Once unemployed, you’re repulsive, more and more so the longer it lasts. If you’re over fifty, you are in a shunned class.
Few want to have anything to do with you. You lose friends, perhaps make one or two new ones — others who, like you, have found they’ve morphed into untouchables.
I decided to share this with you. It’s not an unobvious thing, particularly after the latest job fair experience at the Convention Center in downtown Los Angeles.
This was a STEM job fair, you know — STEM — that universal magic word meant to mean “science jobs,” uttered by people who are either lying or who don’t know from excrement.
There were about twenty “businesses” at the STEM job fair. Four rows, five kiosk/displays per row, with one on the end for on-the-spot interviews. There were no on-the-spot interviews during the time I was there.
I suspect there were none during the fair’s four hour duration.
And that’s because there weren’t any firms that were obviously looking to make hires in science. What they were mostly interested in was public relations, a kind of social networking where the human resources people sent to staff the booths hand out glossy paper and refer you to the company’s website to upload a resume.
The Environmental Protection Agency was there and was honest about it. The reps said up front they weren’t making any hires, that all of it was processed through usajobs dot gov, the omnibus website for federal hiring.
They were taking e-mail addresses so that you would received blasts when something opened up.
A firm that handled logistical and civilian staffing services for the US Air Force was looking for interns, presumably free. Which, in the current economic climate, isn’t really a job at all, but a way for a private sector company to offer outsourced contract work at a lower rate than the military would have to pay if it actually had to hire and train its own people.
Boeing was the big cheese corporation everyone was in a line to talk to. Boeing doesn’t do science. It does jets and arms manufacturing, engineering applications.
As far as I could tell, the Boeing desk wasn’t actually spreading any love to all the people hoping for some.
There was also a company, another private sector firm doing work for the US military. They were, according to their display, looking for people who could help develop underwater minefields and, reciprocally, sensors for the detection of the same.
This should make you laugh. Yes, everyone gets science and math schooling so they can get in on the exploding American industry of naval mine warfare.
It’s an inspiring vision of the future.
Picture a remake of The Graduate, a young man by the swimming pool in southern California for an evening formal party. A wealthy corporate executive puts his arm around Ben:

“I have one word to say to you, just one word … are you listening? Minefields. ‘Nuff said! That’s a deal.”

At least four of the slots at the STEMS job fair made no bones about not being there to look for workers at all. Three were from local colleges looking to enroll people in graduate work. So, like, you could spend another year and a half or longer in school, perhaps going deeper into debt before emerging into the modern labor market.
Another was the Employment Development Department of California, the state agency present to inform job-seekers without jobs of what they might be able to take advantage of in terms of their unemployment benefit and further re-training programs.
It’s really no secret that job fairs in the US are more aptly described as places where many frustrated people go, dressed in business attire, to totally waste their time.
You can hand out resumes but, for the most part, it’s desperation participation in more American corporate scamming.
One suspects there is a corporate federal income tax deduction that can be invoked once a year (or perhaps even a subsidy to apply for) if one can document some trivial outreach to the American labor pool.
It is a hard thing to make people understand. Once you’ve been transformed into the American economy’s equivalent of insect vermin, you cannot make anyone understand what is happening. You even have a hard time explaining it to yourself.
Will you be ready for the metamorphosis?