Ideological Training for the New Economy
At job search clubs across the country, unemployed workers are taught to blame themselves for their joblessness — not the system that produced their precarity.
Gene Han / Flickr
The forty unemployed tech workers who made it to this “job search club” meeting are prepared to chant. Arranged in folding chairs with styrofoam cups in hand, their eyes are fixed on their lines, projected on a PowerPoint slide: “I’m not over-qualified, I’m absolutely qualified!”
The bubbly presenter orchestrates: “Let’s say it all together!”
The crowd looks like a twenty-year reunion of the characters in Office Space: not its scheming anti-work hero, but the background cast, the characters who decided to stick with IniTech until the layoffs came around. We chant together in drab, office-birthday-party tones:
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