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Ofer Sharone, "The Stigma Trap: College-Educated, Experienced, and Long-Term Unemployed" (Oxford UP, 2024)
00:34:00
An interview with Ofer Sharone
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Stephen Pimpair, host of the Public Policy Channel, and I am pleased today to be joined by Ophir Sharon, author of the Stigma, College educated, experienced and long term unemployed, new from Oxford University Press. Ofer. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today.
- [01:25]
C
Thank you for having me, Stefan.
- [01:27]
B
So before we talk about the book, I wonder if you might tell folks a little bit about who you are and what you do and what it is that brought you to this project.
- [01:36]
C
I am a sociologist at UMass Amherst. What got me to this project is that I published a previous book about unemployment right at the time when the Great Recession hit. And the book generated lots of questions from policymakers. Hey, you're an expert on unemployment. What should we do? The problem is that my prior book didn't really have a whole lot to say in terms of how we might support people who are facing long term unemployment. And it was more of a critique of the way that that support is offered, as well as a dive into the experience. So I decided to write this new book that's coming out with the focus of not only understanding the obstacles and experiences of people facing long term unemployment, but also looking at ways that might be more effective in supporting people going through this challenge.
- [02:34]
B
Terrific. So you conduct 139 interviews with long term unemployed workers, most of whom are college educated, most of whom are over the age of 50. But you also speak with 20 recruiters, so I wonder if we want one start there. In those interviews with the recruiters, what did you learn about the job seeking process and prospects for the population that we're talking about?
- [03:00]
C
Yeah, well, to the recruiters, you know, I presented them with this puzzle that I was seeing. The people that I studied, as you mentioned, they're typically college educated, many of them actually with advanced degrees, PhDs and masters, some of them even from places like Harvard or MIT. They were generally very experienced, 20, 30 years of experience in, in their field, and yet they were not getting any job offers at all, often not even getting a response to their applications. So I presented this puzzle to the recruiter, said, you know, by conventional sociological theory, these are the people you know, many of them also white men, highly educated, they are supposed to be at the front of the line, and yet they're not. So what's going on here? And so I discovered a series of obstacles that people face despite credentials, despite what we call social and cultural capital. And the biggest one I think that also doesn't get discussed much is the stigma of unemployment. The stigma that happens as soon as you lose your job and then whether or not it had anything to do with your performance. And we know often it has nothing to do with performance. It's an economic factor. After the Great Recession, companies simply shut down entire divisions or just had to lay off people due to lack of money. And yet that stigma, even in the height of that Great Recession, was very strong. And so I explored how that works essentially by talking to people who do the hiring.
- [04:58]
B
And I mean, some of what you point to going on here is that recruiters are simply overwhelmed. Right. They've got so many applications for any given position, so they are looking for excuses to cull down that pile. Right. So, and, and these folks, right. Well, they're not already employed, as you talk about in a number of different ways throughout the book. We've got. This is the, the stigma trap that you talk about, right, Is that we've got this arguably embedded in the culture, the notion that if, well, if you're unemployed. Yeah, we know about all the macro stuff, but you. Right. Why are, why are you really unemployed? Right. It's probably performance. It's probably something else. It's. And the longer that a person is unemployed, the more this kicks in. What else should we know about sort of the way that dynamic is playing Out.
- [05:47]
C
Yeah. So exactly. There is, you know, conscious or unconscious, this assumption of meritocracy, the idea that our position reflects our worth, our performance, our merits. And so if you're unemployed, it immediately raises a question mark. And this is the way that recruiters explain it to me. They said, look, we have 100 applicants, we have, you know, some cases even more. We are trying to narrow it down to the few that we can take the time to interview. Now I've got an applicant here who is unemployed. I don't know why they're unemployed. It raises a question mark. It's easier for me to just move on to the next applicant who is currently employed. It's a shortcut. It's essentially a bias, a way that then systematically has the effect of eliminating an entire category of workers. The trap then, for the particular kinds of workers that I interviewed who are ironically trapped by the fact that they're so experienced, is that they are applying, as we all typically do, for the kinds of jobs that we had. But these people who are more experienced and more successful, they're applying for more competitive, tough jobs to get. Those are highly sought after jobs. So they are being compared to their peers who may be employed and not doing well. So after a few months they might adjust and start applying for jobs that are a bit less competitive, that maybe it's the kind of job they did five years ago and there's more of those kinds of jobs. And then they get blocked by the most ironic obstacle called overqualification, which if we stop and think about, really flips meritocracy on its head. Right. This is where you're told, and often not told, but in fact your past achievements are blocking any access to jobs now. Because the logic of the recruiters, as they explain it to me, is that if you reach a certain level of success, we're going to just assume that you will not be happy at anything at a lower level, regardless of whether the applicant would or not. They're just. It's an easy. It's another assumption lots of applicants I interviewed feel that they would be very happy with. They need a job and they could do that job very well, but they're not typically even given a chance to explain that. So the movement downwards is blocked. Another thing they might try is to move sideways using what's called transferable skills. So I'm going to move to another industry where I'm clearly not overqualified. But here, particularly, These workers over 50 are blocked by having no experience. Here, they're under qualified for a new type of job. So whatever direction they're going, the workers face obstacles. And that's how you can get trapped in this for years and years.
- [09:16]
B
And despite the fact that it's illegal, age discrimination also is really a thing.
- [09:22]
C
Yes, it is. It's absolutely a thing. We know that from audit studies that applicants who are have the same skills and qualifications, the only difference between them is their age. The older you are, the less likely you are to get invited for an interview. So in this kind of study, researchers send out resumes to their fake resumes, but they're real companies to see how employers respond. And so when age is manipulated, it's clear that the older the worker, the less callback. We can also see that with unemployment, the longer you're unemployed, the less likely you are to get a callback.
- [10:05]
B
So to get around this, one of the pieces of common advice for people is that, well, you can't necessarily just throw a resume over the transom. You've got to go out there and you've got to be networking. So what's wrong with that? Why does that not necessarily overcome the kinds of biases that we see in these formal recruitment processes?
- [10:23]
C
Yes. So you're right. The recruiters, when I ask them, so what should people do? They would always say network, network, network. Networking is easier said than done. I want to preface by saying, yes, it is probably the most likely way for people to get out of this trap. It's true, but yet about half the people I studied never did get out of the trap, never got back to a professional job. So it often doesn't work. Why doesn't it work? Well, to begin with, the stigma about unemployment is not only in the minds of recruiters, it unfortunately is everywhere, including past colleagues, people who are in your network. So the people who are networking are facing skeptical responses from their former colleagues about why they're currently unemployed. There's also just a finite pool of people who are your colleagues and who can vouch for you. If you get trapped in a longer term situation, you typically run out of colleagues. You can't go back after a certain while, or people feel, feel that they can't go back. There's also more subtle emotional dynamics that happen in networking that make it very, very difficult, which is to be effective in networking requires projecting a lot of confidence, projecting, you know, essentially very professional self. And yet when one is undergoing the experience of long term unemployment, you feel anything but that. You're typically feeling a lot of emotional turmoil. There's a lot of emotional fallout to the Experience of unemployment. And that makes it extremely hard for people to reach out to their networks. It's way easier to network when you're currently working, when you are enjoying professional success, when you are in one of those periods that employers are not getting back to you, it's a lot more difficult.
- [12:50]
B
It's easier to ask for something when you don't need it.
- [12:53]
C
Absolutely.
- [12:54]
B
Yeah. So that's a perfect segue. So you turn your attention to the consequence of this for these job seekers. So let's start with how long term employment affects folks identities, their notions of their selves. And then we will later turn our attention to what it does to their relationship with others. So what happens to people who are caught in this trap?
- [13:20]
C
So there is a long standing theory in sociology about where we get our sense of self and our identity that's called the looking glass self. So sociologists understand that a lot of how we end up thinking about ourselves depends on how we imagine others see us. In the context of being long term unemployed. And in a world where there's stigma all around you, this acts as a very distorting mirror. Right. You see yourself being reflected back in your network and employers also in your friends and family. And people begin to then have self doubts. What I hear when I probe this deeply is typically some kind of inner battle going on within the individual for how they understand what's happening. There's a part of them that, that says this is a macro structural economic issue. There's you know, other people unemployed. The did not do this because of anything about me. But then there's another part, the feeling part. They say I, I know it's not me, but I feel that it's me. I feel like something is wrong with me. I feel flawed. I. There's a very strong other part that self blames and that feels a lot of shame. And you know, the stories of shame include one man told me how he during the workday he will not step outside his home to get his mail because he's worried about the neighbors seeing him at home during the workday and what is he doing at home. So that just kind of shows the intense level of shame people feel. This in turn also creates another trap. There's all kinds of traps and reinforcing cycles in the experience of long term unemployment. The more you come to feel have negative feelings as a result of unemployment, which is honestly unavoidable. It's structurally set up that you're going to feel bad. But the more you have these feelings, the harder it is to get a job, not only because of the networking obstacle, but because of employers and recruiters. Recruiters told me in my interviews with them very straight, that if there's even a hint of negative feelings coming from the candidate, it's a red flag and they're out. So you're going through an emotional crisis. That emotional crisis means you're not even getting considered by employers. And that, of course, is going to create even more emotional crisis. So it's a very tough cycle.
- [16:21]
B
So what we haven't yet talked about is the financial consequences of this. So why don't we talk about that in the context of what long term unemployment does to people's intimate relationships with spouses, with family, with friends.
- [16:35]
C
Yeah, this is one of the saddest parts of my research. We hope that in these times of crises, the people who are closest to us, our spouses, our friends, can really be their strong supports. And sadly, while this is sometimes the case, it's often not. More marriages than not, more friendships than not end up not being the kind of support that the unemployed person had hoped. With marriages, you bring up the financial crisis. That is absolutely one of the centerpieces and one of the big obstacles. So married unemployed workers, particularly male unemployed workers, face a breadwinner expectation that they are not living up to. Right. So spouses of married men who are unemployed express often in one way or another some disappointment at the lack of breadwinning, and this creates tension. The unemployed person typically feels disappointment at the lack of empathy. And this is whether the unemployed person is male or female. There's usually a gap between the experience they have and the level of empathy that they expect because of this very difficult experience with employers, with recruiters, with networks, and the level of understanding that their spouses typically have for that situation. To some extent, people come to feel that even their own spouse harbors at some level the stigma of unemployment, the assumption of meritocracy, that if, if they were good, they wouldn't be in this position. And this is where it gets most painful, right. When your most intimate person may also be looking at you skeptically, this triggers a whole other level of emotional crisis. So before I talked about the emotional crisis, it just comes from the unemployment and from the response in the labor market. But now there is a. A doubling of this emotional crisis because it also is touching your most intimate relationship, which clearly then generates another dimension of emotional fallout, often working and reinforcing the. The one that's happening in the labor market.
- [19:26]
B
Talk a little bit about. Yeah, yeah, exactly where I'M going, we're talking about friendships.
- [19:30]
C
Yeah. So, you know, interestingly, friendships are different. I first asked about marriages and I heard the centrality of money and the breadwinning issue and I thought, okay, this obviously does not come up in friendships in the same way. People are not interdependent financially, but friendships, they suffer for a number of other reasons. First, lots of people who are in their 40s or 50s or 60s, turns out their main friendship group is often at work. And once they lose their job, they think, you know, they initially optimistically hope that these friendships would continue, but the they often don't. The commonality of having the same boss, having the same project, turned out to be a bigger glue for that friendship than they had previously realized. There's no more opportunities for spontaneous interactions. Everything needs to be planned. They report that their friends who are, have their own, you know, busy lives don't have much time to get together. So there's a loss of work friends. And then, you know, there are the friends who are the non work friends, maybe the lifelong friends, the friends from, from college, from other areas of one's life, sometimes 30 year friendships. And here there is an interesting way in which money does come back that lots of activities that friends do cost money. Going out to dinner. Typically friends go out and in some cases they even travel together. But even just the smaller, you know, going to get drinks can feel like a financial strain. And then there is, friends may offer to pay for their unemployed friend, but that also raises feelings of negative feelings and feeling bad. And then I would say the third thing that happens with friendships that is very difficult is that friends will either engage in advice giving or stay silent about the unemployment. And both of these are problematic in different ways. So the, the advice giving is often experienced by the unemployed person as essentially a blaming of them for being unemployed if they only job searched a little better if they only, you know, joined LinkedIn or whatever the advice is, why don't you apply to this or that? What they're hearing indirectly from their friends through the advice is it's something about your actions that is leading to your unemployment. It's something about you as opposed to larger forces. In other cases, the friends just try to ignore the unemployment and stay silent about it. And that's experienced as a lack of empathy or an awkwardness that also signals some kind of discomfort and probably some underlying stigma that's driving it. So these more subtle things in friendships over time lead to a drifting apart.
- [23:04]
B
So let's move away from describing and diagnosing the problem and talk a little bit about what we can do about it. And you have done more than simply describe the problem. You have in fact, fact made some effort to improve this for long term unemployed people. So if you would talk to us about the Institute for Career Transitions, tell us what that is and what it does and how you think that might overcome some of these problems for this population group.
- [23:32]
C
Yeah, some is a key word. It cannot. This is a set of ideas about how to provide support. But clearly the ultimate support would be the provision of jobs, right?
- [23:45]
B
Individual changes can't alter structural forces, right?
- [23:49]
C
Yes, yes, but we can do much better in the type of support we offer unemployed people. And this is what the Institute of Career Transitions try to do. There's a couple of problems with the way that unemployed people are typically supported, which I tried to address through this experiment. One problem is typically unemployed job seekers are told perhaps as a way to make them feel more encouraged, that the process is in their control, that the issue is about job search skills and therefore conventional support, if you look at it around the country, focuses on resume writing or networking workshops. The, the message that comes with that is your unemployment is due to your lack of job search skills. This tends to reinforce the sense of self blame, the shame that comes with unemployment. And it doesn't address the, the elephant in the room that there are very real forces and obstacles outside the job seeker control. So in this with the Institute of Career Transitions, I found a bunch of wonderful career coaches and counselors who volunteer to provide free support to the people I was studying with. The tweak that we would be very open, open with the job seekers about structural obstacles. This happened in individual coaching, in group coaching, and also in workshops that I led where I would do the unconventional thing of beginning by telling unemployed job seekers, look, here is the research about the obstacles you're facing. Here is the unemployment stigma we can see from audit studies like the ones I was talking about, where employers simply don't respond with the same rate to someone who's unemployed than to other people. Here are age discrimination obstacles. Then I would say, look, the only thing worse than hearing this is not hearing this. Because if you don't hear this news, as terrible as it is, then you take it all on yourself. This form of support created a space for job seekers to not only have a more structural understanding, have that validated, but then speak with each other and peer to peer about the obstacles they were facing and so that they would not feel alone. This is the other major problem with conventional Support is that emotions are typically not allowed, especially negative emotions are not allowed to be shared. It's seen as something that's just going to drag everybody down. But the result of that is, is everyone ends up being very isolated in their. This whole emotional crisis I was describing is experienced in isolation, which we know is the worst. Right. It's so much better if you're having a difficult emotional time to be able to express that, share that and find others who understand and maybe going through the same thing. So we created a space where it was okay. It was encouraged, in fact, to discuss people's experiences, including difficult experiences. And then we studied the results and learned that in fact, most job seekers felt this gave them a boost to their well being. It was a counter force to the stigmatizing experiences they have all around, which individually blame them for their position and instead point to other forces in the economy and stigma which take the focus off of them and off the possibility that maybe something is wrong or flawed about them. This in turn created more by helping well being, people were able to devote more energy to continue job search. It's a marathon. It takes a lot of attempts. There's going to be a lot of rejections. So having the well being to stay in it for the long run is crucial. So that is the promise of this form of support. It doesn't ultimately deal with the external problems, with the stigma, with the economy that's providing very few good jobs, but it does help individuals at least counter the tendency to internalize the stigma.
- [28:36]
B
As we conclude, there's one other possible kind of intervention that you talk about in the form of advocacy and collective action. I wonder if you might talk just a little bit of some of the work in that realm that you've seen go on and how you think that might matter in the longer term.
- [28:53]
C
Yeah. So in the long term and in the big picture, we as a society need to change our way of thinking about unemployment and more broadly about anyone who is suffering some kind of economic disadvantage. The assumption that your position in our society simply reflects your skills and effort is wrong and it's very damaging. We've had other social movements in the past to try to deal with unwarranted biases and prejudices and assumptions that led to structural obstacles, including civil rights movements. We need some kind of equivalent social movement, some kind of force that will change our culture in terms of how we think about people facing economic hardships. Now, the people I studied attempted to do some of this and face some real obstacles, again from stigma. So when People gave stories to share their stories with the media. They faced backlash. They sometimes faced very skeptical, a skeptical audience. So this is not an easy matter. This is not something that can be easily achieved and it cannot be left alone. To the, to the long term unemployed to wage this, this kind of struggle. I think this has to be something we take on for all of us. All of us are subject to in our current economy and culture. We are subject to the potential of tomorrow being laid off and then stigmatized. And that's a precarity and a level of stress that even for someone who's never been unemployed, I think it's hard to live in this society and not feel the fear of it and the stress that comes from that. And so our preoccupation with work, our crazy work hours and other, you know, levels of stress and mental health challenges, I think have some important roots in this phenomenon that we fear we might be judged and wrongly judged by economic forces that are out of our control. And so I'm urging taking on of that issue in a large way.
- [31:46]
B
You've been listening to the Public Policy Channel of the New Books Network. Excuse me. And we've been speaking today with Ofer Sharon, who is the author of the Stigma Trap, College educated, experienced and long term unemployed from Oxford University Press. Ofer, thank you so much for joining us today. Much appreciated.
- [32:04]
C
Thank you so much, Stephen.