"Just get a job!"

Navigating unemployment in Aotearoa, with no end in sight

Kia ora! Thanks to your support I’m sometimes able to commission pieces of writing to highlight stories that often aren’t shared. I’ve been thinking a lot about unemployment as I often help folks with their CVs and I’ve been struck by how hard folks are trying to get work right now and how hard the process has been for them.

I’ve heard stories of “trial runs” up to a week long, where someone isn’t paid and then doesn’t get the job. This was something that was happening a lot a few decades ago - bad employers wanted free labour and this was a way to do it. We’ve had many years where things have been better, but I feel like they’re getting worse again.

I am immensely worried about public sector workers being fired before Christmas with no work available to them. Up to 15,000 jobs in the public sector could be cut by the Cruelty Coalition.

But, it’s been a while since I’ve been on the job hunt so I wanted to commission someone who can actually say what it’s really like. Sarah D. Levy is a writer at Imported Opinions and one of my dear friends.

I’ll pass it over to her.

My name is Sarah, and I am a New Zealand resident who is unemployed.

I’m also a filmmaker, poet, singer, and highly experienced community organiser. I’m 35 and have been employed in some capacity since I was 15, in three different countries, so I’m a seasoned job searcher and employee.

I was forced to resign from my last permanent role due to an immigration delay that has since been resolved permanently. Although I left that role with great references, my employer had already been forced to hire my replacement and I have not had permanent employment since then. 

Like most normal kiwis, my partner’s income is not enough to support us and keep us housed. As a resident, I do not qualify for any financial assistance, and paying to live has not been easy.

When immigrants are unemployed, our situation is quite different from New Zealand citizens. So, for the past several months, I’ve had to cobble together a combination of contract work, savings, somewhat-predatory New Zealand loans, and ultimately assistance from overseas family in order to stay alive and in our home.

And every day of this humiliating cycle, I’ve wondered why I can’t seem to secure a permanent full time role that pays for half of our modest lifestyle.

Perhaps some of it may be that I am an American immigrant, a former academic, a lesbian, and Jewish. I stand out, especially in the South Island, and some people might not want me on their team (although they’d never say it).  All of this “diversity” is apparent from the work on my CV, and while my human rights career “is very impressive” in some employers’ eyes, I know that it also disqualifies me from countless workplaces that will never have the courage to tell me.  

I’m proud of the way I lead my life, and increasingly aware of how little correlation that has to whether or not I’m employed. In  fact, In the past year, it’s been made clear to me just how unrelated to the current job market so many valuable experiences are.

Increasingly, I feel called to share these facts because of how isolating this experience has been, even while I know it’s not uncommon.

I’m tired of being ashamed of asking for help from my family to stay afloat when that is how so many millennials (among others) survive navigating a world with often crushing debt and deflated wages.

So many of us need community support to survive even when we are employed. Especially in the hospitality and public sectors, where entire workplaces are staffed with what labour organisers call “precarious work”.

Precarious work is employment that is usually casual or fixed term and your package is never quite enough hours, but you can make it by if you constantly volunteer to cover the openings in the schedule that this staffing necessitates. However, you can’t apply for a flat, let alone apply for a loan, with your employer’s verbal promise of extra shifts. 

To be clear: I scraped together a 24 hour per week package at my last job after a year of only having a guaranteed 17 hours per week, and that boost in hours was only because my beloved coworker died suddenly and I inherited her hours. I wish I were exaggerating, but I’m not. 

This experience left me feeling lower in my self esteem than I have in many years, and frankly, that makes me really angry. I hate how this has made me feel like such a failure. I’m tired of feeling like a failure for being 35, having worked my ass off for most of my life, donated thousands of hours of my time, and yet I still need my family’s help to keep the lights on in my moldy, cold apartment. 

And just in case it needs saying, I don’t believe anyone deserves to feel this way, regardless of employment status. I don’t believe in “deserving poor” or that I should have it better than anyone else simply because of my past work experiences, or that folks shouldn’t go on the benefit if they can (you should and I would!). Rather, I’m really frustrated at doing my best, continuing to play the game we’re all told will keep us out of these situations, and having nothing to actually show for all of the hours spent on this search.

I’m really grateful to Emily for asking me to write about this, to share what it feels like to keep putting yourself out there, to hope things get better, to not be able to plan for when they will, and to know that I’m doing everything I can possibly do, and to keep hoping…

Hope is all that fuels me as, for the past few months, I’ve applied for countless listings.

Most of them, I haven’t heard back, but with a few I’ve gotten really close to an offer. I’ve had a few interviews and done an unpaid “trial shift” that still didn’t result in employment.

I’ve met with recruiters who gush over my resume and promise help that never comes. I’ve met with sympathetic employers in my fields who simply have no money to retain the staff they already employ, and are facing painful conversations. These are the effects of government austerity “for the ratepayers” or whoever is being appeased at the moment…

But mostly, the rejection all happens on the internet and feels fairly anonymous. 

For some of the jobs I apply to, even ones where my skills feel obviously related, the electronic rejection is almost immediate. In these cases, my best guess is either the AI screening system is rejecting something on my CV automatically, or hasn’t found something the screening process requires and is rejecting it as a result. They’ve got to use the technology that way in order to account for the fact they receive way more applications than they could ever need.

The hiring managers I speak to confirm this. However, there is an even more insidious reason that almost every applicant will be rejected: because the way hiring works in the public sector in New Zealand, jobs are listed externally that technically don’t even need to be filled… which means you spend much of your time applying to role for which there is virtually zero chance of getting hired. 

That’s because people in the roles are working a fixed term contract (a popular way for employers to keep labour costs low), and when the term renews or the job is made permanent, they are being forced to reapply for their own job. For some reason the ministry or council they work for is required to still list that job and put a bunch of other people through an application process in the name of competition or transparency, or whatever was used to justify this absurd rule when HR rules were written…

The result is a system where you feel absolutely grateful that anyone wants to pay you after months of jumping through hoops only to find the job wasn’t even available.

I saw this all the time when I was working in the public service, and have heard the same from employees of a few different ministries that this is true, and so I have to ask why we keep doing this.

How much money is wasted in performing this charade?

How much of our time and our energy is being spent on chasing dead ends?

And ultimately, how should the discussion about job searchers take these facts into account? How is it ethical to offer employment that, materially, is not actually available?

What has been helpful to me in surviving a really demoralizing and frankly dehumanizing job search process, is understanding the capitalist system we live in, is set up to hurt us. Honestly, the hardest part of the whole job application process has been keeping up my self esteem as I face rejection after rejection. Getting so close to a job for which there have been literally hundreds of applicants, at least half of them totally qualified for the role.

It seems I just can’t convince anyone to pay me to do the things I’ve been paid to do since it was legal for me to work.

On a good day, it’s enough to make me feel like I’ve lost my grip on reality, like the things I’m doing have no effect and make no difference, so it must be me and I’ve got to find a new way to mold myself into whatever it is the mythical Hiring Manager in the sky desires. 

On a bad day, it’s enough to make me question why I even try if I’m so easy to reject. It’s harder and harder to keep my self esteem up, to keep applying, to keep saying that I’m a catch, when I’ve had no confirmation of this from the market in a long time.

Despite what society would have you believe, there is only one thing your employment status proves, and that is you are employed. It doesn’t mean you are better or worse, more deserving to survive or not, more qualified to do the role or not. So much of employment is luck, to be picked out of a pile of hundreds of applications, or to know the right person, or to even be related to the right person.

So here’s what I have to offer, which keeps me going. I shared it with my other job searching friends and sometimes we text it back and forth to each other in our lower moments:

You are not your employment status.

Your employment status only says one thing about you: that you’re employed.

You will figure it out. You always have.

And then, we will make it better for everyone, so that one day, no one goes through this again. I promise. 

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