Pigeon Holed by the Pigeon Minded

by Jerry Waxman

Looking for a job has never been my favorite pasttime. Besides the endless tasks of writing and meticulously rewriting cover letters and resumes, and filling forms and obtaining copies of documents, there are also the people you have to deal with. Of course there is the employer, and the staff of the employer. And there is no penetrating their egos. They need no reason to reject you, they just do.

Then there are others, like the people in government offices who are supposed to help you find work.

Lishkat Avoda in Hebrew means "Work Office." The people who work in this office are charged with helping people find employment. Occasionally there is one or two who remember that that is their job. Most seem to define their roles much differently.

The first time I went to Lishkat Avoda, a woman there treated me pretty well. she saw that I had degrees and experience, and she treated my kindly. At the end of the hour though, there were no jobs for me,

The next time I came back, the same woman looked and found no jobs in my category.

The next time I came back, I asked her if she could look for things outside my category. She gave a strange look like "You're a teacher. What other category is there for you." Then she gave me some story about how there were no unskilled labor jobs around.

It came to pass that my unemployment insurance didn't arrive. So I had to go to another government office - the National Insurance office (Bituach Leumi). The fellow there looked at his computer and saw I had been to Lishkat Avoda a number of times. The first thing he said was, "It says here that you were sent to an interview.."

I never was sent to an interview. The lady at Lishkat Avoda faxed my resume to a few places. But nobody had ever asked me to come in for an interview.

The second thing the guy at Bituach Leumi said - and he said it more than once - is "Don't go to Lishkat Avoda more than once a month. It messes up the records."

This gave me to believe that such was the reigning attitude. "We -- government employees that we are -- are not here to help you. We just have papers to fill out."

I kept going to Lishkat Avoda.. Even the lady there agreed with me and she thought her purpose was to help me find a job. So she would check her screen, find propositions that may still be current, and send my resume fy fax. Until I had just about joo much of this.

One day, I went to Lishkat Aavoda, and the lady wasn't there.

So I tried the guy who sat next to her. As usual, no teaching jobs. I asked if he could find me any other kind of job. Like working in a factory.

His response: "You're a teacher. What do you know about working in a factory?"

That's unskilled labor. What do I have to know"

"Look," he said, "I can't just send anybody. The employers there will get angry. You don't have anything about factory work on your resume, so I can't send you there. "

And then I saw the look. He couldn't make eye contact. He was hiding something. Maybe these jobs were already deligated to a certain part of the population, that I am not a part or. But he couldn't tell me that. He could only tell me that he had no job for me. That was his job.

It is humiliating enough to go to employers and offer to surrender your time so you could work for them. To have to put up with the people who work in the system . . . it's more than enough to make you want to find a different way to make money.


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Filed under: About Israel

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