Spencer Lund

Visiting the New York State Department of Labor on Fulton Street

The man waited patiently for the G train. He waited and waited while reading his phone. He waited some more and tried to covertly read The New Yorker magazine. The discretion he employed upset him, but an innocuous joke on Twitter had made him self-conscious about reading the magazine in public. Finally, the G train arrived and took him south towards Fulton Street near the A,C lines. After exiting the station, he walked past a couple delis and a Subway, and arrived at ___ Fulton street.

The New York State Department of Labor’s Division of Employment & Workforce Solutions operates out of a nondescript, midlevel  grey building a couple streets southwest of Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. It’s the meeting place for unemployed Brooklyn residents looking to find a job.

The man walked through the doors and looked around at a long, slow-moving line with SSA signs everywhere. He didn’t think he was supposed to be at the Social Security Administration, so he walked back out to Fulton and found a Department of Labor sign a door down to the east. Another man on the street made the same mistake.

When he walked in the door, he was greeted by a large security guard and further down, a metal detector with a line forming. He side-stepped past the intimidating security guard and waited in line. As he grew closer he took his wallet, lighter, cigarettes, earplugs, phone and buckle off. His pants sagged, and he remembered the last time he’d been in jail.

Currently, the unemployment rate in New York City has remained at 8.7% through August and September. This is down from a high of 10.4% in January of 2010 (via).

The metal detectors at ___ Fulton Street are similar to the kind the man had seen at La Guardia or any other airport in a large, metropolitan city. The man checked the right breast pocket of his button-down flannel to make sure the one-hitter caked with hash resin wasn’t sitting where it had the night before. It wasn’t, and the man breathed a sigh of relief as he passed through the metal detectors and reclaimed his belongings at a circular table past the metal detectors.

The man took the elevator up to the 4th floor and signed in at the security desk. He then waited in another line for around 15-20 minutes. While in line, the man overheard a middle-aged black woman say “We can at least thank God we all woke up this morning still breathing.” In response, another woman in line said semi-audibly “But then reality strikes,” and the man could hear a couple “Amen’s” as the line murmured their agreement with the second woman’s rebuttal.

The man waited another five minutes and then a cherubic, bald man with a flared collar like you see in cartoons said out loud to the line: “If you have a ‘request to appear’ form please go to room ‘C.’” The man, and three others, filed out of the line they had been standing in, and headed down the unmarked hallway. After searching for a sign that said ‘C,’ and only finding a room marked ‘B’ the man and the small group split up. Eventually, after a couple of turns, the man found room C, and he went back to show the others the way.

Once the man found a seat along the wall, he filled out a short questionnaire with 9 questions he saw others fill out. The questions read:

1. What was your last job title? How many years of experience do you have in your field?
2. What was your most recent salary?
3. What job title are you currently seeking?
4. Do you have an updated resume? If yes, has your resume been professionally reviewed? Has your resume been submitted to SMART2010?
5. Please indicate the highest level of education you completed and also list any other certifications, licenses, etc. that will help you on your quest for re-employment.
6. Do you have a valid driver’s license? If so, please complete the following.
7. Do you have any issues that will prevent you from accepting a job at this time? Please check any that apply.
8. How have you been searching for work? Please check any that apply.
9. How do you feel your job search has been going? Have you been making progress in your search for work?

The man filled out the questionnaire in 7 minutes. His handwriting wasn’t perfect, but he made sure to avoid the longhand/print mixture he’d developed since handwriting had ceased happening (aside from the occasional letter to his grandma or scribbled interview notes) when he graduated from college 6 years prior.

New York State has developed a SMART2010 program designed to connect unemployed workers with jobs electronically.  The Department of Labor’s April 2010 Press Release states:

The Department of Labor’s ground-breaking, web-based Skills Matching and Referral Technology (SMART) 2010 program analyzes resumes for skills and work experience, then electronically contacts unemployed New Yorkers via e-mail, recommending job openings in their areas to them based on their past work history, experience and skills.

Basically, you submit your resume and you get a daily email blast with job leads. That’s the idea anyway.

After filling out the questionnaire, the man tried listening to music and writing in his notebook. Intermittently over the next hour a Caucasian would peek their head into the rapidly filling room and ask: “Does anyone here need the Spanish form and can you speak English?” There was a separate room for Spanish-speakers, and they were escorted out of the room.

Forty-five minutes passed, and no one came into the room. Another twenty minutes passed and the man wondered if his group had been forgotten. Five minutes later, a woman with a heavy Russian accent similar to Natasha Fatale from Rocky and Bullwinkle came into the room and said this was the Spanish-speaking room, and if you wanted the English-speaking class/tutorial you had to come with her.

The man looked around in wonder. Most of the people left the room with him and followed Natasha down the hallway to room ‘D.’ Once the group of 30 people settled into their new room, this time with a view of the rocks on the abutted roof. The old room had been windowless. The man felt sorry for the people in the Spanish-speaking class. He quickly reversed that feeling when he heard Natasha try and explain what they were going to do.

One woman a couple rows to the man’s left said during the opening introduction from Natasha that she had no idea what the woman was saying. The man and most of the others in her vicinity nodded in agreement. The woman spoke for an hour and a half going through a one-sided sheet of paper with the topics: SMART2010, Resource Room, Workshops, Training & Education (including Info on free training resources and section 599 that stipulates you can receive benefits while attending training sessions), Counseling, Veteran’s Services, Services for Ex-Offenders, and a bullet-pointed list of recommended websites.

During the presentation, a few people chimed in and said the resource room, workshops, training courses, and websites did not work. They also said SMART2010 is a joke and they never get job listings. The man had never heard of SMART2010 before this day and did not recognize any of the websites on the sheet, so he was not in a position to agree or disagree with the people’s complaints.

After Natasha finished going through the sheet, which again took 90 minutes, she began to see each person individually in a separate office adjacent to the classroom. Natasha said they could not leave until they met with her one on one. Each meeting with an individual took between 5-20 minutes. The man timed it on his phone. The man, with little to do that day aside from an internship and looking for work, let others go ahead of him.

Finally, after an additional hour of people filing into the office of Natasha for one on one help passed, the man grew catatonic with boredom and an itch for a Camel Light. He eventually asked the remaining 5-6 people in the room if he could go next. He lied and said he had a job interview to get to. At the time, he was in such dire need of a cigarette and felt so claustrophobic in the classroom where he had been sitting for two and a half hours, the lie didn’t seem like it would hurt anyone. He went in and explained to Natasha he was looking for work, and that yes, he had given the DOL his resume before, and they had told him he didn’t need any help and should just leave and “good luck.”

The woman, Natasha, said something he couldn’t understand. He nodded like he did, dropped his resume off again and left. Once outside, the man took a catalog of everything he’d done since high school and wondered how the Occupy Wall Street protestors had so much free time to squat in a privately-funded public space all day. The man went back to his home and started applying for jobs again and writing for the internships that didn’t pay.

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