| WORKING WORLD
By Tamar Asedo Sherman
Patty brought her Ticket to Work to the agency where I work several months before I started working with her. She had good skills: a recent certificate in phlebotomy and an earlier certificate as a medical assistant. Health care is the one field where there is always a demand for workers, and medical assistant is one of the top jobs, since they are replacing RNs in many doctors’ offices. There should be no problem finding a position for her, I thought. Why then, was she still looking for a job?
Patty’s disability is of a physical nature, with swelling of her legs making it hard for her to move around and making her a potential candidate for knee replacement surgery. As a result of her disability and subsequent unemployment, she has become depressed. I met with her, a somewhat overweight, middle-aged woman who is missing teeth and has a downtrodden demeanor.
Could her presentation be the barrier to employment? We talked about hygiene and dressing up for an interview. I mentioned trying to have a more positive, upbeat attitude. We practiced interview role-playing.
I punched up her résumé, creating four different résumés targeting four different jobs: one for a phlebotomist, one for a medical assistant, one for home health aide, which she was doing part-time, and one for assistant residence manager, a job she had performed a few years back for a nonprofit agency. Patty was qualified for all. I showed her how to create a cover letter for each job, using keywords to indicate to the employer that she has exactly the skills asked for in the job listing.
Searching for job leads for her, I found many on www.craigslist.com and www.indeed.com,where you can enter a ZIP code to find jobs in your immediate area or up to 25 miles away. Initially, I would e-mail her the leads, and I expected her to respond to them, but then she said she was having trouble with her computer. Later on she said she lost her Internet connection because she couldn’t pay for it. Would I respond to the job leads for her?
I applied to dozens of listings for her, but not one ever got back to her, or maybe they did, but with her computer not working, maybe she missed them. Finally, one employer got back to me immediately since the résumé went out from my e-mail address. The listing was vague, wanting a phlebotomist for a health fair for two weeks in February. Was I interested? Yes, oh yes!
Next message listed sites for the health fair and two of them were in our area on Long Island, but both were on the same day, and it was only one day, not two weeks. If I (standing in for Patty) wanted to proceed, the e-mail said, I should fill out an application, sign an independent contractor’s agreement, and send the company a copy of my phlebotomy certificate.
Colleagues told me it wasn’t worth the effort for a one-day position. Maybe not for most people, I reasoned, but for Patty it would pay $270 for the one day, it would boost her confidence and self-esteem, and perhaps lead to future employment for other health fairs. I asked Patty to come into my office the next day to sign the forms, and to please bring in her phlebotomy certificate.
Later that day, Patty called and said her legs were bothering her. She would not be able to come in, and, by the way, her certificate expired. What if her legs should swell up on the day of the health fair? I asked. Patty assured me she would be fine by then and would come in on Monday to sign the forms.
We’re all set, I thought to myself. It’s okay that her certificate expired. They just wanted to be sure she was trained. Patty is assigned a time and place to perform blood tests for a diabetes screening fair that Oprah would be promoting on her show the very next day. How exciting!
Alas, to my dismay, Patty called the day of the fair to say her legs were swollen again and she could not attend! My credibility with the employer was shot, but so was my confidence in Patty. Did she sabotage herself? Was she afraid of failure? Or was she afraid of success? After months of looking for work and getting no response, not even an interview, she finally got a job offer—although for only one day—and was unable to follow through.
Maybe Patty’s disability was such that she really was not able to return to work at that time, I thought, even though she wanted to. Many people are in denial as to the extent of their disability. Was Patty one of them? A couple of weeks passed, a month, a couple more weeks, and then Patty called. She said she was desperate for work, had no money and was about to lose her house. She would take anything, she insisted.
I took a deep breath. I asked her how she was feeling, and started to look for jobs for her all over again. That is my job, after all.
If you were in my place, would you think Patty was ready for work?
Tamar Asedo Sherman is an employment specialist. She can be reached at action@unitedspinal.org.
