The Crash of 2008 hit everyone pretty hard, but in some ways it hit Baby Boomers hardest. Not only did many Boomers take a major hit to 401K plans that were already woefully underfunded (or even leveraged to send kids to college or make escalating mortgage payments), lots of them also lost the jobs they planned to keep working at way past their normal retirement age.

And guess what? Turns out employers don’t much want to hire older workers, especially older white men—a group they expect the bail on them the moment the economy recovers.

In fact, it isn’t all that much of a stretch to imagine that when it comes to corporate cost-cutting and decisions about downsizing, sending a pink slip to an older employee instead of a younger one probably looks like a pretty good idea. An older employee may be perilously close to collecting on an (often underfunded) pension plan that has long since been phased out for new hires, and that same older employee probably carries health insurance that costs the corporation twice that of the 19-year-old down the hall.

In fact, the 19-year-old might not even opt into the employer-subsidized health insurance plan.

He often needs the money in his check a lot more.

That means that there are lots of people in their late forties, 50s, and even 60s and older who need jobs desperately and can’t get them right now, even though they have a lifetime of professional experience under their belts, excellent skills, advanced educations, and the kind of maturity and insight that makes them expert trouble shooters and negotiators.

Whenever I see clips like the one above, I’m always amazed and a bit put off by the relentless positivity of the featured geezer. Two years out of work and this guy is energized and inspired by his fruitless, endless effort to get a job way beneath his capabilities? Really? What kind of drugs is he taking? Can I have some?

Since I am such a geezer myself (I’ve been unemployed since October 2008, although I do make a modest income freelancing), I can assure you I do not get up every morning and do a little happy dance before suiting up and throwing myself full force at the endless entry level cube farm opportunities posted on Monster and Career Builder this week.

No, I know by now that:

1) They are the same crappy ‘opportunities’ (‘no-pportunities?’) that were there last week.

2) If I spend hours each day applying for these awful jobs I will never hear back from 98% of them, and…

3) That’s if I’m lucky.

If I’m unlucky, I will get an interview in about six weeks. Like this poor bastard in the video clip, someone at the interview will definitely say SOMETHING about my age, even though at 56 I consider myself pretty damn cute.

The person interviewing me will be all of 23 but no older than 32, and will tremble at my crinkly eyelids and geriatric hideousness while trying hard to feign tolerance and respect. (Yes, my child, someday this will happen to you too!) This torture will drag on through several personality and skill tests and re-interviews, and will almost certainly include the opportunity to prove that I can still pee in a cup without making a mess.

At the end of it, if God really, really hates me, I’ll get the job.

But God doesn’t hate me. Not that much anyway. So here I am.

Now what?

Here’s where we get to the good news.

According to a feature article in today’s New York Times, downsized workers over 55 are starting their own businesses in record numbers, and the success rate for these businesses is quite high. Older workers have the skills, the confidence, and often the money (in the form of a severance package or nest egg) to invest in a start up and actually succeed. Many service-oriented businesses require almost no cash investment to get going: All that is needed is a few paying clients and good word of mouth.

Self-employment is possibly the easiest business to start. Just start working. For yourself. Although people who own franchises and other small businesses that require cash backing often look down their noses at  self-employed people (seeing them as something akin to a housekeepers or gardeners; something lowly and stigmatic), the fact remains that, if a corporation doesn’t want to pay you for your skills, other people just might.

You just have to find those other people.

That’s no small task, and the trials and tribulations therein are fodder for another post. But many, many older workers are setting out this way by necessity.

It will be interesting to see how that plays out. Stay tuned for more on the drawbacks and rewards of such a life, and other reports from the dispossessed front lines.

If you haven’t been living in a cave for the past few months, you’ve probably already heard the story of Jackie Ramos, the Bank of America credit card CSR who was fired for deliberately refunding ‘convenience fees’ and for putting people who were in dire staits on repayment programs instead of piling on punitive late fees and freezing their interest rates at 29.9%. Ramos has lately been featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as well as in countless news programs, blogs, and financial editorials.

Jackie Ramos not only obeyed her employer’s instructions (by doing what was ‘best for the customer and best for the bank’), she also simultaneously disobeyed her employer’s instructions (by refunding fees and making payment arrangements that almost no one really qualified for). She also put her crazy-making story on You Tube—earning her rousing cheers of “you go, girl!” from millions of people angry at the banks as well as endless criticism from banks and conservatives who were critical of her.

In truth, Ramos’s double-bind problems are the problems of just about every CSR who works in today’s opportunistic financial services industry—an industry that, according to economist Kevin Phillips in his book Bad Money, now makes up over 20% of U.S. GDP (compared with just 10% in 1950).

That GDP statistic becomes even more alarming when you look at what it really means: It means the main product traded and exported by the U.S. is no longer steel, blue jeans, corn, oil, or Fords, it’s debt.

In 1950, the financial sector (comprised of banks, credit card companies, mortage firms, investment houses, etc.) held about 7.5% of the total outstanding debt in the United States. By 2006 that percentage had ballooned to 31.7% of the total U.S. debt.

In fact, if you look at U.S. industries as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, financial services (at over 20%) and health care (currently at over 17% and growing fast) make up nearly HALF of all goods and services currently produced in the United States.

You might say one arm makes us sick (the financial sector) and the other fixes us up (the health care sector) so we can go back and create more sickness again (via the financial sector). If current trends continue, by 2025 the U.S. will be involved in almost nothing but creating hideous financial problems that are partially solved in medical institutions for prices no one can afford, which in turn will add to the financial problems.

It’s a reliable business model all right, but is it really a good one?

The following clip shows MBNA CSRs raising similar concerns about their pretend ‘jobs’:

Having worked in the call center of a major regional bank for a year and a half, I can vouch for the veracity of these clips. What shocks me about them though is not the practices themselves—we all know they exist—what shocks me is how mundane these practices are now; how normal they have become.

Most of the people I worked with at the bank where I pushed financial products on poor people until I could no longer stand to do so, would laugh at these CSRs. My co-workers mostly saw themselves as movers and shakers, tough salespeople who did what needed to be done and laughed all the way to the bank. The atmosphere was thick with sports cheers, testosterone antics and contests, and loud ‘woot woots’ every time someone made a big ‘sale’ at the expense of a confused widow or misguided debtor.

All the best salespeople had horns and noisemakers at their desks.

But I do feel heartened that at least a few people are finally beginning to ask the right questions and ask them publicly, at great risk to their own well-being (where are they going to work right now?) and despite all the mocking and vitriol they sustain from people who keep these jobs (hey it’s a dog eat dog world! Don’t blame me! Pussies!)

Suppose an employer with more money than God offered you a chance to whack old ladies in the head with a baseball bat for $100 a whack in addition to your $10 hourly wage and a sort-of-adequate benefit package.

Would you do it?

Some people would think, “You know, these old ladies are going to die anyway. And I have my whole life ahead of me. I can whack at least three old ladies in the head per hour and there’s my next house payment and a new car, and my kids go to private school. Screw those old ladies.”

Other people whack the first couple of old ladies and start to feel bad about it and leave or get fired.

And still other people say, “No way. Whack your own old ladies you wealthy scum.”

So here we are. And this is the question before us today. We can’t blame all of it one the banks if we willingly participate in activities we know to be predatory nonsense and thievery. At some point, it does come down to individual responsibility, and we all must in the end decide what we will do for money and what we will not.

What would you do?

Don’t think for too long. This opportunity expires at midnight, certain restrictions do apply.

As anyone who has ever navigated the corporate workplace knows, relentless positivity is essential to success in today’s corporate world. Negativity has become a sin worse than theft, lying, or being a bit too fat or too old. Negative workers are quickly and severely reprimanded. If they keep kvetching, they will generally be fired.

‘Negativity’ is a broad term however. In today’s workplace ‘negativity’ can refer to anything from critical thinking of any kind to not smiling enough (what is enough?) to asking too many (or any) pertinent questions about what looks like a serious impending problem. I personally knew one CSR who was reprimanded for popping a balloon as a ‘joke’, not because of the noise it made, but because it could have been construed by other employees as a ‘negative’ form of humor.

Do constantly grinning, chirpy employees really do a better job than surly ones?

In Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich says no. Ehrenreich credits the cult of positive thinking with nearly crashing the world economy in August of 2008, pointing to example after example of specific highly-placed employees who sounded the alarm about the impending crash and were subsequently fired for ‘negativity.’

A recent study published in the November/December 2009 edition of the Australasian Science journal found that negative employees “…are less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages,” than are employees who maintain an unchanging smiling facade and look only for the best in every situation.

Ehrenreich describes how, during the 1990s, the cult of positive thinking became untethered from any connection to reality or functionality within the corporate world. Corporate America, giddy with the waves of easy cash produced by rapid financial deregulation, openly embraced a chaos-theory model of CEO performance. This new model claimed that success was not tied to an understanding of the specific business itself, but rather to an intangible attitude that drew wealth to the particular CEO.

The idea was that success lay more in the unique worth of individual personalities (positive ones!) than in performance and business expertise. CEOs from some of the largest corporations in the world began to regularly attend sweat lodges and Law of Attraction workshops, all the while rigidly enforcing a ban on negative feedback from underlings. CEOs were hired without regard to any real understanding of the corporation they were about to run, but rather on their fame and image and strength of intangible mojo.

The money kept rolling in, so it was easy to justify this behavior. Clearly, irrational idiocacy was much more effective than genuine business acumen. In actuality, the temporary flood of money bore no relationship whatsoever to CEO attendance at New Age Workshops or any given CEOs mojo quotient, but was rather a temporary effect of a classic financial bubble as it inflated regardless of what anyone did or didn’t do.

Today, enforced positive thinking serves other purposes within corporate organizations. Though enforced positivity can easily be shown to have quantifiable negative effects on productivity and profitability, requiring unquestioning chirpiness in all employees does create a compliant, easily-controlled workforce. It helps to keep the money at the top, and to insulate executives from the consequences of their actions, all the while making corporate policy more and more delusional and surreal.

Ehrenreich’s antidote to relentless positivity is NOT relentless negativity, but rather, realism. Realism makes for grounded business models and sane commerce, but it doesn’t appeal to the less than one half of one percent of persons in America who are currently hogging all the money. They understandably see nothing in it for them.

So stop smiling. Do ask questions. Do get angry. Do channel that anger productively.

And do stay tuned for upcoming personal examples of corporate dysfunction in action, as well as lots of ideas about what to do about it and what can happen next if we decide to care.

The video clip above is subtitled but it’s well worth watching all the way through. The clip presents a rare, realistic view of what it means to be a “Customer Service Representative” or “CSR.” What’s more, the video was produced by the workers themselves, not the corporation hawking the photos of fakely smiling faces happily meeting your every need.

The CSRs in this clip eventually did try to organize their call center (that is, they tried to install a labor union). Similar organization efforts have taken place in call centers around the world in recent years, including the U.S. (AT & T and Verizon call centers have both been targets of organizing efforts), but what typically happens in the case of call center worker attempts at organization is that, when all is said and done, the corporation simply shuts the call center down without warning and moves it somewhere it thinks a union can’t wriggle in. I personally worked with a call center rep for Verizon who won “Employee of the Year” one day, and the very next day was unemployed because the center was shut down. So she came to our call center, where she was quickly every bit as miserable as she was at her last pretend job.

Maybe you’re thinking, “OK Pam, but why should I care?”