Hiring Stories

Marshall Mosley

I moved from New York to California when I was twenty-two. My first night there I said to myself “Self, it's California, it's December 1983, it's 75 degrees – time for the hot tub!” So I went to my new apartment’s hot tub. I’m sitting in the tub and this woman who looks to be in her mid-40s comes and sits in it with me. We're chatting, and she says, “What do you do?” And I explain I just arrived, and she said, “So you’re looking for work?” And I said, yeah. And she says “Well, I'm an employment counselor. What can you do?” And I explained that my most recent job was in a warehouse driving a forklift.

And she said “Well, not 200 yards from here is this new company, Kaypro Computers. And if you go in there the first day and ask to apply, they'll turn you down. Go in the second day, ask to apply, they'll turn you down. Go in the third day, they'll hire you.” I don't know how she knew this magic formula, but it was exactly as she said. And so I became what at Kaypro was called a material handler.
(Interview with Marshall Mosley)

Story from the New Yorker Magazine

(Warning:This article may be overstating the hiring of foreign workers at Kaypro yet my research shows that it did happen, especially in certain departments)
In the nineteen-eighties, the sociologist Patricia Fernandez-Kelly conducted a study of the electronics and garment industries in Southern California. More than seventy per cent of the labor force was women of color, and more than seventy per cent of those women were Hispanic. In San Diego, Fernandez-Kelly interviewed a woman she called Fermina Calero (a pseudonym, to protect her from deportation). Calero was born in Mexico. In 1980, when she was twenty-one, she began working in Tijuana, soldering filaments of metal for sixty-five cents an hour. In 1983, Calero crossed into the United States, illegally, to work at Kaypro, the maker of the Kaypro II, a personal computer that briefly rivalled the Apple II. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, Andrew Kay, the company’s founder, had hired management consultants to help him reimagine his labor force. In the eighties, when people speaking English responded to the company’s newspaper Help Wanted ads, they were told that there were no openings; when people speaking Spanish called, they were invited to apply. By the time Calero started working for Kaypro, its workforce consisted of seven hundred people, nearly all undocumented Mexican immigrants. The company’s general manager said, “They are reliable; they work hard; they don’t make trouble.” At Kaypro, Calero earned nearly five dollars an hour. When the Immigration and Naturalization Service raided the factory, she hid in a supply closet.
(The New Yorker, February 2019)