August 14, 2007

The Pearl Street Scam—Or How To Displace American Workers Without Quite Breaking The Law
By Rob Sanchez
http://www.vdare.com/

Several people in places like Detroit, Michigan got suspicious when employment ads in local newspapers requested that their resumes should be sent to a location in Dallas, Texas —on Pearl Street. Without exception the people who sent resumes to Pearl Street never got replies. It’s as if their resumes were being sucked into a black hole.

For several months, there were discussions on Dice.com and Indeed.com about the mystery of Pearl Street. Eventually several very clever people on those message threads pieced the puzzle together and figured out what was happening to their resumes. More importantly they cracked THE CODE. (Carrie’s Nation blog has a very good summary of the entire story.

Job ads that contained the Pearl St. mailing address aren’t hard to find. They are sometimes posted on the Department of Labor Job Bank and they often appear in newspaper classifieds for private companies. (NOTE: America's Job Bank is changing to America's Job Exchange. A couple of examples follow at the end of this article, and one of them was scanned from the San Luis Obispo Tribune. [PDF])

One thing that these job ads have in common: a job code at the end of each ad. Sometimes it’s very obvious because it’s preceded with the letters “ETAâ€