Not many job-seekers would retain hope if their pleas for work were ignored by thousands of people each day, but Glenn Morrissey’s dedication to starting a new life in Australia means he’s willing to tolerate the ‘soul-destroying’ rejection.
Day after day, the 50-year-old sits on Sydney’s busy George Street with signs asking to be given a chance at a job, but for the most part he is studiously ignored.
‘Brains for hire,’ says one of his colourful laminated signs.
‘Use my unique problem-solving ability and attention to detail, analytical ability and superb English in your business. Unleash my autistic brain.’
‘This has gone through a lot of iterations, trying different formats,’ the New Zealander told Daily Mail Australia about his very public job pitch.
Mr Morrissey also hands out business cards and has an up-to-date LinkedIn page to enhance his hiring prospects.
However so far his admirable dedication has not borne fruit, and he blames ageism in bustling and burgeoning Sydney which he calls a ’20-year-olds’ town’.
After coming to Australia from New Zealand a little over a year ago for a ‘mid-life change’ with the aim of getting degrees in science and mechanical engineering, things had not gone to plan for the indefatigable Kiwi, and he has been sleeping rough for the past eight months.
Although many people would walk straight past him without so much as a glance Glenn Morrissey puts himself out on the pavement for long days looking for work
‘The first six months I was here I tried to do the conventional job agency thing… and absolute silence,’ Mr Morrissey said.
‘There’s a lot of misconceptions that New Zealanders in Australia get the dole; no they don’t.
‘I came here with five grand but once your money runs out you are screwed.
‘Australia has got so damn expensive, it’s way more expensive than New Zealand now and it always used to be the other way around.’
Mr Morrissey said he survives now purely on donations, which he solicits with another of his laminated signs: ‘Contributions welcome’.
‘I float around the inner city because this is the only place you get working people on foot,’ he said.
However, he said some days ‘you don’t make any money at all’.
‘There is nothing more soul-destroying than sitting here all day and getting $2,’ he said.
Mr Morrissey’s colourful signs invite people to ‘unleash his autistic brain!’ in the workforce
‘I don’t do the food line, the food vans, I buy my food. Sometimes I don’t make enough money to buy my food for the day.
‘But everyone is doing it tough not just me.
‘Then you will get very generous people, thank God for the generous people.’
Being homeless, it is difficult to keep up a reasonable level of presentation to make him a job prospect, but he does his best.
‘I try and keep my clothes washed, I have one of those buzzers I cut my hair with,’ he said.
‘If I look like a bag of s**t nobody is going to take me seriously at all.
‘I don’t look like I am just hanging out because I am not hanging out.
‘I stopped drinking when I turned 30 because I knew it was bad for me, I don’t gamble, I don’t take drugs.’
Although he has yet to land a job despite his admirable efforts, he said there have been some promising leads recently.
‘Last week I gave out a business card to a civil engineer, a software developer, someone who wanted an aid for their business, so it is starting to click with people but you’ve got to be out here a lot,’ he said.
‘It’s almost like a stickability thing, they will walk past you lots of times before they’ll actually stop.
‘It’s the left-field people who will stop. It’s not the conventional people because they are like “just get a f***ing job”.’
Mr Morrissey’s last job was in New Plymouth, on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island, in a sheet metal workshop.
Mr Morrissey came out to Australia with the ambition of studying but ran out of money eight months ago
‘My background pre-Covid is trades, so building, joinery, I had a maintenance business that I subcontracted to a mate. I am just a bit too old for that now,’ he said.
Mr Morrissey said he also had computing, Maori and hammer hand qualifications.
‘My résumé is three pages but it would run to seven pages if I put all my skills in there,’ he said.
The other major hurdle Mr Morrissey sees to his employment prospects is his autism, which was diagnosed 10 years ago, although he regards it as a strength in some ways.
‘The word autism on a resume is poison,’ he said.
‘The unemployment rate for us runs at about 38 per cent.’
When asked why he is so upfront about his condition, Ms Morrissey said employers were bound to ‘find out pretty quick’.
‘The moment you put me into a squeeze, you put me a pressure situation where I don’t know what I am doing, I don’t react to that well,’ he said.
‘In autism we call it a meltdown. A meltdown is a like an anxiety version of a panic attack and it’s horrible.’
Mr Morrisey said being open about his condition was ‘his voice, my statement to the world’.
‘People think autism is a mental illness, it’s not – it’s a developmental one,’ he said.
‘To be in the higher end (of the spectrum) is almost like a curse, because you are just left, there is no money, there is no help, there is no support.
‘You end up explaining yourself a hell of a lot more than you should. People should know more than they do.’
Mr Morrissey said he wanted to show that autism had positives.
‘Why you hire me is my ability to think outside the square and that’s really an autistic thing,’ he said.
‘You can’t buy that sort of analytic ability to look at things differently and the fact that I have English as my first language and am very good at.’
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