The former auto workers, steel mill workers, and coal miners come to the T. J. Maxx job fair at the Holiday Inn by the hundreds. It's a mixed bag of job seekers. Some wear suits and make an effort to embody the sterile, smiley, head-nodding personality that retail employers crave. Some wear T-shirts and have small children in tow because they can't afford a babysitter. Some bring snacks and bottles of pop in plastic grocery store bags. They eat Doritos and drink Pepsi while they fill out their applications, oblivious to the scandalized stares of the interviewers. The one common denominator of all the applicants is that they want, desperately, to be hired.

The job fair is taking place in Boardman, Ohio, a crowded Rust-Belt suburb of hollowed-out, bombed-looking Youngstown. Ten minutes south of Boardman lies Appalachia, so with crumbling factories to the north and empty coal mines to the south, this is an area of the country where jobs, even minimum wage jobs, are "scarcer than hen's teeth" (to use a local phrase).

The ad in the newspaper for the job fair made the positions available sound fun and easy, and the employment atmosphere "upbeat" — "upbeat" being a pet word of HR execs who are trying to put a positive spin on a frantic, chronically short-handed workplace. However, everyone in this economically-trounced area knows that the jobs are really strip mall wage slavery — tedious, brain-numbing, exhausting labor with no lunch or bathroom breaks, no health coverage, and no paid time off to recuperate from the flu or to go to your grandmother's funeral.

The ad claimed that full-time positions would be offered, but everyone can hear the interviewers saying, "We have no full-time positions available." They can also hear the words, "minimum wage."

But none of the job seekers pack up their kids, pick up their plastic bags, and leave, because here in the Rust Belt, where the tumbling economy has turned the landscape into a grimy movie set for a post-apocalyptic horror movie, even deceptively-advertised strip mall jobs are better than the embarrassment of having no job at all. Having one of the smarmy, fresh-out-of-high-school management trainees who are conducting the interviews as a boss is better than having no boss, and cashing a check for $200 every two weeks (which is what the average part-time worker at such a job earns, after taxes), is better than having no check to cash besides a welfare check.

You see, these people, who are usually referred to as "hillbillies" by the rest of the country, actually want to work. They shake their heads, perplexed, when a story comes on the news about immigrants taking the jobs that Americans supposedly "don't want" — these so-called "hillbillies" are people who would happily work full-time as maids or busboys, if only the work were available in their town. The Upton Sinclairian work ethic they had to learn in order to survive the 4 a.m. shift at the coal mine or the rotating shift at the plant dies hard, if at all. If this work ethic's only outlet is moving boxes and running the register at a discount store, so be it. They'll do it, and they won't complain — if only they could get hired.

Some teenage kids saw the sign outside for the job fair, and they come into the room wearing swimsuits that are still wet from the hotel's pool. A few of the older job seekers eye the kids worriedly, wondering if older people will now be passed over for the few open positions because of their age the way they were passed over at McDonalds and BP last week.

The interviewers drone on, the false friendliness and cheerfulnesswearing thin in their voices as they mouth the same tiresome job interview questions over and over again.

A management trainee in a Walmartish button-down shirt and tie ensemble gives the exhausted-looking middle-aged woman he is interviewing his best retail supervisor smile, the one that shows all of his teeth."What is your availability?" he asks, referring to the times and hours she is available to work.

"Any," she says. "Any at all."