There aren’t many job seekers who have any hope left when hundreds of people are looking past them every day. But George Morrissey’s dedication to starting a new life in Australia is hard to match.
While many of the people bustling along Sydney’s pedestrianised George Street don’t seem to notice, Mr Morrissey continues to work long, hard days standing on the pavement advertising his job.
“Brains for rent,” reads one of his colorful laminated signs.
‘Use my unique problem-solving skills and eye for detail, analytical skills and superior English in your company. Unleash my autistic brain.
“This has gone through a lot of changes and tried different formats,” the 50-year-old New Zealander told Daily Mail Australia of his striking signs.
Mr. Morrissey also hands out business cards and has an up-to-date LinkedIn page to increase his chances of getting a job.
However, he felt his age worked against him as Sydney was ‘a city for twenty-somethings’.
After coming to Australia from New Zealand just over a year ago for a ‘midlife change’ with the aim of studying for a bachelor’s degree in natural sciences and mechanical engineering, Mr Morrissey has been sleeping rough for the past eight months.
Although many people would pass him by without batting an eyelid, Glenn Morrissey spends days on the sidewalk looking for work
“The first six months I was here I tried to do the conventional agency thing … and absolute silence,” Morrissey said.
‘There is a lot of misconception that New Zealanders in Australia receive benefits, but that is not the case.
‘I came here with five thousand dollars, but once your money runs out, you’re in trouble.
‘Australia has become so incredibly expensive. It is now much more expensive than New Zealand, whereas it used to be the other way around.’
Mr. Morrissey says he now lives solely on donations. Another laminated sign invites him to do so with the phrase: “Contributions are welcome.”
“I move around downtown because it’s the only place you can get working people on foot,” he said.
But Saturday, Sunday, Monday and even Tuesday, “you don’t make any money at all,” he said.
“There’s nothing more heartbreaking than sitting here all day and getting $2,” he said.
Mr Morrissye’s colourful signs invite people to ‘unleash their autistic brain!’ in the workplace
“I don’t do the food line, the food buss, I buy my food. Sometimes I don’t make enough money to buy my food for the day.
‘But everyone is having a hard time, not just me.
‘Then you get very generous people, thank God for generous people.’
It is important for Mr Morrissey to maintain a reasonable level of presentation in the hope that he will eventually get work.
“I always try to wash my clothes, I have these clippers that I cut my hair with,” he said.
‘If I look like a bag of shit, no one will take me seriously.
It doesn’t seem like I’m just hanging out, because I’m not.
‘I stopped drinking when I was 30 because I knew it was bad for me. I don’t gamble or do drugs.’
Although he has not yet been offered any work by his sidewalk guards, he says promising leads have recently been found.
“Last week I gave a business card to a civil engineer, a software developer, someone who needed help with his business. You’re starting to click with people, but you have to be there a lot,” he said.
“It’s a bit of a holding on thing. They walk past you several times before they actually stop.”
‘It’s the left wing people who will quit. It’s not the conventional people, because they say, “just get a f***ing job.”‘
Mr Morrissy’s last job was in New Plymouth, on the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island, in a sheet metal shop.
Mr Morrissey came to Australia with ambitions to study but ran out of money eight months ago
“My background pre-Covid is craftsmanlike, so building, carpentry, I had a maintenance business that I outsourced to a mate. I’m just a bit too old for that now,” he said.
Mr Morrissey said he held the New Zealand equivalents of a Certificate 2 or 3 in retail trade, a computer certificate at levels 3 and 2, spoke Maori and was a skilled ‘hammerhand’ (semi-skilled roofer or labourer).
“My resume is three pages long, but if I put all my skills on it, it would be seven,” he said.
The other major hurdle Mr. Morrissey faces to securing his job is one he considers a strength: his autism, which he says was diagnosed 10 years ago.
“The word autism on a resume is poison,” he said.
“I think our unemployment rate is around 38 percent.”
When asked why he was so open about his condition, Ms Morrissey replied that employers “always find out quite quickly”.
“The moment you put me in a difficult position, you put me in a situation where I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t respond well to that,” he said.
“In autism, we call it a meltdown. A meltdown is kind of an anxiety version of a panic attack, and it’s horrible.”
Mr Morrisey said talking openly about his condition was “his voice, my statement to the world”.
“People think autism is a mental illness, but it’s not. It’s a developmental disorder,” he said.
‘If you’re at the top end of the spectrum, it’s almost a curse. You’re left alone, there’s no money, no help, no support.
“You end up explaining yourself a lot more than you should. People should know more than they do.”
Mr Morrissey said he wanted to show that autism also has positive sides.
“The reason you hire me is my ability to think outside the box, and that’s really an autistic trait,” he said.
‘You can’t buy that analytical ability to look at things differently, and then there’s the fact that English is my native language and I’m very good at it.’