Monday, September 12, 2005
The white-collar blues
chicagotribune.com
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-0509030261sep04,1,6229356.story
By Eric Arnesen, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a specialist in race and labor history
September 4, 2005
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan/Holt, 237 pages, $24
Social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has earned a well-deserved reputation as a prolific and creative commentator, one of the most insightful on the left-liberal end of the political spectrum. Whatever literary medium she employs--her short-term-replacement columns for The New York Times op-ed page, essays, or books--she invariably wields sharp political knife, all the while lacing her prose with generous doses of humanity and humor (some of it disarmingly self-deprecating). If her conclusions are occasionally predictable, the routes she takes to reach them are often not. Indeed, with Ehrenreich, the process of getting there is more than half the fun, making her commentaries illuminating and enjoyable even when her subjects are unmistakably depressing.
In "Bait and Switch: The (Fu-tile) Pursuit of the American Dream," Ehrenreich resumes the undercover mode she adopted in her previous best seller, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America." In that earlier book, she set out to answer a simple question--How do workers survive in an economy when they are paid too little to get by?--by working as a waitress, maid and Wal-Mart "associate" in the Florida Keys, Maine and Minneapolis.
Long a student of poverty in America, Ehrenreich recently began observing growing "tales of hardship" from out-of-work or underemployed members of the middle class. What about us? one such individual challenged Ehrenreich after the publication of "Nickel and Dimed." What about the "hardworking, virtuous people" who "did everything right" and still wound up on a downward economic trajectory in the early 21st Century?
For this lot, diligence, proper behavior and higher education are providing little protection against the harsh economic winds that eliminate their jobs and toss them ignominiously into the ranks of the economically strapped and personally desperate and depressed. This isn't how it was supposed to be: The American middle class, in which Ehrenreich includes herself, was "raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security."
Yet today, relentless corporate downsizing and restructuring belie those expectations. If white-collar employees could once reasonably imagine themselves attached to their corporate employer for most of their salary-earning lives, they now face the more anxiety-producing prospect of frequent job changes and, for some, long stints of unemployment. This group, which has played by all the conventional rules, finds the likelihood of job security elusive; they are the "losers, in other words, in a classic game of bait and switch."
This corporate, white-collar realm was also one Ehrenreich admittedly knew little about. (The realm of the independent, frequently published writer that she inhabits bears it little resemblance). Hence, she partook in a long-standing American investigative tradition of assuming a new identity and blending in with those she sought to examine. A century or so ago, middle-class investigators like Walter Wycoff or Whiting Williams put on a workingman's cap, mingled with the denizens of America's slums and industrial workplaces, and published magazine or book-length exposes about how the other half supposedly lived. With far more humor (and humanity) than many of her Progressive-era counterparts, Ehrenreich followed suit, to excellent effect, in "Nickel and Dimed."
This time she paid for an image makeover, put on fancier clothes, polished a fabricated resume and dived into the depths of the white-collar job market. Legally changing her name to Barbara Alexander (her maiden name) and securing a new Social Security card, Ehrenreich allocated up to five months to land a job and four months on the job to probe the world of the white-collar corporate employee. The ground rules she set for herself were straightforward: Basing herself in Charlottesville, Va., she was willing to travel anywhere the job search required her to go. Although she avoided publishing, academia and the non-profit sector (fearing recognition), she promised to be receptive to any corporate position, no matter how "unglamorous or morally repugnant."
Over the course of her experiment, Ehrenreich covered the bases. She read a dozen how-to books, cruised innumerable job-assistance and professional-development Web sites, hired several career coaches and a resume consultant, attended job fairs and secular and religious business-networking sessions, and enrolled in a boot camp for executives "in transition"--among other things. And, of course, she dispatched countless job-inquiry letters and applications over the Internet and through the U.S. Postal Service.
To no avail. Ehrenreich tips her hand in her introduction with the unmistakable hint that her assumptions of success proved wildly wrong. After almost a year's strenuous efforts, the only job offers she receives are selling insurance and cosmetics, neither of which is a corporate position utilizing her skills (she puts herself forward as a public-relations specialist with experience in event planning). Nor do they offer benefits of any kind, much less an office out of which to work. For all of her efforts, Ehrenreich gets nowhere fast.
Her entree into the world of white-collar unemployment begins with full immersion into the " `transition industry.' " With middle-class job loss increasingly a fact of economic life, in recent years a large number of specialists have emerged to assist--or, as Ehrenreich sees it, exploit--down-and-out white-collar workers desperate for any assistance in re-entering the corporate world that expelled them. In her sometimes-hilarious telling, career coaches prey upon the insecurities and anxieties of their clients in exchange for substantial fees. The specialists to whom she pays many hundreds of dollars subject her to personality tests, prohibit " `negative self-talk,' " insist that she be "upbeat, cheery, `in the moment,' and excruciatingly overreactive" and develop a " `winning attitude,' " and instruct her in the need for mastery of professional buzzwords. Her expensive resume consultant's contribution lies in teaching her "how to lie--how to plump up an undistinguished resume" and project a false confidence. Deception, Ehrenreich learns, simply "is part of the game."
Attending networking sessions, local business leaders' luncheons, executive boot camp, job fairs and professional-development seminars provides Ehrenreich with few job leads but ample opportunity to reflect on the "pop-psych exhortations" embedded in the ideologies of self-help and individual responsibility to which she was constantly subjected. She is appalled by her coaches' (and many corporations') reliance upon the wholly unscientific Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and upon Enneagram tests ("a pastiche of wispy New Age yearnings for some mystic unity underlying the disorder of human experience"), concluding that their function is to provide, through their veneer of "superficial rationality," a reason for hiring or rejection on the basis not of skill or accomplishment but on the more elusive notion of "a good `fit.' " Again and again she is lectured that the process is " `about knowing yourself' " and that "one's fate depends entirely on oneself." Whether attending talks in windowless hotel rooms, strip-mall restaurants, or suburban churches, the conversation is directed away from systemic sources of unemployment and the changing nature of corporate employment toward the self and the need to develop that winning attitude. "The aching question--why was I let go when I gave the company so much?--is cut off before it can be asked," she repeatedly and unhappily discovers.
Those fellow white-collar-job seekers she encounters along her journey through the transition industry's many programmatic offerings don't appear to be in much shape to ask that question, however. The psychological impact of corporate-job loss on the middle class does not make for a pretty picture, she finds. The "in transition" men and women she meets "wear the same dogged, passive expressions I've learned to associate with job seekers everywhere." Regardless of venue, they have the "same desultory coiffures and dulled, passive expressions." Or, as one unemployed telecommunications worker pithily puts it, " `Welcome to the land of the undead.' "
This is where "Bait and Switch" differs markedly from "Nickel and Dimed." In both books Ehrenreich employs a similar modus operandi: going undercover to learn what she can about the people she is studying. Toward many of the impoverished workingwomen in her early book, she displays a discernable level of respect. Beyond the pathos and sometimes tragic lives are good, decent, hardworking people trapped in a system designed to grind them down.
In "Bait and Switch," in contrast, Ehrenreich exhibits less warmth and little genuine respect toward her middle-class job seekers. They are a glassy-eyed bunch, some defeated and depressed, others desperate and depressed. The regular doses of blame-the-victim ideology they have imbibed have accomplished their task. Few if any fingers are pointed at the larger corporate world for dispensing with their salaried employees' services after so many years of loyalty; instead, the middle-class unemployed locate the obstacles to job-market success narrowly within themselves, just as they have been instructed by their coaches.
Ehrenreich's portrait of widespread resignation among those "in transition" makes it difficult to understand a crucial aspect of her critique: their tragic failure to do "so much more," to "make the leap from solitary desperation to collective action." Instead of finding themselves at fault, they could ask the tough questions; for exmple, "[W]hat is happening in the corporate world today"? Or, "[W]hy does experience seem to be so little valued and accomplishment so unreliably rewarded"? They could also lobby for further unemployment insurance, or advocate on behalf of universal health-care coverage for all Americans.
These questions and causes have much to recommend them, of course, but even Ehrenreich regards them as utopian, given our current political environment, not to mention the various factors she rightly acknowledges as forestalling such action. Even under the best of circumstances, it's hard to imagine the kind of political activism whose absence she bemoans among a group she depicts not as rebels but as "victims of corporate instability." For many years the left has invested its political hopes in the diverse and yet-to-be-unified working class, to little effect. Doing the same for a downwardly mobile middle class seems not merely utopian but oddly anachronistic and politically naive.
Those looking for precise sociological data on the scope and nature of under- and unemployment, the rise of contingent and non-standard work, and age and gender discrimination will encounter only tantalizing, brief (though discerning) excursions into those phenomena in these pages. The strengths of "Bait and Switch"--and they are considerable--lie less in Ehrenreich's prescriptions or formal analyses of economic problems than in her casual if usually astute observations and her caustic and thought-provoking critiques.
Her remarks on the valuing of personality and "fit" over skill and accomplishment, the fetishization of worthless psychological testing and the cultivation of workplace "conformity and studied restraint" are particular perceptive. Her harsh indictments of the "insidiously manipulative culture" preying upon the white-collar unemployed and the damaging corporate practices that result in the "chewing up [of] men and women and spitting them out late in life" are poignant and compelling. The questions she poses about job loss, corporate responsibility and the fraying of the social compact--even if her subjects aren't asking them--deserve far greater attention in the political arena than they have received. Following Ehrenreich along her journey to employment failure is well worth the time spent on the trip.
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/booksmags/chi-0509030261sep04,1,6229356.story
By Eric Arnesen, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a specialist in race and labor history
September 4, 2005
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan/Holt, 237 pages, $24
Social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has earned a well-deserved reputation as a prolific and creative commentator, one of the most insightful on the left-liberal end of the political spectrum. Whatever literary medium she employs--her short-term-replacement columns for The New York Times op-ed page, essays, or books--she invariably wields sharp political knife, all the while lacing her prose with generous doses of humanity and humor (some of it disarmingly self-deprecating). If her conclusions are occasionally predictable, the routes she takes to reach them are often not. Indeed, with Ehrenreich, the process of getting there is more than half the fun, making her commentaries illuminating and enjoyable even when her subjects are unmistakably depressing.
In "Bait and Switch: The (Fu-tile) Pursuit of the American Dream," Ehrenreich resumes the undercover mode she adopted in her previous best seller, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America." In that earlier book, she set out to answer a simple question--How do workers survive in an economy when they are paid too little to get by?--by working as a waitress, maid and Wal-Mart "associate" in the Florida Keys, Maine and Minneapolis.
Long a student of poverty in America, Ehrenreich recently began observing growing "tales of hardship" from out-of-work or underemployed members of the middle class. What about us? one such individual challenged Ehrenreich after the publication of "Nickel and Dimed." What about the "hardworking, virtuous people" who "did everything right" and still wound up on a downward economic trajectory in the early 21st Century?
For this lot, diligence, proper behavior and higher education are providing little protection against the harsh economic winds that eliminate their jobs and toss them ignominiously into the ranks of the economically strapped and personally desperate and depressed. This isn't how it was supposed to be: The American middle class, in which Ehrenreich includes herself, was "raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security."
Yet today, relentless corporate downsizing and restructuring belie those expectations. If white-collar employees could once reasonably imagine themselves attached to their corporate employer for most of their salary-earning lives, they now face the more anxiety-producing prospect of frequent job changes and, for some, long stints of unemployment. This group, which has played by all the conventional rules, finds the likelihood of job security elusive; they are the "losers, in other words, in a classic game of bait and switch."
This corporate, white-collar realm was also one Ehrenreich admittedly knew little about. (The realm of the independent, frequently published writer that she inhabits bears it little resemblance). Hence, she partook in a long-standing American investigative tradition of assuming a new identity and blending in with those she sought to examine. A century or so ago, middle-class investigators like Walter Wycoff or Whiting Williams put on a workingman's cap, mingled with the denizens of America's slums and industrial workplaces, and published magazine or book-length exposes about how the other half supposedly lived. With far more humor (and humanity) than many of her Progressive-era counterparts, Ehrenreich followed suit, to excellent effect, in "Nickel and Dimed."
This time she paid for an image makeover, put on fancier clothes, polished a fabricated resume and dived into the depths of the white-collar job market. Legally changing her name to Barbara Alexander (her maiden name) and securing a new Social Security card, Ehrenreich allocated up to five months to land a job and four months on the job to probe the world of the white-collar corporate employee. The ground rules she set for herself were straightforward: Basing herself in Charlottesville, Va., she was willing to travel anywhere the job search required her to go. Although she avoided publishing, academia and the non-profit sector (fearing recognition), she promised to be receptive to any corporate position, no matter how "unglamorous or morally repugnant."
Over the course of her experiment, Ehrenreich covered the bases. She read a dozen how-to books, cruised innumerable job-assistance and professional-development Web sites, hired several career coaches and a resume consultant, attended job fairs and secular and religious business-networking sessions, and enrolled in a boot camp for executives "in transition"--among other things. And, of course, she dispatched countless job-inquiry letters and applications over the Internet and through the U.S. Postal Service.
To no avail. Ehrenreich tips her hand in her introduction with the unmistakable hint that her assumptions of success proved wildly wrong. After almost a year's strenuous efforts, the only job offers she receives are selling insurance and cosmetics, neither of which is a corporate position utilizing her skills (she puts herself forward as a public-relations specialist with experience in event planning). Nor do they offer benefits of any kind, much less an office out of which to work. For all of her efforts, Ehrenreich gets nowhere fast.
Her entree into the world of white-collar unemployment begins with full immersion into the " `transition industry.' " With middle-class job loss increasingly a fact of economic life, in recent years a large number of specialists have emerged to assist--or, as Ehrenreich sees it, exploit--down-and-out white-collar workers desperate for any assistance in re-entering the corporate world that expelled them. In her sometimes-hilarious telling, career coaches prey upon the insecurities and anxieties of their clients in exchange for substantial fees. The specialists to whom she pays many hundreds of dollars subject her to personality tests, prohibit " `negative self-talk,' " insist that she be "upbeat, cheery, `in the moment,' and excruciatingly overreactive" and develop a " `winning attitude,' " and instruct her in the need for mastery of professional buzzwords. Her expensive resume consultant's contribution lies in teaching her "how to lie--how to plump up an undistinguished resume" and project a false confidence. Deception, Ehrenreich learns, simply "is part of the game."
Attending networking sessions, local business leaders' luncheons, executive boot camp, job fairs and professional-development seminars provides Ehrenreich with few job leads but ample opportunity to reflect on the "pop-psych exhortations" embedded in the ideologies of self-help and individual responsibility to which she was constantly subjected. She is appalled by her coaches' (and many corporations') reliance upon the wholly unscientific Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and upon Enneagram tests ("a pastiche of wispy New Age yearnings for some mystic unity underlying the disorder of human experience"), concluding that their function is to provide, through their veneer of "superficial rationality," a reason for hiring or rejection on the basis not of skill or accomplishment but on the more elusive notion of "a good `fit.' " Again and again she is lectured that the process is " `about knowing yourself' " and that "one's fate depends entirely on oneself." Whether attending talks in windowless hotel rooms, strip-mall restaurants, or suburban churches, the conversation is directed away from systemic sources of unemployment and the changing nature of corporate employment toward the self and the need to develop that winning attitude. "The aching question--why was I let go when I gave the company so much?--is cut off before it can be asked," she repeatedly and unhappily discovers.
Those fellow white-collar-job seekers she encounters along her journey through the transition industry's many programmatic offerings don't appear to be in much shape to ask that question, however. The psychological impact of corporate-job loss on the middle class does not make for a pretty picture, she finds. The "in transition" men and women she meets "wear the same dogged, passive expressions I've learned to associate with job seekers everywhere." Regardless of venue, they have the "same desultory coiffures and dulled, passive expressions." Or, as one unemployed telecommunications worker pithily puts it, " `Welcome to the land of the undead.' "
This is where "Bait and Switch" differs markedly from "Nickel and Dimed." In both books Ehrenreich employs a similar modus operandi: going undercover to learn what she can about the people she is studying. Toward many of the impoverished workingwomen in her early book, she displays a discernable level of respect. Beyond the pathos and sometimes tragic lives are good, decent, hardworking people trapped in a system designed to grind them down.
In "Bait and Switch," in contrast, Ehrenreich exhibits less warmth and little genuine respect toward her middle-class job seekers. They are a glassy-eyed bunch, some defeated and depressed, others desperate and depressed. The regular doses of blame-the-victim ideology they have imbibed have accomplished their task. Few if any fingers are pointed at the larger corporate world for dispensing with their salaried employees' services after so many years of loyalty; instead, the middle-class unemployed locate the obstacles to job-market success narrowly within themselves, just as they have been instructed by their coaches.
Ehrenreich's portrait of widespread resignation among those "in transition" makes it difficult to understand a crucial aspect of her critique: their tragic failure to do "so much more," to "make the leap from solitary desperation to collective action." Instead of finding themselves at fault, they could ask the tough questions; for exmple, "[W]hat is happening in the corporate world today"? Or, "[W]hy does experience seem to be so little valued and accomplishment so unreliably rewarded"? They could also lobby for further unemployment insurance, or advocate on behalf of universal health-care coverage for all Americans.
These questions and causes have much to recommend them, of course, but even Ehrenreich regards them as utopian, given our current political environment, not to mention the various factors she rightly acknowledges as forestalling such action. Even under the best of circumstances, it's hard to imagine the kind of political activism whose absence she bemoans among a group she depicts not as rebels but as "victims of corporate instability." For many years the left has invested its political hopes in the diverse and yet-to-be-unified working class, to little effect. Doing the same for a downwardly mobile middle class seems not merely utopian but oddly anachronistic and politically naive.
Those looking for precise sociological data on the scope and nature of under- and unemployment, the rise of contingent and non-standard work, and age and gender discrimination will encounter only tantalizing, brief (though discerning) excursions into those phenomena in these pages. The strengths of "Bait and Switch"--and they are considerable--lie less in Ehrenreich's prescriptions or formal analyses of economic problems than in her casual if usually astute observations and her caustic and thought-provoking critiques.
Her remarks on the valuing of personality and "fit" over skill and accomplishment, the fetishization of worthless psychological testing and the cultivation of workplace "conformity and studied restraint" are particular perceptive. Her harsh indictments of the "insidiously manipulative culture" preying upon the white-collar unemployed and the damaging corporate practices that result in the "chewing up [of] men and women and spitting them out late in life" are poignant and compelling. The questions she poses about job loss, corporate responsibility and the fraying of the social compact--even if her subjects aren't asking them--deserve far greater attention in the political arena than they have received. Following Ehrenreich along her journey to employment failure is well worth the time spent on the trip.
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
