Afterword
A year has passed since I finished writing this book, and it is no longer a novelty to hear that the middle class is in trouble, even “under assault.” The nightly news has brought us wave after wave of layoffs—in the automobile industry, pharmaceuticals, and financial services—affecting white-collar as well as blue-collar workers. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have run major series on class in America, in which they highlighted the rising “income volatility” of the middle class, where a layoff can mean a sudden descent from a six-figure income to zero. If anything, America has become even less hospitable to its displaced and “redundant” employees: The new federal bankruptcy bill, enacted in the fall of 2005, makes it far more difficult for the indebted to get a fresh start.
So the human damage mounts, and as the author of a book on white-collar job searching, I’ve been in a good position to witness it. While traveling around the country talking about this book, I’ve heard enough heartbreaking stories of downward mobility to fill an entire new volume. Most recently, an Indiana woman, a single mother who had painstakingly worked her way up to what she thought was a secure position as a benefits analyst, broke into tears while recounting her unexpected layoff. A few days ago, she wrote to say she had been offered a new job, but at only $10 an hour. Another woman, whose story of past layoffs is told in this book, called me a week ago, utterly distraught, to tell me that after seven months of steady employment, she’d just been laid off once again.
The forum on my web site, barbaraehrenreich.com, has become another magnet for stories of personal economic tragedy. “Fading Away,” for example, posted the following:
100 resumes sent in the last 6 months. No job. Have actually been unemployed for two years. Moved to new state to start over, about to roll over a cliff. To add to my woes I now doubt my ability to hold a job should I ever get one. I feel like I’m eroding. Once I was extremely adept, flexible, proactive, etc., etc. Now I feel like sludge. . . . Doubt is making me into someone I don’t recognize. Who am I?
Like “Fading Away,” many of my forum guests have been searching for jobs for six months or more—a category of the unemployed that has grown dramatically in the last couple of years. One person writes:
After searching the entire country for 6 months for a job my unemployment [benefit] is up. It looks like my career is over. All those years of hard work ruined. I’ve got a masters degree in mechanical engineering and I’m seriously considering going back to school to become a nurse.
As the months roll on, some report losing the will to continue to their search:
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m exhausted. Emotionally, physically, intellectually, I’m all done in. Don’t know how much more of all this nothing I can handle. More than three years of no job and not even a response in the last 5 months has taken the life out of me.
And of course, always in the background is the real fear of destitution, as in the following post:
Had been avoiding this forum for a while cuz I was getting too depressed from it—but that’s not really fair, it’s the lack of income that’s the real problem!! (will be homeless at end of Nov if don’t come up with something soon . . .)
Many, if not most, of these tragedies slip under the radar of official unemployment measures, because the victims continue, in some fashion, to work. Some of the laid-off immediately restyle themselves as “consultants”—a feint that doesn’t fool potential employers, to whom, as I found in my job search, “consultant” is a euphemism for unemployed. If they can afford to, the laid-off take volunteer positions in the hope that they will eventually be paid. Others abandon the idea of a job, and patch together a living out of various “income streams”—dog-walking, website design, proofreading, whatever. Or they take on massive student loans in the hope that a master’s degree will add luster to their résumé. Most commonly though, laid-off white-collar workers simply swallow their pride, go to the local Best Buy or Starbucks, and take whatever they can get. One visitor to my web site accounted for over three years of unemployment as follows:
41 months since last real job . . . During the 41 months (caution, these overlap, not serial, etc.):
2 months seasonal work, roughly half time overall, minimal wage
4 months part time work, minimum wage
13 months unemployment insurance pay
12 months full time school
9 months part time school
12 months part time work, minimal wage
3 months full time work, minimal wage
Another writes:
I’m barely surviving in a $8.25 an hour job. I’ve probably just lowered my expectations and standards. I’m not optimistic that our white-collar and middle-class jobs will return. I just let go of the dream of returning to the economic level I enjoyed during the 1990s. If THAT’S the reality . . . it stinks.
Since publishing this book in the fall of 2005, I have finally gotten an estimate of the number of such “underemployed” people, i.e., people working at jobs that do not utilize their college degrees. New research, undertaken at my suggestion by Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, suggests that 17 percent of jobs that do not require a college degree are currently filled by college graduates, for a total of about seven million underemployed people. Unless you count the ineffable intellectual benefits of a college education, that’s a lot of wasted tuition. It is low-wage, mostly blue-collar jobs that are proliferating and keeping America’s unemployment rate at an admirably low rate of under 5 percent. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report issued in February, of the twenty-five fastest growing jobs for 2006, only five required a college degree at all. The growth opportunities lie in low-paid fields like food preparation, health aide work, janitorial, landscaping, and retail sales.1
For most of the white-collar workforce, however, downward mobility is a gradual process, played out over years of tumbling from job to job. People who are reemployed after a job loss earn 17 percent less, on average, than they would have if they had remained in their original job.2 Multiply that out over several job losses and you have a rapidly diminishing income—like that of an Orlando-based training expert I met through my web site who, now in her fifties, has seen her earnings drop to 50 percent of what their peak was in the nineties. At some point in a career of job turbulence, age discrimination renders one unemployable for all practical purposes—unless as a “people greeter” at Wal-Mart.
In a setting where all jobs are increasingly contingent—on downsizings, “riffings,” outsourcings, and managerial whim—even the good ones offer little relief from anxiety. The threat of layoffs operates like an inescapable, irritating background buzz, a perpetual source of fear. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Marx saw the “reserve army of the unemployed”—the huge numbers of the out-of-work and impoverished—serving as a whip to instill docility in the working class. In our own time, that army has shrunk; most people do have jobs. It is the threat of sudden job loss, and with it the loss of health insurance, that keeps the employed in a constant sweat.
But if you raise these issues today, you are bound to elicit the condescending response that layoffs, declining benefits, and the punishingly low pay of the “working poor” are all necessary, in fact essential, if American firms are to maintain their competitiveness in a globalized economy. To be competitive, companies have to be agile, capable of shedding employees and whole departments at a moment’s notice. The old “corporate welfare state,” which offered long-term employment as well as health and retirement benefits, may have worked in a more insular era, but it has become a deadly burden for the companies—like GM—who once epitomized it. Hence, for example, the pundits’ widespread mockery of the French youth who rioted against a proposed change in the employment law that would have made it easier to fire young workers: Don’t those French kids understand how things work? Employers won’t hire people unless they are guaranteed the freedom to fire them. In this line of reasoning, t
he individual must be patient and “flexible”—ever-attentive to the changing needs of our corporate leaders—in order for that great abstraction, the economy, to thrive.
I can think of many rebuttals to this argument, which eerily echoes the demands for self-sacrifice once made by communist governments. But, after talking to hundreds of white-collar Americans within the last year, what seems most questionable about it is the unstated assumption that corporations behave in an economically rational fashion. In the conclusion to this book, I expressed my surprise at certain blatantly nonrational features of corporate culture, such as the emphasis on personality over experience and the reliance on discredited tests to assess it. Now I think I was far too hesitant in my critique of corporate irrationality. If anything threatens the competitiveness of American business, it is not an atavistic loyalty to employees, but an internal culture of self-indulgence and its inevitable result, incompetence.
A rational economic enterprise should, of course, hire and promote the best possible people—the smartest, most experienced, and accomplished. But in my travels, white-collar veterans have repeatedly, and laughingly, chided me for being shocked by the advice that I should reduce the experience I claimed in my résumé to a mere ten years: “Didn’t you realize you have to dumb down your résumé? I’ve done it again and again.” Dumb down? All I ever heard as a child was that it was the “smart,” and of course hardworking, people who got ahead. As for promotions, a computer scientist shared with me what he was told when he asked for raise as a reward for a recent achievement: “Why would you want that? It would be like having a bull’s-eye painted on your back.” The person who is rewarded with higher pay for his or her achievements runs the risk of being eliminated as a “cost saving” measure.
Furthermore, a rational enterprise should encourage creativity, innovation, and critical thinking. But over and over, white-collar people have told me that these are exactly the capabilities that can sink a career. As one guest at my web site put it:
Though most of us were taught that smarts, independent thinking, creativity, and loyality were valued in corporate America, we know now it’s all a lie.
If you think out of the box, you’re out in the cold.
If you tell a truth the company doesn’t want to hear, you have a negative attitude.
If you miss the boss’s superbowl party for any reason at all, you’re on the corporate fecal roster.
If you work less than 50–60 hours a week, you’re not committed to your job.
The real mantra of surviving in the workplace is “go along to get along.”
Or I might cite the common white-collar wisdom that “your most important customer is your boss.” If your boss is your “customer,” what is your product—flattery?
These reports from the front lines—along with the constant emphasis on “likability” and being a “team player” that I encountered in my undercover search—suggests an increasingly inward-looking corporate culture. Rather than rising to the challenge of global competition, American corporate decision-makers, or at least those who make hiring and firing decisions, seem to be hunkering down, more concerned about maintaining their own “comfort level” than battling for market share. This is not “rational” behavior except in the narrowest, personal sense—as in the case of those boards of directors that award their CEOs giant pay increases even as the stock price falls, apparently for the sake of coziness. The end result may well be a generalized culture of incompetence, as we saw in the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Michael D. Brown, the director of FEMA under our first “CEO president,” was to all appearances a likable and extremely well-connected fellow—just tragically unsuited for his job.
There is a ready rejoinder to all the accusations of corporate irrationality (and cruelty) I have cited above: They are the carpings of the “disgruntled” and are automatically discredited by their “negativity.” I’ve even met laid-off people who apologized for their own complaints with a rueful proviso like “of course, I’m just another disgruntled former employee.” Thus are the victims silenced, leaving the corporate culture to exult in its chosen mood of perpetual self-congratulation.
The more time I spend with white-collar victims—the unemployed, underemployed, and anxiously employed—the more parallels I see between them and such traditionally “oppressed” groups as women, gays, and, in the more distant past, people of color. They feel shame even for their own injuries. They are stigmatized by their condition, although they did nothing to incur it, as illustrated, in the case of the unemployed, by the management consultant who advises corporate recruiters to avoid job fairs: “Who goes to job fairs? People without jobs! All you get are worthless résumés and lots of germs.”3 They are made to feel they are part of a generally loathsome group, not worthy of associating with: Note the common enjoinders to avoid the company of other unemployed people.
Nothing will change until America’s disposable and disposed-of white-collar workers begin to come together to reclaim their dignity and self-worth and, hopefully, in the process, begin to make common cause with the blue-collar workers whose ranks they are so often forced into. In a landscape filled with phony “networking” groups, there is little organizational framework for such a coming-together, but I have one fledgling startup to offer: United Professionals (united-professionals.org), which has been created with help from the Service Employees International Union. UP is not a union, it is a membership association aimed at providing advocacy, services, and, at the very least, a setting where America’s “disgruntled” workers can hold their own conversation about wide-ranging, long-term solutions.
And we have to find those solutions, because there is a level of macro-irrationality here that goes beyond the micro-insanity of individual hiring and firing decisions: That is a massive, sickening, ongoing waste of talent, as exemplified by the taxi-driving engineer, the idle teachers and techies, the still-employed people who are too crushed by anxiety to express their creativity. It is not as if there is nothing to do. Consider our crumbling inner cities, our decrepit infrastructure, the threats posed by climate change and pandemics. If corporate America will not mobilize to solve these problems, and there is no reason to hope that it will, then we have to find or create other ways of putting people to work at meeting urgent human needs—whether through government, the nonprofit sector, or “alternative,” cooperative businesses. We may not all have jobs, but we have our work cut out for us.
acknowledgments
I thank Diane Alexander, Leah Gray, and Kelley Walker for their invaluable research assistance. Diane Alexander, Shakoor Aljuwani, Rosa Brooks, Ben Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven read early drafts and offered extremely useful comments. Jared Bernstein, Heather Boushey, Corinne Coen, John Ehrenreich, Doug Henwood, Ken Hudson, Robert Jackall, and Jerry M. Newman answered assorted questions along the way. Arlie Hochschild and Kris Dahl, who is my agent, took time for long conversations on issues raised by my research. And I’m grateful to the team at Metropolitan Books, including John Sterling for his careful reading, Riva Hocherman for her excellent suggestions, and especially my brilliant editor, Sara Bershtel.
about the author
BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and The Worst Years of Our Lives, as well as Blood Rites and Fear of Falling, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. A frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine and a columnist for The Progressive, she has been a columnist at the New York Times and Time.
1. Even fiction—my favorite source of insight into cultures and times remote from my own—was no help. While the fifties and sixties had produced absorbing novels about white-collar corporate life, including Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, more recent novels and films tend to ignore the white-collar corporate work world except as a backdrop to sexual intrigue.
2. National Center for Educational Statistics
, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2004/2004018.pdf.
3. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women are only slightly more likely than men to be unemployed—6.1 percent compared to 5.7 percent—and white women, like myself, are about half as likely as black women to be unemployed (www.bls.gov).
4. Jonathan Mahler, “Commute to Nowhere,” New York Times Magazine, April 13, 2003.
5. I was particularly enlightened by Jill Andresky Fraser’s White Collar Sweat-shop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America (New York: Norton, 2001) and Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998).
6. Harvey Mackay, We Got Fired! And It’s the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us (New York: Ballantine, 2004), p. 94.
7. Fraser, White Collar Sweatshop, p. 23.
8. Fraser, White Collar Sweatshop, p. 158.
9. From December 2003 to October 2004, with the exception of most of July, when I had a brief real-life job writing biweekly columns for the New York Times.
10. John Leland, “For Unemployed, Wait for New Work Grows Longer,” New York Times, January 9, 2005.
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream Page 21
