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The Futile American Dream

In 2003, labor activist and writer Barbara Ehrenreich came across an interesting statistic: White collar professionals made up 20 percent of the unemployed, which in 2003 was 5.9 percent of the American population. While the economic downturn following September 11 impacted the corporate sector disproportionately, the 2003 statistic signaled a disturbing era in white-collar America: Corporate job security was dead.

At the time, the plight of corporate, white-collar workers was not a topic that Ehrenreich followed closely. Ehrenreich’s most popular book, Nickel and Dimed, was an undercover investigation into the lives of the working poor. In 1999 and 2000, a time of extraordinary economic prosperity in the United States, Ehrenreich labored as a waitress and housekeeper, and worked at Wal-Mart to give readers a glimpse of how working-class folks get by. Most jobs ended in economic strife for Ehrenreich—she barely made ends meet—and Nickel and Dimed enjoyed widespread acclaim for its brutally honest account of the US economy’s bottom-most rung.

Applying her humorous, cantankerous and plucky approach to the corporate world, Ehrenreich set out once again in 2003 to go undercover. While her original goal was to bag a PR job and chronicle her corporate escapades, Ehrenreich quickly became muddled in a different world—that of the white-collar unemployed. From pseudo-psychology to boot camps, from image makeovers to career coaches, from religious proselytizing to strategizing against feminist activists, Ehrenreich endured it all to bring us Bait and Switch, a colorful account of the dark underbelly of American corporate life.

Ehrenreich is currently touring the US to promote the paperback version of Bait and Switch and she recently took time to discuss the saccharine nature of corporate life, why we ought to worry about the lack of universal health care and her newly launched nonprofit, United Professionals.

AV: What is United Professionals?

Barbara Ehrenreich: It was just launched over a week ago. We’ve been working on it for many months. This really grew out of Bait and Switch. When I was doing the research for Bait and Switch, I was struck by how many people were in this terrible situation and seemed to want to come together in some way. But when they did, it was always in some exploitative or manipulative setting—where they were being asked to put out a lot of money, or being proselytized for some brand of religion. I thought, “What if people could come together in a more authentic way, not dominated by someone at the front of the room who’s telling them that it’s all their own problem, but able to exchange stories and talk about what their needs were, and potentially become a political force.

On the hardcover tour, this was a gleam in my eye. I started passing around yellow legal pads of paper for people to put their e-mail addresses on. Out of the people I met came some of the people that formed United Professionals.

AV: So it sounds like your book tour was useful for organizing white-collar folks?

BE: I’d look around and say, “I have 200 people in this room. A lot of them have had this problem. I’m not just a book author—I’m an activist. Let’s do some real networking, not fake networking.”

I found that people are very eager to be a part of something that they feel represents them. We’ve been doing a survey on the UP Web site, and what most people say they want from an organization, more than anything, [is] something that does political advocacy on their issues—which would be things like universal health insurance, a serious form of unemployment compensation—which we don’t have—and ultimately looking for legal ways to hold companies accountable for their treatment of people.

AV: How would you compare this response to that of Nickel and Dimed?

BE: Well, with Nickel and Dimed, it wasn’t like there was an organizational vacuum. What I tell people to do is join or form a living-wage movement. If there isn’t one, start one in their community—or support unionization struggles, [or] get to work on affordable housing. So it’s not like there’s nothing. And I feel supportive of all those efforts, especially the living-wage crusades, which I run around to a lot.

AV: What do you make of the organizational vacuum that exists for white-collar workers?

BE: It’s not a union-type situation. We’re talking about people in different occupations and different workplaces. If there’s a model, structurally, it would be more like the AARP. Although UP will be much more grassroots based—and, I hope, feistier.

A person over the age of 50 can say, “I have something that is going to fight against social security privatization [and] Medicare,” although the AARP fell down on that with drugs. There’s no such thing for the increasingly common kind of person who probably has a college degree or some college and is not going to have a few jobs in a lifetime, but a lot—with gaps in between.

AV: Bait and Switch paints this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario. If you lose your job, you’re a failure. People are penalized for having gaps on their resumes. And yet your investigation shows that the job search process is often fruitless and always depressing.

BE: The paperback has a new afterword, and I put some of the things that have come to my Web site. There’s this total loss of any kind of self-confidence after searching. [There’s] feelings of worthlessness and shame. Shame is the topic of this week’s blog on my Web site.

AV: In Nickel and Dimed, there was at least a sense of camaraderie. Bait and Switch depicts a lonely environment. It wasn’t until the very end that you had a laugh with some fellow job seekers.

BE: And the people who I was laughing with weren’t even professionals. The isolation, the depression, the anxiety—it’s not something that is talked about a lot in our culture because I think there’s all this shame attached to it. I’ve had people tell me their stories and then say, “Well, I’m sure that this doesn’t count for anything because I’m a disgruntled former employee.” Well, it’s the disgruntled who have to speak up.

AV: So how bad are things right now? As you start your paperback tour, what does unemployment look like for the white-collar professional?

BE: There’s a growing debate about what some of the numbers mean right now. The unemployment number is really quite low, it’s 4.7 percent, but what it leaves out is those people who have given up on their job searches. Perhaps more importantly, [it] leaves out those people who found employment, but at a wage and level way different from that which they were educated for.

AV: So it’s the same picture as a year ago when you launched your hardcover tour?

BE: It’s the same story. There’s a lot of churning in the corporate workforce.

AV: What’s really striking about the situation you describe is that raises and firings no longer seem to be connected to the business cycle.

BE: Worse yet, [it’s] not connected to your performance. So it becomes really baffling, what’s going on. No one knows. And when they get laid off and get into this transition industry with the coaches and self-help people, they’re told that it’s their fault. It’s pervasive in our culture—the winning attitude. I encountered that when I had breast cancer and started going into the Internet and looking for support groups. I was stunned and horrified by all the things telling me that, really, it’s just a matter of attitude. If you think of your cancer in a positive way, you’ll get better, and you’ll be a better person. It infuriated me. I didn’t put it together with Bait and Switch until I wrote the book.

It goes back to Mary Baker Eddy and Norman Vincent Peale in the ’50s. People used to be gathered into large auditoriums and harangued for hours about how they control everything in their lives, and they just have to adjust the dial and everything will be wonderful.

AV: Americans have a hard time just being unhappy about things.

BE: Yeah, it’s hard for us to say, “This sucks, and I’m a victim,” but sometimes we are. You don’t bring many dreaded diseases on yourself [and] you don’t bring the layoffs down on yourself.

AV: This overly positive corporate psychology even tried to remold you. One consultant you hired in Bait and Switch told you to be “less authoritative”—a quality that has given you a lot of success in your chosen industry as a journalist.

BE: I started out being cocky and thinking, “I’m smart, and I’m pretending to be a PR person, and I can certainly write. I can ‘make things happen.’ I can almost ‘talk the talk.’”

There was a moment of horrible realization when I was at the PR training conference in Boston and we did we an exercise with how to deal with activists. We had this role-playing thing where my group had to figure out how to deal with a feminist activist because of a sexual harassment scandal. I found myself taking over my group and telling them exactly how to do it from my knowledge as a feminist activist. Then I realized, “What am I doing? I’m being too smart—stop it.” I pulled myself back, zipped my lips and spent the rest of my time smiling.

AV: What other behaviors did you learn to be “corporate”?

BE: I quoted somewhere in the book about [a] woman who took a personality test which asked her to identify her favorite form of humor. She checked “irony,” and she was told if she wanted to keep her job, she would have to change her favorite form of humor. Then, I realized that there is no place for me in this world.

I get the feeling, and I think this is supported by harder sociological studies, that there’s a lot of emphasis on hiring people who will maintain the comfort level of those who are already in charge. You [can’t] come across as too challenging and too smart. One of the problems with people over 40 or 50 is the fear that they might have their own ideas about how to do things. And there’s the stereotype that people will be more malleable if they’re younger. This poses a real problem for American businesses in terms of international competition. How are you going to innovate and be more creative with this kind of emphasis? I don’t think they’re making their decisions this way in Bangalore.

AV: At a certain point, do you think this corporate culture is going to bite us in the ass?

BE: Yeah, and I can think of one example where it already has: Michael Brown running FEMA. Likeable guy, very well dressed, nice attitude.

AV: Talking about wage disparity, in 2005 full-time working women earned 77 cents to every dollar earned by men. African-American women earned 66 cents and Hispanic women earned 54 cents to every dollar earned by men. Why are we still struggling with wage disparity?

BE: Part of that at the lower wage levels has to do with more irregular employment histories—like being the one who stays home with a sick child and loses a job as a result. I don’t understand the sex discrimination in the corporate world enough. I wrote something for TIME last summer about the fact that boys aren’t doing as well in college; they’re less likely to go to college today and they get worse grades. And I was just speculating that they knew what they were doing, because all those things like knowledge and skills were less important than having spent four years playing fantasy football if you want to get along in the corporate world.

There has to be more research to find out correlations between grades in college and where you are five years after graduating. What I saw was not a culture that honors education.

AV: How do you see things changing in the next 20 years for white-collar workers?

BE: I’m interested in the blue [collar], too. We can change collar colors many times in our lives. So it’s not a separate thing. In general with these economic issues, we can continue to become more and more polarized with a growing population that is just not making it, or we can go the way of what I like to think of as the “civilized countries” that have things like universal health care and an adequate safety net for people who are laid off and have public sector reviews of the way companies treat people.

AV: What other issues will you be watching?

BE: The living-wage movement. Can we raise the federal minimum wage? Some states have been going ahead on their own.

AV: Many say we’re in the middle of a backlash against feminism right now. How do you explain the New York Times and the New Yorker covering the “opt-out movement,” in which more women are supposedly choosing to be stay-at-home moms?

BE: It’s something different, it’s “Man bites dog.” If you had more stories of working women struggling with child care and dividing responsibilities with their husbands, it’s the same old same old. That’s not as interesting to an editor.

AV: What job or economic issues are you following in the mid-term elections?

BE: I’m not a close electoral-politics watcher, but I think it’s very interesting that the Democrats have taken on Wal-Mart, which is the largest corporation in the world, and also the low-wage and anti-union corporation. So it seems to me [they’re] taking on an economic-populist attitude. There’s been a lot of criticism of Wal-Mart coming from people who are quite centrist, even people like Joe Biden. I had a blog about Wal-Mart and the Democrats going after it.

AV: Where are the Democrats going with this?

BE: It means that the Democrats have to find some way to address the growing inequality in this country and the huge numbers of people in this country that are working poor.

AV: What’s next for you?

BE: I just finished a book on a completely unrelated topic. I’ve been working on this for eight years, before Nickel and Dimed, it’s called Dancing in the Street: A History of Collective Joy. It’s historical, anthropological, and dips a little into neuroscience. [It’s about] festivities and rituals and why we don’t have them—why don’t we have robust forms of them anymore. It’s about the suppression of those sorts of things.

AV: Is it focused on the US?

BE: No, when I do history, it’s the whole world. It looks at the Christian tradition, but there’s a chapter on Wahhabism and it’s extremely hostile to Sufism, which had the dancing and music and ecstatic rituals. It looks at celebrations of a particular kind, ones that historically involved feasting, dancing, costume making.

AV: It sounds a bit upbeat.

BE: In some ways, it’s quite sad because it gets wiped out because we don’t know how to do it.

AV: Any plans to go undercover again?

BE: I wish I had done Dancing in the Streets in person, but that’s all based on normal forms of research. I have no commitment to the undercover approach; if that’s the best way to do something, I’ll do it. Otherwise, it’s not a fetish. I think that some younger journalist like you can do the next one.