Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and Jill Andresky Fraser's White-Collar Sweatshop
Robin, Corey
NICKEL AND LIMED: ON (NOT) GETTING BY IN BOOM-TIME AMERICA by Barbara Ehrenreich Metropolitan Books, 2001 256 pp $23 WHITE-COLLAR SWEATSHOP: THE DETERIORATION OF WORK AND ITS...
...Five jobs and three cities later, Ehrenreich concludes that many of today's jobs don't pay enough to support one person—much less a whole family...
...If today's professional wants to keep her position, she must prove that she is willing to work all the time, on and off the job, and do as she's told...
...In real life I am moderately brave, but plenty of brave people shed their courage in POW camps, and maybe something similar goes on in the infinitely more congenial milieu of the low-wage American workplace...
...But most are not...
...A A LTHOUGH NEITHER Ehrenreich nor Fraser addresses larger questions of so cial theory, their accounts pose a serious challenge to many contemporary intellectuals on the left...
...We all did it...
...And, finally, Ehrenreich and Fraser force us to rethink the politics of poverty...
...Other bosses go high tech, relying on computer technology to monitor an employee's every move...
...What is new is the failure to acknowledge that work does not always fulfill its appointed mission...
...centuries ago, John Calvin praised work as "a sort of sentry post" preventing us from "heedlessly wander[ing] about through life...
...Ehrenreich and Fraser remind us why the workplace is so important to progressive politics...
...She makes calls for work the whole way home...
...Work instills discipline and responsibility...
...Despite their different travels, both authors land in the same place—a nation of intense economic anxiety...
...So complete is our faith in its virtues that George W. Bush, whose own life is not exactly an advertisement for steady work, can nevertheless luxuriate, without a hint of embarrassment or criticism, in its moral grandeur...
...They are the temps and contingent workers who make profit margins soar...
...In our post-welfare era, work is an unqualified good...
...the only bad thing is not having it...
...Men and women spend the bulk of their waking hours at work...
...Karl Marx complained that capitalism combined "anarchy" in the market with "despotism in . . . the workshop...
...But more striking than their depictions of financial stress are their unsentimental renditions of work itself, particularly the nearly authoritarian control to which workers— blue-, pink-, and white-collar alike—are routinely subjected...
...FI HRENREICH GOT her inspiration for Nickel and Dimed over a $30 lunch of I 'salmon and field greens" with Harper's editor Louis Lapham...
...It often requires demanding physical effort...
...He is writing a book entitled Fear: Biography of an Idea...
...There is a reason, after all, that work is a biblical curse...
...Intimidation and spying coexist with phony professions of individualism, while employees terrified of losing their jobs are corralled into elaborate affirmations of faux bonhomie and loyalty to the firm...
...It converts the self's drifting energies into vital currents of industry and design...
...The comparison is apt, but not for the reason these reviewers think...
...Kennedy nodded...
...Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism— you know, go out there and try it for themselves.'" Next thing she knew, Ehrenreich was dishing out salad and Key Lime pie to hungry tourists at a downscale Key West restaurant...
...In her mise-en-scene, Fraser describes the punishing schedule of Gemma, a marketing executive, who rides the 5:29 commuter train back to Scarsdale every day...
...But for the vast majority, work occasions a return to childhood, with few of its freedoms and most of its restrictions...
...It's where they earn their pay and meet the world...
...After the kids are fed and in bed, she has faxes to send, e-mails to answer, and more calls to return...
...managers make sure white-collar employees think they must work eighty-hour weeks simply to hold onto their jobs...
...In recent decades, William Julius Wilson has advanced a similar argument...
...Professionals, done in by downsizing and stagnant wages, are too frightened of losing their own jobs to worry about anyone else's...
...Should an employee type an "alert" word like boss or union, Investigator automatically forwards her docuDISSENT / Fall 2001 • 133 BOOKS ment to her supervisor...
...Kennedy admitted that he was...
...In the Western tradition, work has been both, and for good reason...
...As a Wall Street Journal article puts it: "The workplace is never free of fear, and it shouldn't be...
...The Investigator software program—used by Exxon, Mobil, and Delta—keeps track not only of workplace performance measures (like the number of an employee's key strokes and mouse clicks per day) but also of troublemakers...
...Take away from English authors their copyrights," he archly observed, "and you would very soon take away also from England her authors...
...Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong, and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators...
...Against critics—inspired by Michel Foucault—who focus on disciplinary institutions like prisons, hospitals, and schools, these books remind us that the workplace remains the central institution in most people's lives...
...Then I said something that I have since had many opportunities to regret," Ehrenreich reports...
...Before she is even employed, Ehrenreich submits herself to the most intimate supervision...
...There were all these executives running around squirting each other," he says...
...At her job in Key West, she fails to protest when an assistant manager fires a nineteen-year-old Czech dishwasher whom she has befriended...
...As one of Ehrenreich's managers explains, if an employee on the job does "anything at all" besides work—including talking—it's "time theft...
...0 0 NE OF THE reasons workers have traditionally fled these dead-end jobs for the salaried life of the professional is to enjoy the autonomy that comes with the white collar...
...He thought to himself, "If I don't squirt, will I be gone too...
...But others press her to self-revelation, Is she prone to self-pity...
...Going to work "constitutes a framework for daily behavior," writes William Julius Wilson, without which "life . . . becomes less coherent...
...Some of these proscriptions are illegal (prohibiting workers, for instance, from sharing information with each other about their pay...
...Though he discussed poverty's many guises and causes, he left the impression that people were poor because they did not fully participate in the economy...
...And, as Fraser shows, low-level workers aren't the only ones feeling the pinch of others' profit, so are the middle tiers of IBM, Drexel Burnham, and other corporate giants...
...It gets people out of poverty— and out of bed...
...Harrington's imagined audience of white-collar readers has largely disappeared...
...Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere...
...DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 135...
...But in the workplace, men and women are disciplined not by an impersonal panopticon but by the all-too personal figure of their boss...
...Less romantic types have celebrated work for the relief it provides from the misery of the human condition...
...After a round of layoffs at the Bank of America, corporate higher-ups established a voluntary program for employees to "adopt" an ATM machine...
...Some questions are about politics: does she think that "management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different sets of goals...
...Both authors show that far from giving men and women an opportunity for spiritual freedom, work today exacts a form of submission that is as far removed from the sunny bromides of the free market as it is from the most minimal definition of a liberal society...
...Managers prowl the aisles and hallways, hunting for "gossip"—anything from chatter about weekend plans to talking against the boss...
...It can be mindnumbing and oppressive...
...For Harrington discovered the poor, as he put it, "off the beaten track," rotting in the inner cities or along the rural peripheries...
...to the "unwanted intimacy" she acquires as a maid cleaning the bathrooms of the privileged...
...Well," the miner drawled, "let me tell you this...
...One employee tells Fraser, "The leaders would say things like, 'Look at how creative you are, how many different ways you can figure out to manage to jump around the room.' And we all did it...
...Such intense supervision, combined with the omnipresent fear of being fired, turns employees— including Ehrenreich—into evasive men and women who shrink before authority and refrain from challenging injustice...
...DISSENT / Fall 2001 n 13 1 BOOKS In two excellent new books, Barbara Ehrenreich and Jill Andresky Fraser provide a more skeptical account of life on the job...
...Is it true that you've never wanted for anything and had everything you wanted...
...More than 2,800 employees signed up, faithfully cleaning their own machine and its environs—on their own time, without extra pay—just to save their jobs...
...To understand the alien world of the poor required the talents of a modern-day Dickens, for only an artist could capture the "smell and texture" of people who "talk and think differently" Harrington's audience was the affluent society, the millions who had suddenly joined the middle class and forgotten that poverty existed...
...We are not that far, it seems, from Frederick Douglass's description of himself as a piece of stolen property...
...But in all three cities, rent gets the better of her economy...
...On the one hand, work, whether physical or intellectual, can be fulfilling...
...NICKEL AND LIMED: ON (NOT) GETTING BY IN BOOM-TIME AMERICA by Barbara Ehrenreich Metropolitan Books, 2001 256 pp $23 WHITE-COLLAR SWEATSHOP: THE DETERIORATION OF WORK AND ITS REWARDS IN CORPORATE AMERICA by Jill Andresky Fraser WW Norton & Company, 2001 352 pp $26.95 DURING WEST VIRGINIA during the 1960 presidential campaign, John Kennedy was accosted by a miner demanding to know whether he was indeed "the son of one of our wealthiest men...
...Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward...
...But Gemma is no 9-to-5er...
...My mind," he says, "rebels at stagnation...
...That's time when I couldn't use my cell phone even if I wanted to...
...Reversing the usual stereotype, Karl Marx criticized Adam Smith for lamenting the burdens of work and failing to grasp that "the overcoming of . . . obstacles" was a basic component of human freedom...
...Given the steady convergence of the lives of the poor and of the middle class, perhaps the time is ripe not for a war on poverty but for a war on the workplace—or, better yet, in the workplace...
...Does she think people talk about her behind her back...
...Indeed, fear can be a powerful management tool...
...Without work, Sherlock Holmes confesses to Watson, there is only tedium— T and cocaine...
...Something new—something loathsome and servile—had infected me," she confesses, "along with the kitchen odors that I could still sniff on my bra when I finally undressed at night...
...For George Orwell understood the poor as indispensable agents of an industrial economy, not as objects of compassion...
...Liberalism is nowhere to be found, and Enlightenment might as well be the name of the utility company...
...But this is a mathematical conclusion, which could have been made with the aid of a calculator...
...Ehrenreich goes undercover in the low end of the service economy, working as a waitress in Florida, a housekeeper and nursing-home aide in Maine, and a retail clerk in Minneapolis, while Fraser interviews scores of high-powered professionals at Intel, Microsoft, and other crown jewels of the high-tech economy...
...They clean the hotel rooms of globe-trotting capitalists...
...It can, if pressure is brought to bear, provide an opportunity for creativity and fellowship...
...These claims are not new...
...The real function of these tests," Ehrenreich concludes, "is not to convey information to the employer, but to the potential employee, and the information BOOKS being conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us...
...Work pressed men and women to develop their full capacities, a prerequisite for the realization of self...
...COREY ROBIN is an assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York...
...Dining at a tony New York restaurant, she and Lapham chewed over the question of how the millions of women being kicked off welfare were getting by in today's low-wage economy...
...Her only break is the ten minutes it takes her train to travel the tunnel between Grand Central and 125th Street...
...You could quite easily drive a car," he wrote, "across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal...
...134 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 Against critics of capitalism, Ehrenreich and Fraser suggest that the great evil of work is not commodification or the culture of the market, but the undignified obeisance workers pay their supervisors...
...You haven't missed a thing...
...Foucault and his followers would have us believe that liberalism and the Enlightenment have vanquished the medieval world, and that discourses of freedom, reason, and individuality are the instruments of contemporary domination...
...But work can also be the misery of the human condition...
...The personality exams that follow the drug tests are more invasive...
...the miner pressed...
...Workers inhabit a world less postmodern than premodern, whose master theorist is neither Karl Marx nor Adam Smith but Joseph de Maistre...
...I guess so...
...Several reviewers have hailed Nickel and Dimed as a worthy successor to Michael Harrington's The Other America...
...Grove, for example, ran Intel the way Al Capone ran Chicago...
...After NYNEX began to cut its workforce, it required its MBAs and skilled technicians to attend a three-day-long retreat where they were asked to hop around a room...
...The only way to widen the circle of "the friends of the poor," he thought, was to describe and decry, in elegant and haunting prose, the poor's isolation, to remind everyone that though the poor were "other," they were still America...
...It takes men and women away from more satisfying activity...
...The most important role of managers is to create an environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace," writes former Intel CEO Andrew Grove in Only the Paranoid Survive...
...But as Jill Andresky Fraser demonstrates in White-Collar Sweatshop—a vivid piece of reportage exposing the dirtiest secrets of today's corporations—the top floor of the skyscraper may not be so different from the cafeteria kitchen...
...But as Ehrenreich shows, today's poor are not the casualties of progress...
...Whether rehearsing the taxonomy of dirty toilets ("there are three kinds of shit-stains") or the grueling routine of washing windows in an un-air-conditioned house ("Outside, I can see the construction guys knocking back Gatorade, but the rule is that no fluid or food item can touch a maid's lips when she's inside a house"), Ehrenreich shows how work's various postures of submission recreate the upstairs-downstairs world of old Europe...
...Gemma's schedule—and those of millions of professionals like her—is not freely chosen...
...only the rewards of money and fame compensated for the painful effort writing required...
...We are far closer to The Road to Wigan Pier than to The Other America...
...Once there, she's back on the phone...
...In recent years, this historic ambivalence about work has given way to a more flattened consciousness...
...Fraser shows that far from being powered by unleashed self-interest, the past decade's economic boom has a darker source...
...And not only hard labor can seem onerous: whatever the charms of the life of the mind, Anthony Trollope noted, they alone could not compel a writer to put pen to paper...
...As the brochure of a Maine cleaning service brags, "We clean floors the old-fashioned way—on our hands and knees...
...When an aide is late for a meeting, Grove waits, "holding a stave of wood the size of a baseball bat...
...Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion...
...The drug tester at Wal-Mart, an ''officious woman in blue scrubs," grabs Ehrenreich's hands, squirts a soapy substance onto her palms, and has Ehrenreich wash them in front of her—all to make sure that Ehrenreich does not slip a drug-dissolving agent into her urine...
...You don't need a de 132 n DISSENT / Fall 2001 gree in economics," she writes, "to see that wages are too low and rents too high...
...Finally, he slams "the wood onto the surface of the meeting-room table," and shouts, "I don't ever, ever, want to be in a meeting with this group that doesn't start and end when it's scheduled...
...They were "the rejects of the affluent society" who "never had the right skills in the first place" or "lost them when the rest of the economy advanced...
...By taking these jobs herself, Ehrenreich is able to capture the material details of workplace indignity—from the obstacle course she is forced to run at the restaurant ("Employees are barred from using the front door, so I enter the first day through the kitchen, where a red-faced man with shoulder length blond hair is throwing frozen steaks against the wall and yelling, `Fuck this shit...
...I can dispense then with artificial stimulants...
...Ehrenreich reminds us that though ours is a high-tech, service economy, we still occupy Orwell's world, where the poor are not so much cast aside as denied the fruits of their labor...
...Once employed, workers are told not only when to pee but when to hold it in: Ehrenreich recites cases of female employees, forbidden to go to the bathroom for up to six hours, wearing pads inside their uniforms into which they urinate...
...She works two jobs at a time and eats "chopped meat, beans, cheese and noodles...
...On the job, employers closely watch workers...
...A marketing executive at a radio-station chain explains how a management consultant handed out water pistols to him and his colleagues and had them squirt each other...
...Is it true you've never done a day's work with your hands all your life...
...They ride bikes through wet city streets, delivering food to Wall Street lawyers burning the midnight oil...
...But many of his followers have paid more attention to the first than to the second...
...Back in the fifteenth century," a PR executive tells Fraser, "they used to use a ball and chain, and now they use technology...
...Some corporate chieftains inspire fear the old-fashioned way...
...Mindless drudgery or moral elevation...
...After a Wal-Mart manager catches her stealing time and demands to know why she isn't at her computer, Ehrenreich squeaks out a lie and flashes "what is known to primatologists as a 'fear grin'—half teeth-baring and half grimace...
...they are its engines, or at least they grease the wheels that BOOKS make the engines go...
Vol. 48 • September 2001 • No. 4
