Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch
Wiener, Jon
BARBARA EHRENREICH iS probably the most widely read writer on the left of the last decade. Her last book, Nickel and Dimed, published in 2001, sold more than a million copies and has spent more...
...It is selling insurance on commission...
...Instead, she gets no response at all from the corporations to which she has applied...
...The practice ground for likability for the white-collar unemployed is networking—coming together to exchange ideas and experiences and maybe get some leads...
...The world of journalism, she reminds us, is full of people who are not at all likable but who nevertheless hold on to important jobs as columnists, reporters, or writers because they are so good at their jobs...
...The transition industry has one central 104 DISSENT / Winter 2006 message for all job-seekers: as one leading book puts it, "you alone are the source of all the conditions and situations in your life...
...The answer, clearly, is No...
...But of course, for the unemployed and excluded, the notion that "the problem is you" is a hellish idea...
...JON WIENER teaches history at UC Irvine and is a contributing editor of the Nation...
...At the top of Ehrenreich's list she puts expanded unemployment benefits and universal health insurance that is not tied to the job...
...Nickel and Dimed worked because Ehrenreich's writing is so vivid and her persona combines an appealing warmth and humor with political analysis that is smart and convincing...
...She had no doubts about her selfworth, her ability to make a living, or her attractiveness as a human being...
...In this world, nobody is "unemployed...
...Why then is it so pervasive...
...Barbara finds an ad for what looks like such a meeting, but it turns out to be a Christian group whose message is that, if you believe that Jesus Christ is your lord and savior, he will get you a job...
...Ehrenreich reminds us that all the corporate tax cuts, public subsidies, and loosened regulations are justified on the grounds that they will "create jobs...
...Because she's a writer and public speaker, she decided to market herself in the field of "public relations"—she calls it "journalism's evil twin...
...Ehrenreich is puzzled by this emphasis on "the thin goo of likability...
...So she says "game over" and finishes her book...
...the new book is about her experience of white-collar unemployment —at a time when 20 percent of the unemployed are white-collar professionals1.6 million people...
...Then comes a bankruptcy bill that permits a fresh start, along with college costs that ordinary families can afford...
...But today, when unemployed middle-class people reach out for "human help and solidarity," as Ehrenreich says so eloquently, "the hands that reach back to them all too often clutch and grab...
...Her last book, Nickel and Dimed, published in 2001, sold more than a million copies and has spent more than a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list...
...Ehrenreich concludes by pointing out the differences between middle- and working-class experiences of unemployment...
...Femininity is part of that other key element for the job-seeker, "likability...
...Clearly it serves the needs of the fortunate, the economic winners —it justifies their prosperity and power and explains why they deserve what they have and why those below them also deserve their fate...
...When I searched for "Barbara Ehrenreich" I got 2,750,000 results...
...she recalls attending a banquet with the poet Grace Paley, "who appeared in a loose pink floral dress...
...The company is AFLAC, which sells supplemental health insurance...
...So what is to be done...
...Likable includes being optimistic and cheerful...
...The first job is writing the résumé, which, with Kimberly's help, somehow takes weeks of daily work...
...This expert recommends $50 worth of his special line of makeup, in addition to $250 for the session...
...Once Barbara has gotten the message that it's up to her, and once she has learned what the tests say about her, career coach Kimberly teaches her that "job searching is not joblessness...
...It's been assigned in more than 2,500 college courses...
...Ehrenreich learns that, "If you haven't spent every moment of your life making money for somebody else, you can forget about getting a job...
...The corporate world has spoken, and it wants nothing to do with me, not even with the smiling, suited, endlessly compliant Alexander version of me...
...After driving for hours, she arrives at a windowless office across from a run-down shopping center...
...Ten thousand people offer their services to the Barbara Alexanders of the world, and she signed up with one, Kimberly, who said it would take three months and $1,200 for Barbara to learn to sell herself...
...Part of the pleasure of Ehrenreich's earlier book, Nickel and Dimed, came from her descriptions of her fellow workers—interesting and intriguing people, full of life...
...it is a job in itself...
...The plan was that, once she got a job, she would work at it for a while before quitting and writing about it...
...She wonders, is it something about my résum...
...Here's what Barbara Alexander's finally said: "Seasoned consultant with experience in Event Planning, Public Relations, and Speechwriting is prepared to provide leadership advancing company brand and image...
...So she changed legally back to her birth name, Barbara Alexander, and got a Social Security card that matched...
...Am I not plucky, resourceful, even a wee bit charismatic...
...Her rules decreed that she would "do everything possible to land a job," that she would "go anywhere for a job or even an interview," and that she would "take the first job I was offered that met my requirements as to income and benefits...
...She would work at home: no salary, no benefits, no office...
...At the outset Ehrenreich had one tremendous advantage over people who really are unemployed: she had experienced none of the well-known psychological damage suffered by the jobless...
...Or they might put all the family savings into a franchise deal and try to run a fast-food operation or a UPS/box store, most of which go broke or else rarely produce more than $30,000 a year for the people who work those ten-to-twelve-hour days...
...The middleclass unemployed feel betrayed because they have been taught that hard work will be rewarded with security...
...She studies its Web site and comes up with a "serious and mature" pitch about how to improve its public image...
...the state of your finances, your personal relationships, your professional life—all of it is your doing, yours and no one else's...
...This advice turns out to be true...
...Ehrenreich asks...
...Barbara, it turns out, has problems not only with her "Dress for Success" outfit— slacks don't match jacket—but her makeup kit is examined and found to be pathetic...
...This is another first-person story about Barbara going underground into the world of work and taking notes...
...Barbara comes from the world of writers, where the rules of dress are, you might say, loose...
...So the working class traditionally has relied more on networks of mutual help— on family and community and sometimes even on unions...
...Three million Americans annually are given the Myers-Briggs test, which is used by eighty-nine of the Fortune top one hundred corporations...
...Ehrenreich finds that the test "possess [es] not a shred of scientific respectability...
...The biggest problem of the résumé is concealing "gaps"—periods in which the applicant was not working...
...Career coaching is a profession in which one can earn a certificate...
...Why don't the corporations value achievement and effectiveness over likability...
...Ehrenreich's recommendations are not particularly original, but they take on considerable force coming after such a vivid and compelling picture of a situation that is so quiet, so widespread, and so desperate...
...But of course she knows that, after six months of unemployment, the real Barbara Alexanders of the world would have a hard time turning down a commission-only job selling insurance...
...This is a hard question to answer...
...This is a tricky area, because too feminine means not being taken seriously as an expert or authority figure...
...After paying the $1200 and perfecting her résumé and covering up the gaps, she finds a book titled Don't Send a Resume, which says that résumés get treated as "junk mail" and that people who send them out don't even get rejection letters...
...How do you follow that up...
...The best networking of course is not with other unemployed people but with businesspeople, managers, corporate people...
...The job turns out not to be in "Event Planning, Public Relations, and Speechwriting...
...Special expertise in health policy and healthrelated issues, with a track record of high-level national exposure...
...The feeling is one of complete invisibility and futility" To her horror, she finds herself thinking that the problem is herself...
...most simply get ignored...
...So she turns to more experts, to get training in femininity...
...Ehrenreich's first discovery was the immense world of "help" for white-collar job seekers: "career coaches," résumé writers, networking advisers—a world that calls itself the "transition industry...
...Armed now with her endlessly polished résumé, her just-feminine-enough outfit, and her training in likability, Barbara spends six months looking—and finally lands an interview...
...Then she had to come up with a plausible set of skills...
...Nickel and Dimed described in an irresistible style the author's firsthand experience of work at the bottom of the ladder— as a waitress, a house cleaner, a Wal-Mart worker...
...But they don't...
...106 DISSENT / Winter 2006...
...Barbara sends out résumés by the hundreds, but she never gets rejected—not in the sense of having been considered "and found wanting...
...When I complimented her, she confessed it was a nightgown, which was obvious on closer inspection...
...It is part of an old and honorable leftwing genre that includes Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and Michael Harrington's The Other America...
...What do you do for a sequel...
...Barbara is supposed to organize her life around the requirements of this new job: get up on time, get dressed, sit down at the computer, and look for a job...
...The working class knows that's not really true—they see every day that good, hardworking people get screwed by their employers...
...She was not in danger of depression, divorce, or drug abuse...
...THERE THE STORY ENDS...
...Even when things are getting more hopeless, even when the darkness is gathering, you must act DISSENT / Winter 2006 105 optimistic and cheerful—or else those white men who do the hiring won't like you...
...Apparently it gives managers and executives a veneer of objectivity for the arbitrary decisions they make about hiring and firing...
...too feminine means not intelligent...
...Just when you finally have a chance to be fully autonomous and possibly creative, for a few months anyway, you have to invent a little drama in which you are still toiling away for the man...
...His most recent book is Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud and Politics in the Ivory Tower (New Press, 2005...
...Ehrenreich asks, whose ideology is this...
...people are "in transition...
...It's still on the paperback best-seller list...
...If you don't get a job, it's because you're not likable...
...She planned to devote ten months and five thousand dollars for travel and expenses to the job search...
...Any kind of gap, for any reason —raising children, taking care of elderly parents, sickness—is "unforgivable...
...Could it be my appearance—not feminine enough...
...She also had one serious disadvantage: she was a middle-aged woman who, her story went, had been out of the work force for a while...
...This brings out the Thoreau in Ehrenreich, who muses that "the one great advantage of unemployment—the freedom to do as you please, to get up when you want, wear what you want, and let your mind drift here and there—is foreclosed...
...The meeting includes some anti-Semitic chuckling, too...
...For this project, Ehrenreich made some rules for herself: she needed a new identity, so that potential employers wouldn't be able to Google her...
...The first step for transition industry professionals who know that the problem is you is to administer personality tests to see what "you" have to offer...
...The last book was about her experience of blue-collar employment...
...One of the things that makes the new book grimmer is that the world of the white-collar unemployed is one of isolated, inexpressive, depressed people fighting a losing battle against "negative" thoughts...
Vol. 53 • January 2006 • No. 1
