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Review:
Author, scientist and jorunalist Barbara Ehrenreich,
complete with the pride of her career and Ph. D. in Biology, went underground
and lived a minimum wage life in several states to find out if people really
can fairly be expected to “make it” on their own. The specific context for
her journalism project was, of course, welfare reform: the laws sweeping most
states forcing people (most notably single mothers) off of welfare after five
years to go back to work. But there is a broader context regarding social
justice in a competitive meritocracy that is quite disturbing indeed.
She tried various jobs—waitressing,
cleaning, minimum wage retailing—in some states such as Florida, Maine, and
Minnesota, and at the same time attempted to live on the minimum wage by
living in substandard housing such as trailer parks and shared rooms.
Consistently, she found that she was treated with suspicion by all employers,
with their “survey” personality tests, drug screening, suspicion of theft,
draconian rules about “gossip” and even bathroom breaks. And not
surprisingly, she could not find acceptable housing on her own, a situation
that could not work for families or single mothers.
There is a bigger context to all of this
than just welfare reform. Here is a hint:
“But guilt doesn’t go anywhere near far
enough: the appropriate emotion is shame—shame at our own dependency, in this
case, on the underpaid labor of others.” (P. 201).
I used to hear this all the time from
the far left in my young adulthood, that even the middle class, not just the
rich, consisted of parasites who lived off the toil of others. What seems
scary, then, during this time of war, recession, corporate scandals, the loss
of wealth, and endless layoffs is falling out of the middle class into the
poverty class and living out the rest of one’s life in some kind of servitude
without much self respect. As Ehrenreich points out, these jobs all
require extreme regimentation, that many “spoiled” middle class and upper
class people could not survive. (She points out the aerobic demands of
cleaning jobs and the mental concentration and memorization of retail—she
felt like she had “Alzheimer’s” while she has a Ph. D!) Yet, it does seem
that the poverty trap does extend much more to those with specific problems
beyond just job loss. The problems include lack of English skills, alcoholism
or drug dependency, mental illness, and sometimes physical unattractiveness
and handicap. The American paradigm is tell “fending for yourself”
and finding one’s special talents to bootstrap oneself out of the cellar. But
the merciless fact of logic is that, in a free society of “personal
responsibility” where there are winners, there will also be losers.
There is a lot of discussion these days
as “good” jobs, especially in information technology, are outsourced to lower
wage areas of the world. At the outset, American workers are now
competing with workers in part of the world where there is less individual
freedom and lower standards for employers in the workplace. Yes, as a matter
of principle, there should be minimum working conditions standards in
countries when we buy goods and services from companies that operate in those
countries. Imagine a time machine taking you to America before 1861
if you could “outsource” work to slaves in the South!
But it’s time to stop whining about
outsourcing! People used to moderate affluence and professional working
conditions may find themselves having to start over in the “low wage” world,
and accepting its regimentation (wearing uniforms, graveyard shifts,
time-clocks) or wind up homeless, without health care and possibly dying
prematurely and being unable to provide for a previously established family.
This is a kind of “free market” cultural revolution. Perhaps, besides labor
unions, the answer to improving working conditions at the low-wage end is to
induce more formerly middle class people to work in this world (and a few
executives, too!). Politicians are unwilling to talk about it with complete
candor, especially conservatives. It is very brutal! Individuals
are told that they are personally responsible for their own competitiveness
in a global marketplace, where people around the world have it much worse.
The fact is that anyone caught in this situation is facing competition for
his standard of living from other parts of the world that is becoming
increasingly resourceful and indignant. In the long run, exportation of jobs
this way does raise living standards worldwide by reducing costs for
everyone. If I buy inexpensive garments or electronics from overseas, if I
take advantage of low-cost technology to promote my writing, I have to face
the other side of this. In the long run, everyone has to get used to the idea
of “paying your dues” to benefit from global efficiency, and some people will
be dropped in the ditch along the way if they can’t compete as individuals as
others take away their opportunities (even as the total pot grows
slowly). It’s really always been that way. Remember how it was in
the days of Vietnam, what happened if you couldn’t compete in
academics.
Of course, politically we have to be
conscious of the ethics and human rights records of societies that we trade
with (and export jobs to). And people have a right to bargain collectively
for their jobs, pay, and working conditions. But union activism (possibly
leading to calls for protectionism) needs to be balanced by employee
education, professionalism, ability to keep up with technology, and downward
competency expectations. And even all of this is a two-way street.
The January 2004 The American
Prospect has a detailed account of the low-wage problem, “Can We
Give America a Raise?: The problem of low-wage work” with contributions by
Christopher Jencks, William Serrin, Harold Meyerson (on
Wal-Mart), Merrill Goozner, Ayelish McGarvey, Matthew Yglesias,
Joan FitzGerald, and Robert Kuttner.
On April 1, 2004 Jim
Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, author David Shipler discussed
his book The Working Poor: Invisible in
America (February, 2004, Knopf, ISBN 0375408908). One of his
points is that underpaid low-wage work artificially elevates living standards
for middle class and upper class Americans, and that corporations who
pay low wages and benefits are getting “corporate welfare” from government
who supplement care for the working poor. Furthermore, the lack of medical
care, poor diet, and other problems hamper the ability of low wage workers to
move up in a meritocratic society. Again, there is a temptation to bring on
the “pay your dues” type of thinking.
On Good Friday, April 14, 2006,
Oprah Winfrey had a segment (on ABC) on what it is like to live on a
minimum wage. Morgan Spurlock, from Supersize Me, and a girl
friend participated in a thirty day experiment in Chicago, where they
went to temp services for day labor and were not allowed bank accounts or
credit cards. They found a run down garden apartment for $325 a month. Both
had medical emergencies. Then they showed a working single mother living in a
homeless shelter, sharing a shower with twenty other people. The single
mother kept the child rather than put her in foster care. This was all definitely
a “paycheck to paycheck” existence in which it was easy to fall into the
hole. Then, Ophrah showed “raising a family of six on $9 an hour.”
The examples pointed out that hospital nurses aides, medical emergency
technicians, and nursing home and day care attendants make very little, as do
teachers’ aides. Sometimes these jobs involve giving custodial care and are
jobs that no one wants and may be held by illegal immigrants. Teachers’ aides
and public health attendants sometimes provide personal care to retarded
students. One minimum wage worker at age 22 had four kids
already.
Bait
and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (2005,
Henry Holt: Metropolitan, New York, ISBN 0805076969) is Ehrenreich’s sequel,
this time about downward mobility in the middle class, in the face of
corporate downsizings and buyouts, and especially offshoring, all
motivated by short-term thinking and investor capitalism.
Here, Ehrenreich posed as a
job seeker, looking for a communications job with a major corporation,
perhaps a pharmaceutical company or a hospital chain. She went through the
outplacement and headhunter companies, the boot camps, the networking, some
of it even “faith based.” She took the personality tests. Not to her surprise
but perhaps her chagrin, she found all of this conducted in very bad faith.
Plenty of career consultants were all too happy to collect thousands of
(fake) dollars from her for all kinds of advice ranging from resumes to
interview styles to dress and appearance. The corporate world seem to be like
a popover appetizer for dinner—a lot of air and not too much substance. The
recruiting practices seemed not to even make real business sense.
Particularly disturbing is the
intellectual dishonesty of the endeavors. Barbara, after characterizing
herself as a writer, early on distinguishes between journalism, which is
supposed to be objective and faithful to the truth, and public relations, in
which one is paid to announce the company line. Toward the end of
the book she characterizes what companies seem to be looking for, as
“passion,” a willingness and eagerness to put the company’s aims above all
else.
I have encountered some of this since my
own “retirement” at the end of 2001. I went through the outplacement
companies and interviews that ended in sudden disappointment. Trying to tack
on to I.T., I encountered a system where people move to distant cities for
W-2 contracts with no benefits, and where very specific technical matches are
required for the job. But, because of my twelve years in insurance, I have
also been approached at least twice to become financial planning advisor and
life insurance agent. One company would have paid for all my training but
would have prohibited my having any outside income (even when all of my income
would come from commissions), an arrangement which would prevent my pursuing
attempts to sell my own writing. They said this was required by securities
law but I suspect they wanted my soul.
Ehrenreich talks about some of
these Faustian deals, as she found a couple of these “jobs” herself toward
the end of her search. She recommends much more political and social
solidarity among the middle class, whose members have gotten used to
competing with each other individually as a kind of social Darwinism exercise.
She also mentions Chaiman Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s,
where professionals and intellectuals were forced to toil in the countryside
as a kind of political purification brought on by their having been
“parasites” on the manual labor of others.
This last point seems relevant to me.
When I worked as an individual contributor in information technology, with no
direct reports or public visibility or sales culture, I still made six or
seven times what minimum wage workers get, with good benefits. Of course,
too, we have outsourced out dirty work to near slave-like conditions
overseas. The “decadent middle class” offers a personal moral hazard;
executives can tap our moral vulnerability. I sensed this in the late 1980s
when (my career seemingly threatened by leveraged buyouts and hostile
takeovers) I would work so much unpaid overtime to keep my own systems
perfect, because weaker programmers were already falling out. I got a break
in the 1990s partly because of the Internet and partly because Y2K concerns
kept my skills in demand until after the millennium turn.
I would find myself, while making myself
indispensable in a world of numbers and dumps, working alone, drifting away
from socialization and meeting the needs of others, in order to enjoy a relatively
sheltered, comfortable lifestyle. Even I could make enemies this way. Things
changed after 9/11 for me. What is needed to get the social justice
that Ehrenreich seeks through political solidarity is a way to hold
every individual person accountable for any advantages he or she had, by
expecting the sharing of burdens in an individual way. This is the “pay your
dues” philosophy. It would seem that Ehrenreich missed the
opportunity to argue along this subtle path.
Two more recent books in this area are:
Uchitelle, Peter. The Disposable
American: Layoffs and their Consequences. New York:
Knopf, 2002. A
portion was printed in The New York Times business
section, March 26, 2005, “Retraining Laid-Off Workers, But for What?”
Bibliography: New York: Knopf, 2006. ISBN 1-4000-4117-1, 283 pages incl.
endnotes and index, hardcover.
This book contains a lot of detailed
anecdotes that trace the history of job market stability since the depression
era. In the 1970s, during the period of stagflation and oil shocks, a new
kind of economic warfare started that again pitted capital against people. At
least, that’s the typical left wing perspective. The book rambles, but it
hits hard a few points. Most of all, on page 7:
“The new economic theory, making each
worker responsible for his or her own job security, interacted fatally with
actual layoff experience. Layoffs, we are told, do not happen to people who
improve their skills and are flexible, innovative, congenial, and
hardworking. The layoff says you have failed in those endeavors, no matter
how hard you tried to follow the prescription.”
The author proceeds to present many case
histories of individuals with at best dubious success in getting back on
their feet, both in blue collar and white collar areas. He maintains that
there are not enough high-paying jobs to go around for the highly educated or
well-trained. He views early retirements as hidden layoffs, as are the ends
of W-2 contracts, common in information technology. He mentions a lot of
interesting details, such as outplacement firms like Right Management and
also the idea that sometimes older people engineer their own layoffs to
increase their severance and start over.
He does make some progressive
recommendations toward the end of the book. Particularly, employers (even
privately held ones) should be required to provide detailed labor accounting
of their hiring. Minimum wages should rise, as should the progressivity of
the income tax over certain levels (now $150000). I do like the idea of the
detailed labor accounting, because having the information on the table will
help people figure out what is really going on.
I went thirty years (from 1971 to 2001)
without another layoff, after one layoff in early 1971, but my “retirement”
was terminal was far as a conventional IT career was concerned. I did make a
few prophylactic resignations, and a couple of them may have been
questionable. (One consulting company that I left in 1990 turned around and
did very well later after Clinton tried to sell his health care plan.)
In information technology, there is a
tendency for employers to look for contractors to fit very specific
short-term needs. Candidates must match a list of requirements exactly to get
a position. Some of this “objectivity” is motivated by discrimination laws.
But systems could be developed to match these employer requirements to school
and outplacement training resources in much more detail than in the past.
My perspective on this is mixed, with
layers of subtlety. For example, if you have a career as an analyst or
technical person say, in life insurance, you may find that people will
pressure to consider selling insurance post “retirement.” It’s
attractive to push people into jobs that pay by commission only, because they
are easy to budget. But many “content oriented” people (myself included) are
not temperamentally suited to “peddle” other people’s
products and services by manipulating the demand of others. This can create
issues if someone is drawing unemployment.
There are philosophical issues to
consider, also, when people invest their own resources to start business or
pursue their own dreams (let’s say, making a movie). The same forces that
drive conventional jobs overseas do make possible opportunities for “average
people” not imagined in the past. A person’s presence on the Internet can
also affect his or her employability, depending on what career is desired;
this is another problem showing up with social networking sites and students,
and employers checking people with Google.
Beth Shulman: The
Betrayal of Work: How Low Paid Jobs Fail 30 Million Americans (New York: The
New Press, 2005, ISBN 1-56584-735-4), 254 pgs, soft, 5 x 8, index, endnotes,
text ends at p 184). Ms. Shulman gives a somewhat telescoped,
textbook exposition and development of the low-wage issue, without the
personal perspective of the Ehrenreich books, and it seems a
bit partisan, perhaps. She does explain how we have allowed our standard
of living to depend on the underrewarded labor of many jobs:
janitor, hostel domestic, fast-food worker, call center rep, convenience
store clerk, poultry factory, day care worker and nursing home attendant. She
makes a good point of the fact that before 9/11, we had auctioned our airline
security off to the lowest bidders with our “market” solutions.
One background trend, not always clear
when dealing with specific issues, is that employers had tended to offload
their costs onto employees. Employers maintain that they can offer more jobs
if they do not have to pay benefits (indeed, the benefits came into being in
a time when there was a big demand for workers). They could sometimes avoid
layoffs by paying only commissions or “piece work.” We saw this argument in
the 1990s. Sales jobs are always easier to budget than true “production.”
The underlying question is: to what
extent is this a political issue, and when it is a personal
morality issue? One obvious issue is illegal immigration: it is
easier to allow it and have a caste society. Another is the rise and fall of
labor unions, and their lack of effectiveness. Still another is globalization
and competition with cheap labor overseas—which starts to invoke the personal
moral question since consumers take advantage of these products. Another
would tie to other political debates, such as universal health care. She
starts her last chapter with a “Compact with Working Americans.”
But it is not possible to propose
political solutions without hidden invocation of the issues of personal and
particularly family responsibility. Ideas like the Dependent Care
Tax Credit and proposals for paid family leave all would result in persons
without children making more financial sacrifices to help those with
children. At a couple points, the author grazes by the “family wage” issue
(she calls it the “family supporting wage”). One problem is that
increasing regulation to protect workers could interfere with small business
or with entrepreneurs. In some scenarios, I might no longer have the freedom
to run this website. The other way that her discussion grazes on personal accountability
is her criticism of depending on volunteerism. The Bush administration has
indeed pushed faith-based volunteer initiatives, has encourage individuals to
get involved in mentoring low-income children (not necessarily a good idea
for everyone, and based on some naïve assumptions). Hurricane Katrina
resulted in enormous calls for volunteerism, for individuals to spend weeks
in the Gulf or to take in displaced persons into their homes; a bird flu
pandemic could make demands on those who have been exposed but who have
recovered (becoming immune) to provide care.
Deeper moral questions, however, concern
how we tie self-worth to work and the whole low-wage problem. I digress a
moment, to mention that after my “retirement” in 2001 I had to encounter the
issues of the low-wage workplace. I worked for a year in telefunding for
a symphony orchestra, for minimum wage plus commissions. It wasn’t that bad,
but I would hear at least one coworker say, “the people that work here aren’t
bad people, but this [a phone bank job] is the only kind of job they can
get.” Then I would work a while for a reputable collection agency (there has
been a lot of press about bad ones) and deal with the regimentation of
staying on the phones and placing at least 175 calls a day. It could have
been worse. I would apply for a job with the post office as a letter carrier
and be warned how “physical” the job is. I would take the test to become
a TSA screener and fail that test—possibly the part on recognizing
bags because I had never had the training. All not good. Can I pay my dues?
That’s what my own father had called
“learning to work.” I think I caught on quickly as a teenager that we had a
caste system, and that family values were invoked to help support it. In my
own adult life, I would learn the indignation of the Left, that the burdens
of dangerous and menial labor-intensive jobs are not shared more equitably at
a personal level. What we have today is a “free market cultural revolution,”
perhaps, with a little spice of the self-righteous justice of Chairman Mao.
Shulman mentions the “contempt”
that many employers have for low-wage workers, which sometimes extends to a
lot of us personally. To put it bluntly, they might be seen as persons who
failed to “compete” as individuals (although that hardly makes sense when
talking about immigrants from poor countries and especially illegal
immigrants). It can be reciprocated. I experienced a lot of contempt from
low-income minority students (with subsequent discipline problems) when I
substitute taught, because I had not “paid my dues” to their
world. Sharing of these kinds of skills makes sense if one expects
a major disruption of our interdependent infrastructure, whether from
terrorism, a pandemic, or other natural disasters.
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