It's ugly out there, you probably know that.
"Lisa" showed up to my high-school reunion with her handsome, personable husband and adorable children. But she looked somber.
The prominent technnology firm that employed her in its marketing division had been hemorraging very publicly in recent years.
"I've survived three rounds of lay-offs," Lisa told me. "I don't know from day-to-day if I'm going to be next." The situation was taking an obvious emotional toll on Lisa, and presumably, on her family, as well.
I remembered Lisa from high school. She had always been a can-do, practical, competitive type, with the energy of a cheerleader. She was a resourceful person. If working for this ailing firm was so demoralizing, why, I wondered, didn't Lisa just go out and get herself a different job?
The reason people in Lisa's situation hang on for dear life, asserts Barbara Ehrenreich, in her 2005 book Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, is that the economy is shedding these comfortable middle-class jobs that sustained our parents, and that Lisa assumed would sustain her. Once we had unions and a civil employment culture that recognized workers' rights. Today the corporations are running the show. They're drumming the personnel "fat" out, and they're globalizing, ruthlessly.
In writing the book, Ehrenreich posed for many months as a middle-aged professional job-seeker, doing everything a reasonable person in her situation would do to land good work. She was willing to relocate. But she got no real interviews, much less job offers.
Ehrenreich criticizes a contemporary job-seekers' culture that doesn't take new economic realities into consideration, but instead blames jobless, or unsatisfactorily employed, professionals for their own problems. "You are your own worst enemy," is advice Ehrenreich hears repeatedly in at least one "career-change" seminar she attends.
"Ehrenreich's previous book, 'Nickled and Dimed,' we've barely been able to keep on the shelves, but 'Bait and Switch' isn't moving as fast," the guy at my neighborhood bookstore told me. "I think it's uncomfortable reading for people, it hits way too close to home."
The reception 'Bait and Switch' is getting, among the middle-class professionals who buy popular nonfiction titles, surprises me not at all.
We're in America. You alone are responsible for whatever's wrong in your life, and you're supposed to "fix" it privately, maybe with some paid helper like a coach or therapist. Books that sell, they tell you how to do that.
A collective sense of helplessness here has driven the appeal of the contemporary "you create your own reality" myth. I believe it was absolutely no coincidence that the 80s saw the real flowering of a faddish, blame-the-victim culture of self-help. During the Reagan-Bush years the interests of big money encroached unchecked on human and civil rights. Progressive activism seemed all but moribund. If your job or relationship problems were entirely personal, anyway, at least you stood a chance of making them better.
In the "Adult Children of Alcoholics" meetings that were all the rage at the time, I personally recall hearing social activism disparaged by group participants as "trying to save the world," when (ahem) you were supposed to be "working on yourself."
No prudent person would deny that "working one oneself" is a very good, necessary thing; we might actually need therapists and 12-Step meetings in the world. But introspection can't take the place of a serious analysis of social realities that determine one's personal struggles, though it's touted, deplorably, as doing just that.
Barbara Ehrenreich, and a sprinkling of others, write analyses of upsetting mundane circumstances that people can relate to, like joblessness, which strike us today as oddly anachronistic, or "60s-esque." The books are scary and challenging, in ways that psycho-babble about "self-esteem" is not. But the message is eerily hopeful, too.
The last two chapters of "Bait and Switch" are the best. When Ehrenreich talks about the ascendance of a prospective employee's supposed "personality fit" at a workplace, over and above the candidate's actual skills, as determining hiring decisions today, bells rang all over the place for me. But it was Ehrenreich's denunciation of "passion" as a sacrosanct personal quality for a professional job candidate that stopped me dead in my tracks.
Your corporate employer can work you to the bone, slash your health benefits, and lay you off at a whim, and you're supposed to have "passion" for your job.
Ehrenreich was writing about basic human dignity here.
I groom my skills to put to the service of an employer. Thank you, my "passion" is personal. I don't "groom" it for anyone.