Bait and Switch: a second look

I was too hasty in my previous post. The last chapter of Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch contains some provocative ideas. (Come to think of it, this was the problem with Nickeled and Dimed too - her analysis of her experience, in the final chapter, was a lot more interesting than the bland details of the indignities she suffered. Sometimes common experiences aren't bonding; they are just boring.)

Some observations:
1.If we can generalize from her experience and those of the job-seekers she met, corporate America is as age-biased as ever. This is a bigger and bigger problem on 2 fronts: there will be more and more middle-aged people in America; and people will work more and more years to close the pension gap and the impending blow-up of Social Security.

2.The old Weberian idea that "you work hard and you will be rewarded" is no longer true (if it ever was, although it's very much the foundation of the 20th century middle-class psyche) and white-collar workers, no less than blue-collar workers, have to adjust to uncertainty and a rapidly changing occupational mix. Their main loyalty must be to themselves (and their brand) because they will not get any loyalty from their corporation - they are completely expendable.

3.The white-collar unemployed could be a powerful force for social and economic change in this country. They have skills, education, intelligence, resources, access. Yet they tend to be marginalized into self-help job-seeking groups of the many kinds she journals. Moreover, the attitudes and activities of these job-seeking groups reinforce passivity, victimhood, isolation, and silence. Unemployment continues to be shameful, especially for white-collar workers, and especially for men.

4.Current corporate infrastructure (and accountability to shareholders) rewards job-cutting, which betters the short-term bottom line. No CEO ever got atta-boys from his board by saving jobs or cutting his own perks so that subordinates could remain employed.

5.Corporations blather endlessly about diversity and teamwork, but in fact LACK of diversity and individualism are what get you ahead.

6.Many of the so-called professions of corporate America don't have clearly defined tasks and barriers to entry (marketing, say, or PR) and thus employees in those fields are vulnerable to the perceptions, rather than the realities, of those evaluating them.

It would be useful to think about how these points could be tested and operationalized, as a part of the larger project of looking at sectoral shifts in labor markets.