The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt
256 pp., $23
By Kim Phillips-Fein
In 1867, E.L. Godkin published an essay in North American Review trying to explain why the United States lacked the “intense class feeling” of European nations. Godkin, editor of the then-fledgling Nation magazine, might have been surprised by the past year in American journalism, which saw The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times each devote a series to the problem of class in America today. While each series had its strengths, each was bedeviled by a vague definition of class. What, after all, is class? Is it a cultural identity, an economic position, an income level? Does showing how lives are shaped by economic factors mean that “class matters,” as The New York Times titled its series? Or does class necessarily involve some idea of politics? Each series brimmed with statistical data and illustrative anecdotes, but often it was hard to know how to connect all the numerical indicators of class with the fragmentary narratives of individuals’ lives.
Are there ways to write about class that avoid these pitfalls? One exemplary alternative appeared back in 2001: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich has spent most of her life reporting about class in America. But in Nickel and Dimed, she went undercover in the world of low-wage workers, getting a job as a waitress, a maid, and a Wal-Mart “associate.” By discussing her own experiences among the ranks of the working poor, Ehrenreich was able to write about class — about the monotony of a bad job, the daily struggle to survive, and the fragility of the social position of people on the bottom — in a way that escaped the narrative of upward mobility and the statistical measures of class pegged to it.
Ehrenreich’s new book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, is also about class. Once again, she reports on her experiences going incognito. But this time she has infiltrated a world that, one imagines, will be far more familiar to her readers: the world of the white-collar middle class, the middle managers of corporate America. The premise of Bait and Switch is that there is as much outrage to expose in cubicles of major corporations as in the service sector. While things don’t turn out exactly as Ehrenreich had expected, her book still reveals the strength of long-form reporting for showing how social forces bear down to shape an individual’s life.
Ehrenreich decided to go undercover as a white-collar worker after she received a letter from a reader daring her to “try investigating people like me who didn’t have babies in high school.” The letter intrigued Ehrenreich. Blue-collar poverty can always be dismissed as the product of people’s poor choices — having a child early, not going to college, failing to save money. But what about people who “did everything right,” who went to college, picked the prudent major, and tried to succeed? What happens when things don’t work out for them?
The bet was on. Ehrenreich constructed a new identity (she changed her legal name to her maiden name, Barbara Alexander, and got a new Social Security card), asked friends to serve as faux references on her résumé, and endeavored to get a job in public relations. She set a few ground rules: she would do everything possible to land a job, go anywhere in the country, and take the first job that she was offered with a minimum annual salary of $50,000.
But there was a hitch. After almost a year on the market, Ehrenreich wasn’t offered a single corporate job. It wasn’t for lack of trying. She hired several career coaches and attended networking sessions; still, she was unable to find gainful employment. Lest we think her difficulties were unique to her situation — why would someone with no connections or experience think she could get a decent middle-manager job right off the bat? — Ehrenreich contacts all the job-seekers whose cards she collected along the way. None of the eleven people who responded to her have found a decent corporate job; they are all still searching, or else they have taken low-wage jobs in the service sector, working at retail chains or grooming dogs or driving a limousine.
As Barbara Alexander, Ehrenreich inhabits what one fellow job-seeker calls “the land of the undead,” and uncovers outposts there that most journalists would have trouble learning about. She ferrets out the “career ministry” of the McLean Bible Church in northern Virginia, which urges people to turn their job searches over to God. She encounters a seminar in crisis management for public-relations executives, helping them learn to “cope” with the antiglobalization movement and hostility toward corporations (the seminar is incongruously led by the son of a blue-collar man who tells the audience that “if you want to see democracy in action, go to a union meeting”).
And she learns a variety of lessons from career counselors and executive boot-camp advisers. For one, it is precisely when “in transition” — a white-collar worker is never “unemployed” — that the Protestant work ethic must be strongest. Finding a job, in fact, can be more work than having one. As one book on job searching puts it, “If you have a job, then you might have the luxury of working 9:00 to 5:00. If you’re getting a job, then plan on twelve to sixteen hours a day.”
But despite this stern emphasis on discipline at the very moment when one has the least to do, what Ehrenreich hears repeatedly is that getting a job is a matter of personality, not of skills or knowledge. And so the mentality of the job-searcher is under constant scrutiny: Are you perky enough, confident enough, happy enough (although unemployed) to get a job? Potential employers ruthlessly search out and discard candidates who display the merest hint of ambivalence. The inner life of the supplicant must not wilt before the harsh reality of the world. All unemployed people, therefore, are in the unenviable position of the fallen sinner, at the same time desperately scrutinizing their souls to make sure they do not sin again.
Ehrenreich has written about the plight of the middle class before, in her 1989 book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. It dealt with the neuroses of professors, doctors, teachers, lawyers — all members of the professional middle class, struggling to distinguish themselves from the poor below them and the hedonistic rich above. Written at the end of the Reagan era, Fear of Falling was a work of historical sociology and political analysis. Bait and Switch is different in several ways. It is about people in the world of the corporate middle class — people who have surrendered any hope of autonomy or pleasurable work at the outset, trading it in for a chance at a well-paid corporate job. And where Fear of Falling was directly critical of the middle classes, Bait and Switch is a story of pathos.
In Bait and Switch the strategy of undercover reporting enables Ehrenreich to embody the dilemma of the declining middle class. As a temporary inhabitant of the white-collar world, she experiences firsthand the powerlessness of people whose life choices have been shaped by the dream of material security, as they watch that hope slip away. Reporting from the outside would not reveal this inner tragedy. What Ehrenreich has found is something that can’t be gleaned from reams of data about levels of middle-class income and unemployment. It is nothing other than an intense class feeling — a sense of shame and anger that verges on despair.
Kim Phillips-Fein is an assistant professor of American history at the Gallatin School of New York University. She is writing a book about the role of business in the modern conservative movement.
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