The white-collar blues

BACK in 1989, Barbara Ehrenreich’s magisterial “Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class” charted the emergence of a “meaner, more selfish outlook, hostile to the aspirations of those less fortunate” among the professional-managerial classes.

Sixteen years later, the white-collar class is reaping its share of the political and economic pain its changed mood has abetted. The corporate world is nowadays subject to “a perpetual winnowing,” as Ehrenreich puts it in “Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream,” expelling, with a terrifying indiscriminateness, even the most efficient workers, in good economic times and bad. It all amounts, Ehrenreich writes in her follow-up to the bestselling first-person account of the working poor, “Nickel and Dimed,” to a “rude finger in the face of the American dream.”

An unspoken part of “Nickel and Dimed’s” appeal was how it fed an almost prurient fascination with the bodily pain inflicted on the middle-class’s underlings. Watching the respected author sweat-soaked in stifling heat, forbidden to take a drink of water, on her hands and knees while scrubbing a linoleum floor, made visible something that is always right in the open but invisible to middle-class eyes. The appropriate response to our blindness is, as Ehrenreich put it, “shame” -- but the images linger on in the reader’s mind partly because of the visceral jolt they deliver.

Such dire immediacy is missing from “Bait and Switch,” which focuses on the subtler psychological exactions made on the dignity of the middle class. We watch as Ehrenreich posts her resume at Monster.com and HotJobs, consults “career coaches,” labors over her (concocted) resume and 30-second “elevator speech,” attends networking events and “boot camps,” and receives a business-professional image makeover.

She skewers the florid inanity of much that she encounters with her characteristic wit, painting a picture of a corporate world “paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking.” The world she describes demands absolute obedience (in marked contrast to the “rules-breaking” cant of the new economy-era managerial gurus), which it repays with absolute indifference.

The leader of a job “boot camp” dispenses a putrid melange of New Age mind-cure that dominates the “transition industry” (“Every unit increase in your personal sense of well-being increases your external performance exponentially,” expressed in the style of a formula, “EP/PSWB”) and turns out to be himself a psychologically broken man. Workers are urged never to blame their employers or the economy for their straitened condition, lest bitterness infect the “winning attitude” they must at all times exude.

The obfuscatory jargon serves a transparent purpose -- to present as inevitable and thus beyond politics the one-sided withdrawal of the social contract that used to assign mutual responsibilities to employers and workers. The white-collar job-seeker faces, she notes, “far more intrusive psychological demands than a laborer or clerk.” Browbeaten from all sides to display “cheerfulness, upbeatness, and compliance,” submissive employees turn out to be the easiest to fire.

Ehrenreich’s next foray, into the faith-based job-networking scene, is both sad and farcical. She is enjoined to “network with the Lord” and is exposed to lecture topics such as “how clutter can be an obstacle to God’s grace,” with a smattering of racism, sexism and homophobia to wash it all down. One wonders what the Jesus Christ who smashed the money-changers’ tables in the Temple would have made of all this.

After seven months of searching, only two “jobs” call her back -- both sales positions without benefits, offices or guaranteed salaries. One is for Mary Kay cosmetics, the other for Aflac insurance.

It’s hard to know exactly how to apply the lesson of her example. That a woman in late middle age with a fake resume that edits out and replaces her worldly accomplishments with fictitious “consulting work” -- and maybe I’m too easily buying into the corrupt realities Ehrenreich is protesting here -- can’t find a job in her chosen field doesn’t feel so surprising.

Ehrenreich makes her experience an effective window into the corporate world by mixing in reportage of her fellow job seekers’ often heart-rending predicaments and apt quotations from other books on the subject. But she never quite manages to arouse the vivid indignation of parts of “Nickel and Dimed.”

She closes the book with a handful of common-sensical political proposals -- universal health insurance, expansion of unemployment benefits -- and suggests turning the unemployed into an activist cadre. After chronicling what she sees as the acquiescence of the white-collar unemployed, she urges on them “the courage to come together and work for change, even in the face of overwhelming odds.” The call has a certain sadly perfunctory ring to it.

For the last 30 years, Ehrenreich has insisted that when workers think only to save themselves and push economic pain onto others, we all lose together. And then she’s gone and tallied up the costs of our failure to learn this simple lesson. Though “Bait and Switch” isn’t her most compelling book, it’s an honorable addition to an essential body of work. We need her lonely, eloquent voice, but more than this, we need others to join in and many more to begin heeding it. *