>Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed examined this issue with its
>look at middle class professionals mired in the job market. When people
>weren't busy blaming themselves, they could get sucked into the industry
>designed to make money off of their job searches.
quibble: It was Bait and Switch. While I'd skimmed it when it first came out, I was short of cash and never bought it. Mired in the endless search for gigs and jobs, I didn't even find time to read the library copy I brought home once. This is pretty sad considering that she actually thanked me for research help inthe afterword. heh. I finally read it two weeks ago, prompted by that ridiculous review written by some conservative wanker that John Thornton forwarded.
I'm currently reading her Dancing in the Streets, btw. Will do a review when I finish.
here's a quickie on BandS. Bait and Switch starts out as Ehrenreich's attempt to get a job in the PR field. She'd been detailing the horrors visited upon blue and pink collar workers, as well as the lower strata of the white collar working class, for a couple of decades. A reader once said something like, "It's not so great being a white collar professional-managerial worker, either." (paraphrase) So, Ehrenreich decided to aggrandize her li'l ol' self some more and try to find work. She changed her name to Barbara Alexander and had some friends creatively lie for her so she had a resume. Essentially, the resume looked like that of someone who'd been the wife of a successful businessman: her 'jobs' were creatively packaged volunteer gigs, etc.
She never found a job, though technically she was offered work with AFFLAC (i'm too lazy to mosey over to the bookshelf to check spelling.) Basically, she wasn't given a job, but had to invest some money to sell insurance from her own home office. No insurance, no benefits, no nothing. An independent contractor. She never did the job since her the entirety of time she'd put aside for research was spent job hunting -- and taking up the services of job transition counselors, image advisers, and going to various support groups (paid and free) offered by job transition consultants, Christian business fellowships, and the National Assn for PR professionals (again: too lazy to look up exact name). She'd try to "network" and "work" her network but to little avail.
Ehrenreich is at her best when she is pissed off at the hurt done to working class folks, methinks. So the book isn't as funny and biting in its humor as Nickle and Dimed was. Ehrenreich just isn't as pissed off. And part of this is due to the utter isolation of job hunting. Even when you do go to networking events or group counseling sessions, the competition between individuals often means a good deal of isolation.
Reading Nickle and Dimed again, I found myself laughing out loud. Not so much with Bait and Switch -- though Ehrenreich always dazzles at self-ironic observation, of which there are plenty of moments for such in Bait and Switch. E.g., when contemplating how black her wardrobe is, or when she realized she'd gone for career fashion advice, wearing slacks with a broken zipper -- a defect normally hidden by a black pull over sweater, but exposed with a tucked in shirt and blazer.
She does a lot of navel gazing about her own inner struggles over whether to do some morally dubious work such as do PR work for drug companies, etc.
One thing I learned that, in all my reading of this in professional support networks for the IT industry, I'd never heard about: The utter bogosity of the Meyers Briggs personality tests that are ubiquitous in the larger organizations. I found it odd that no one ever brought this up. Email discussion lists for IT pros, etc. are hardly absent people critical of HR tactics, so I would have thought that someone would have pointed out, with a snarl, how utterly stupid they are. Not in 10 years belonging to such lists had I read anyone pointing it out.
Dancing in the Streets is a much different book and there are few places where she can exercise her considerable talent with flashes of sarcasm -- though I get the sense that its writing these histories and no ethnographies that she likes best. I think I forwarded her Harpers (I think) article where she speculates onthe possibility that depression is something that has been shaped by historical circumstances. That it isn't always with us in the same rates that it is now. That maybe depression rates emerge because of the decline of opportunities for expressions of collective joy.
http://pulpculture.org/blog -- now with 100% SFW!