Editorial: American workers, you're saved! Journalists are here to rescue you!

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Manufacturing News, Source : The Manufacturer US
Zone : Leadership and strategy
Published : 26 Jun 2007 17:32

"Today's ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding 'surplus' people. Join UP and me to make our education, our families and our professions matter again," beseeches Barbara Ehrenreich

UP is United Professionals, and Ehrenreich, a self-proclaimed activist and an anti-corporate noodge, one of its founders. She is the author of "Nickel and Dimed" and "Bait and Switch," two books writing about how US corporations screw workers.

This is a popular theme, but not an especially gutsy stand. You'll always find friends by claiming that industry has its hobnailed boot on the throat of the worker.

I had the pleasure of attending one of Ehrenreich's lectures in a church in Cambridge, Mass, and on the Harvard campus. She had just relesed her "Bait and Switched," a piece of "immersion journalism," in which she attempted to pass herself off as a PR professional, and applied for vice presidencies, seemingly for the sheer joy of not getting the jobs and being able to complain about it.

Immersion journalism is a dubious journalistic technique. The journalist jumps in to see "what it's like," to be old, to be poor, etc., which presumes the old and poor can't speak for themselves.

Sometimes, the journalist goes in through the front door, announced. George Plimpton famously trained with the Detroit Lions in 1963 as a backup quarterback, and slowed down an exhibition game. He revealed little about being an NFL player, but revealed much about being a pantywaist being hazed by NFL players.

More often than not, immersion journalish is secretive. She mocked up a supposedly impressive CV and "infiltrated" the PR world in a jobhunt, with little success. One company offered to take her on spec. Few others interviewed her more than once. This, she speculated, was because she was female, too old, too expensive, too experienced, ad nauseum.

My guess: they saw through her clever disguise. As I pointed out in the Q&A session at her talk, PR his a highly insular business that collects and trades management. Someone around 60 who's qualified for a VP job should be practically famous. Anyone who isn't is probably a liar.

Ms. Ehrenreich gamely acknowledged that she didn't know everything about PR and perhaps I could offer a hint or two. "Smile," I said, but have yet to see her do it.

She nodded her head sympathetically as a young adjunct professor described being without health benefits - not traditionally given with a part-time job, but it seems that healthcare oughtta be plentiful, top-quality and free. Ehrenreich nearly choked back tears as she described how millions of commissioned salespeople purchase their own insurance, forced to "labor...(choke)...labor under these conditions." Applause.

See, here's where this goes wrong. Yes, there are plenty of people unqualified for government programs, who find themselves bankrupted by healthcare costs. For example, a nanny I know, who had to return to teaching, not by choice. But the commission salespeople I know from marketing enterprise software saw themselves as lone rangers. Freelancers. They described themselves as their own bosses, masters of their own destinies, and one fellow I keep in touch with was amused at the idea that he was downtrodden.

This all adds up to a prejudice, about industry, about corporate America, that it means to squeeze out as much from a worker as possible while paying as little as possible. "Lean" is such a device, never mind that it is key to our global competitiveness. Freelancers are helpless and exploited - no, never mind how content you feel or how much you earn, or how many people you employ or children you put through school, or where you take your vacations, you're exploited, you just don't know it.

"I can’t imagine getting involved in a problem as a journalist and not wanting to do something about it," writes Ehrenreich, "whether that means marching, picketing, leafleting, or helping build an organization for social change."

Well, United Professionals is that org, supposedly. But with a board of academics, labor attorneys and union organizers, it likely won't recognize a fair shake when it sees one.

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