Alan Wolfe and Tyler Cowen are “discussing”:http://www.slate.com/id/2125041/entry/2125046/ Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Bait and Switch”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805076069/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ on Slate this week. The book is a kind of white-collar counterpart to Nickel and Dimed, where Ehrenreich tries to get a job (using an invented identity) in the media/public relations sector. Neither Wolfe nor Cowen is much impressed by the result, so I wonder whether they’ll be able to keep agreeing with each other about this for the next few days.
Today, Tyler opens his comments by saying, “We still need a good book on why white-collar workers are having a harder time finding jobs.” I suggest Vicki Smith’s Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy, which does what Ehrenreich is trying to do, only — if Tyler’s characterization of Bait and Switch is accurate — with more nuance and better methods. Smith is a sociologist at U.C. Davis. Her book looks at the efforts of non-union, white-collar workers to build careers for themselves at three companies (including a photocopy service firm and a computer outfit) and a job-search club. It’s a clear and nuanced piece of work, and it might be what Tyler is looking to read. (The next few paragraphs draw on an unpublished discussion of mine about the book.)
Smith found that the labor market was indeed an uncertain and difficult one for all the workers she interviewed:
bq. [T]he reality is that institutional, structural insecurity is an unrelenting possibility … What looks like a good contract for workers — participate, give extra effort and intensity to the job, sweat over production glitches and outcomes, all in return for being admitted to a partnership with management — is a contract betrayed when employment security is replaced with uncertainty or termination. (Smith 2001, 176-77.)
But Smith also discovered that many interviewees “were willing to adapt to
uncertainty because they felt they were gaining skills and insights that would allow them to maintain a solid footing in the new economy” (9). Moreover, many were “poised and willing to experiment, to undertake new responsibilities, to be held more accountable, and to identify their interests with those of their employers if they perceived that employers were committed to working with workers and not against them and to building quality work environments” (175).
Smith had expected labor market conditions to push workers towards collective action in an effort to insulate themselves from labor market instability. The absence of such efforts is partly explained by structural features of the labor market. Temp workers, for instance, routinely move from project to project, which makes it difficult to begin organizing. But the self-conception and choices of workers are also important. The Temps that Smith studied thought of themselves as good workers who were more reliable than the stereotypical “bad Temp.” They preferred to identify themselves with permanent workers or even management rather than with other Temps (114-116).
In general, workers were prepared to act on new economy rhetoric, though not in all circumstances. The work environment and its institutional setting were important to their willingness to do all that was demanded of them. Smith’s research deliberately tries to go beyond the good jobs vs bad jobs debate, arguing that “it is time to consider the possibility that these elements are planted side-by-side in dissimilar cases, not separated off with unquestionably ‘good’ jobs and work settings on one side and unquestionably ‘bad’ jobs and work settings on the other” (7).
{ 6 comments }
paul 09.07.05 at 11:22 am
One of the enormous propaganda successes of white-collar employers (in the US, at least) is the myth that professionalism precludes collective action. There are a few fields where it hasn’t become pervasive (including teaching), but in general it’s a given.
Although the usual explanation seems to involve some kind of meritocracy (in which the respondents all imagine themselves above average and destined for great things), most of what one sees anecdotally is much more boring: a misguided classism that associates collective action with dirty-fingered uneducated types who couldn’t possibly negotiate their own contracts and prevail over their employers by sheer force of intellect and will.
cm 09.08.05 at 1:45 am
paul: Agreed in most part, and you could safely have used the word “arrogance”.
OTOH, unions have been historically associated with “lifetime jobs” or institutional situations, to a similar effect. Most professional jobs, for two decades or so, have not been of that nature, and professionals have been prone to moving between jobs every few years. Not sure what is cause and what effect. Also not quite independently the professional “class” (in reality a perhaps more glorified variety of grunts) has been in an aggregate up trend until recently, which has reduced people’s attachment to particular jobs and cohesion in the professions.
paul 09.08.05 at 9:04 am
cm: I think your “lifetime jobs” point is important, but not exactly in the way you think it is. The decline of longterm employment in typically-unionized sectors has been one of the factors clobbering union membership, just as it has been a factor in destroying stable quality of life for many so-called “professionals”. (There’s a deeply sick irony in the fact that although most people perceive “professional” as a description of social class, education or commitment, in business terms it describes those employees you don’t have to pay for overtime.)
In skilled trades where tenure with any particular employer is typically short, it’s long been known that unions are the most effective method for ensuring decent working conditions. I think it’s the meritocratic myth that keeps that understanding from being transferred to the white-collar world.
cm 09.08.05 at 10:59 am
paul: No, I did not mean to argue against your latter point. I said I was not sure what is cause and what effect. (I.e. lack of unionization vs. job churn).
However, as one of said professionals (in the software industry) I believe strongly that much of the churn is voluntary, in the sense that people rather move on their own than be laid off. That does not prove anything of course, it may be just that they seek to escape unpleasant environments, which is certainly often an aspect. But many are looking, aside from financial consideration, for intellectual challenge etc. That’s perhaps more the case in at least some professions (those strong in innovation) than in the trades, manufacturing, or many services.
To the extent that professional environments become corporatized, and level & rate of innovation goes down, this becomes moot. E.g. the software industry was an overall great place at least for younger workers until 2000 or so, after that less so. Accordingly some people start thinking about unions. But one challenge is how to have cohesion & continuity in the local chapters when people don’t want to stay on for long?
Slocum 09.08.05 at 11:31 am
The decline of longterm employment in typically-unionized sectors has been one of the factors clobbering union membership, just as it has been a factor in destroying stable quality of life for many so-called “professionalsâ€.
I live in the midst of a lot of so-called “professionals” (physicians, professors, lawyers, engineers, executives, small business owners) in a state with high unemployment (by U.S. standards anyway). As a group, they seem to be doing rather well. Those few who have had to look for new jobs in the last couple of years have found them reasonably quickly (e.g. within a few months).
I thought that the standard complaint was that the well-off professionals were doing well while the working class was treading water–hence increasing inequality. Or do we think that professionals getting wealthier even as their “stable quality of life” is being destroyed?
Kevin 09.08.05 at 3:37 pm
Kieran,
As I understand it, one of the reasons that many of the 18th and 19th century classical liberals were for free labor markets is precisely because they thought that freeing labor markets would *increase* the bargaining power of workers. And I think this is borne out by history. Corporations almost *never* want fair and equal free labor markets – in fact, most progressive era legislation that was supposed to help workers by enacting health and safety regulations were forced through by large companies.
Why does this support my point? Because it increases the cost of entry for small businesses, and thus restricts the number of potential employers, and thus the number of choices that workers have. With a smaller supply of jobs, the remaning businesses have more bargaining power. And so the worker suffers. This was one of the big critiques of government-sustained monopolies, and it’s a critique repeated by Marxist historian Gabriel Kolko in his book _The_Triumph_of_Conservatism_. Corporations hijacked (or you might be more revisionist and say “constituted”) the progressive era’s push to increase centralized control of economies, and this led to a reduced ability by workers to control their own fates (although I should note that Kolko’s book doesn’t advance the thesis in the way I’m advancing it – he just documents the degree of corporation-sponsored worker legislation).
In addition, by raising the cost of entering a competitive business market, many people who would’ve been entrepreneurs and business operators had to be wage-laborers instead.
So, here’s a general moral: even if many classical liberals underestimated in actual practice the willingness of workers to engage in collective action, perhaps they misread the situation in two different respects:
1) It was not always obvious the ways in which major capital owners were restricting the bargaining power of laborers, thus raising the costs of collective bargaining.
2) Individual worker action already provided enough of a collective effect to cause corporations to push governments to restrict labor markets in their own favor.
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