Ehrenreich is clueless when it comes to job searching. The book jacket describes her "series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and—again and again—rejected." The reader is never sure if she goes through all this to express her contempt for the participants in those enterprises, or if she truly believes this is the best way to look for a job. At one point she visits a Web site and pays $200 an hour for a weekly phone consultation; she is then told to fantasize about her ideal job. A worthy anecdote, yes, but should I assume this very smart woman was doing her best?
Nor was Ehrenreich a model interviewee. For one meeting she was late. She was asking for salaries of $60,000-$70,000, and at least once she asked for $100,000. Her (phony) résumé is stacked with a long succession of short-term contracts, none showing much commitment. One interviewer tells her she seems "angry."
Ehrenreich's latest work picks up where Nickle and Dimed left off. In that earlier work, she pretended to be a low-wage worker and attempted to live on a series of low-wage jobs: Waitress, cleaning woman, Wal-Mart clerk. Now, she's pretending to be a member of America's blighted middle class.
I could easily write a book about the many lousy jobs I've had and the often horrific interview experiences I've suffered through. Some of those experiences are mildly horrifying, while others are amusing. Doesn't tell you a thing about the plight of the middle class, though it may leave you with examples of how not to behave. Or jobs you should avoid at all costs. And this would be the story of an actual life. Not the story of a pretend life.
The problem with such projects as Ehrenreich's--and Morgan Spurlock's TV show 30 Days--is that you can't just parachute in and pretend you're a working class person. People don't exist in a vacuum. As Cowen points out:
She had no church, no family, and no reliance on friends for financial or even moral aid. It is no wonder she found life so tough and capitalism so demoralizing. She lived an ordinary "lower class" life, yet with upper-middle-class, modern, academic morals and methods.
This is an inherent problem with all such social experiments. They begin with a tabula rasa. And they end up at the same place. Real life doesn't work like that. For example, Ehrenreich knew she wasn't condemned to live the life of a low-wage worker or a middle class worker bee. At the end of the day, she had a home in Key West to go to and a book to write.
Likewise, she never considered, as Spurlock didn't in his own venture into the world of the lower classes, that just because a person is currently earning minimum wage he is not necessarily condemned to spend his life earning minimum wage. Real people get promoted or opt to seek more specialized training. Or start their own business.
The same holds true, of course, for Spurlock's award-winning film Supersize Me. To give it any credence you have to believe in a world where a person eats only fast food. And not just any fast food: It has to be McDonald's fast food. And you can't eat anything on McDonald's menu: You must eat only the most fattening things. And you can't just eat the most fattening things: You must get the largest size of those fattening fast foods. No one lives like this. No one ever has. No one ever will.
So Ehrenreich parachutes in to middle-income, middle-management, middle America and expects to find a job with no experience and no references. She has no past and she will make no plans for the future.
Not surprising that she finds that world "economically cruel" is it?
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