BARBARA EHRENREICH INTERVIEW
Working Hard or Hardly Working

From AlterNet:

[ALTERNET:] Yet, a New York Times study found that 80 percent of Americans believe it's still possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Did your experience in Bait and Switch and Nickel and Dimed give you any sense of why that belief still persists?

EHRENREICH: There is a tremendous American theme about positive thinking. We have a hard time dealing with truly bad news and discouraging information. Throughout my experience trying to get a white-collar job, I was encouraged to think positively. You are supposed to see your job loss as some great break, your chance to move on to something bigger and better. The reality is that 70 percent of people who lose their jobs and do get rehired, are rehired at a lower pay. But to criticize the system, or to be negative is considered "un-American."

It was a similar attitude that drove me crazy when I was dealing with breast cancer. Despite study after study showing there was no correlation, everyone kept telling me that my outcome would be better if I had a better attitude.

What's so offensive about that insistence, whether in relation to illness or job loss, is the implication that the victim is at fault.

Click here for the rest.

A few years back my father was very surprised by my insistence that all able-bodied Americans ought to work. He raised an eyebrow and said, "really?" The implication was that he was confused by a liberal expressing such a seemingly conservative attitude. I quickly dispelled his surprise by telling him that I got the idea from Karl Marx.

Indeed, it seems utterly obvious that civilization doesn't function unless citizens work--I think conservatives have been so busy for so long bashing liberal support for welfare that they've begun to believe their own rhetoric: liberals support free money for the poor, and think that the government owes them a living. Unfortunately, liberals seem to have been cowed by such thinking, and are often falling over themselves to prove to skeptical conservatives that they don't believe in free money for the poor, which unfortunately is expressed often in terms of support for our current unjust economic system. Kind of like how Cold War Democrats felt they had to prove their pro-war credentials to skeptical Republicans. History repeats.

Consequently, the political establishment is stuck in a dynamic such that examination of American citizens-as-workers is all but impossible. That is, there is no public discourse about how people are being continually raked over the coals in terms of their employment or lack thereof. Nobody in polite society even thinks to fault the system. Nobody dares suggest that business' attitude toward workers is unjust, and such a problem might be solved by (gasp!) regulating business.

I think the overwhelming majority of American citizens want to work for a living: however, this is becoming increasingly difficult, and it has nothing to do with laziness or welfare; it has everything to do with corporate America's decision to treat their employees as less-than-human pieces of capital, to be discarded when desired. The consensus of US business is that there is no longer such a thing as responsibility to employees. We're on our own, whether we're willing to work or not, and too bad if you can't find a job, too bad if you have to work three or four jobs in order to pay the rent.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$