Bill Sittig: Good afternoon, everybody.
Welcome to today's program featuring Barbara Ehrenreich.
I'm Bill Sittig, Chief of the Library of Science, Technology
and Business Division and just getting
over a sore throat, so bear with me.
This event is the final one in this year's series of lectures
of our Division in which we learn from important writers, thinkers,
and practitioners in the various fields of science,
technology, and business.
Please check the Library's and our Division's Web sites
for our schedule of events for 2006.
We are currently working on a list of speakers, which we hope will be
as informative and exciting as was this year's lineup,
and I think we're ending on a very high note.
Before I introduce today's speaker I would like to take this opportunity
to thank Carolyn Larson of the Business Reference staff
of my Division for suggesting and planning today's program
and Alison Kelly of our Science Reference staff
for crafting today's publicity.
And now it is my great pleasure to introduce Barbara Ehrenreich,
noted journalist, author, and social critic.
Barbara had a peripatetic early life.
Born in the copper mining town of Butte, Montana, she attended schools
in Lowell, Massachusetts and Los Angeles, California,
and received her bachelor's degree from Reed College in Portland,
Oregon, studying chemistry and physics,
such the tie to science, technology and business.
[ laughter ]
She earned a doctorate in cell biology in 1968
at Rockefeller University in New York City,
but upon graduation she became less involved in science
and more involved in the anti-war and feminist movements
and healthcare issues in New York City.
Barbara also discovered that she had a talent and passion for writing,
regularly contributing articles to newsletters on women's health issues
and eventually producing the influential works Witches, Midwives,
and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, Complaints and Disorders:
The Sexual Politics of Sickness, and For Her Own Good:
150 Years of the Experts' Advice To Women,
which established her reputation as one
of the preeminent feminist writers of her generation.
In the 1970s and early 1980s Ehrenreich continued her involvement
in social activism working and associating
with influential thinkers, such as Michael Harrington.
In this period and into the 1990s she devoted much
of her energy to her writing.
Her articles appeared in numerous publications,
including Time magazine, The New York Times, The Nation,
the New Republic, Harper's, and many, many others.
She shared a National Magazine Award for a piece in Mother Jones
on how drug companies dumped faulty contraceptives on poor nations.
During this period she also had published a number
of well received books, including Fear of Falling: The Inner Life
of the Middle Class, The Hearts of Men, American Dreams,
Flights From Commitments, and one of her favorites Blood Rights: Origins
and History of the Passions of War.   She has received numerous awards,
including a 1982 Ford Foundation Award for humanistic perspectives
on contemporary society and the 1978-88 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Ehrenreich became a reporter for her bestselling book of 2001,
Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America,
for which she went undercover
to reveal the day-to-day struggles of the working poor.
For that book, she worked among other jobs as a waitress,
a maid, and a Wal-Mart employee.   In paperback, this book was
on The New York Times bestseller list for almost 100 weeks.
One eminent sociologist called it probably the bestselling book
about poverty in the last quarter century.
By the way, it's one of the books for sale and signing
after the program just outside this room, as is the other book Bait
and Switch, the book she is going to talk about today.
This book chronicles the often-futile efforts
of laid off middle class professionals
who become reemployed in corporate America.
She went undercover for this book also, posing as a professional
in transition she relates her unsuccessful quest
to land a middle class job highlighting both the exploit
of transition industry and the vulnerability
of the highly educated, white collar, unemployed,
caught up in the world of corporate downsizing and outsourcing.
And now, to hear from the undercover agent herself it is my honor
to introduce Barbara Ehrenreich.
[ applause ]   Barbara Ehrenreich: Thank you.
Thank you very much.   Thank you for coming.
There's a little - there's a chair, an empty chair right there.
[ laughter ]
There's a little more room if you want to squeeze in.
Anyway, I'm delighted that you all came.
It seems odd to me to be in the Library
of Congress to - as a speaker.
I'm usually, I have been here many times as a user.
How many of you work here?   Oh, okay.
[ laughter ]   I didn't smudge anything.
Everything was returned to its place neatly.
[ laughter ]
And last time I was here, which was maybe three years ago,
I was telling Bill that it was, I was looking for a text,
which there's probably only one in this country,
which was a 17th Century English book about melancholia,
not Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, another one, a rarer one,
and I found it and it was here, and I got exactly what I needed from it.
This is for a book - you could tell
from Bill's introduction I have no attention span.
[ laughter ]
You know, I - many different things going on and different channels.
And, the book I will probably return to this Library for before I'm done
with it is a historical book about festivities and ecstatic rituals,
which has been on the back of my mind all through Nickel and Dimed
and this more recent book, Bait and Switch.
So, thank you, thank you, for being librarians
and for maintaining this great institution,
which is especially important for people like myself
who are not academics, you know, don't have research, you know,
graduate students who run off and get everything for us
and actually have to find our own sources.
So, I'm going to talk today about the most recent book,
Bait and Switch, which was inspired really - it grew out of -
the one before, Nickel and Dimed, which some of you might have read.
Anybody read Nickel and Dimed?   All right, who didn't read it?
[ laughter ]   [ Laughs ]
okay. You know, that book was about the working poor
or really my attempt to support myself as an entry-level worker.
But as a result of that I've gotten lots and lots of mail
from people in difficult situations.
E-mails, you know, physical letters saying, you know, "I've been working
for $8.00 an hour, $7.00 an hour for years.
I'm facing an eviction notice."
Or, "I've been diagnosed with cancer,
and I have no health insurance," just terrible stories.
And what I began to notice at a certain point is that many
of these people would mention that they had college degrees,
that they had master's degrees even, and said that they had
at one time had decent paying white collar jobs
until a layoff came along, a downsizing,
or there are many euphemisms for that now in the business literature:
right-sizing, smart-sizing, and then
of course there's re-orging, and there's outsourcing.
You know, one of these things comes along, dislodges the person
and they, you know, sink back down to the blue-collar level.
So that peaked my curiosity and concern because, you know,
this seemed to me another aspect of poverty,
one that I had not thought about,
which is people being recruited essentially from poverty -
to poverty - from the middle class.
And it particularly peaked my interest because, you know,
one response I often got to Nickel
and Dimed was a fairly hard hearted response, I think, of people saying,
"Well, these people you're talking about, you know,
they made the wrong choices; they didn't get college degrees."
As if that were, you know, a choice, just an option for everybody.
"They," you know, "They had their children too early;
they did something wrong."
So, you know, then I thought well let's look at poverty among people
who "made all the right choices," went to college,
not only went to college but, in many cases -
at least this is what I hear from a lot of college students - you know,
they wanted to major in psychology but that was too risky
so they switched to marketing or they were really interested
in philosophy but, you know, that's impractical so they went
into finance or something, and people who did, you know,
do everything possible with a view towards security in their lives.
So, I decided to investigate this situation by the same kind
of journalistic technique that I had used with Nickel and Dimed.
Now, in Nickel and Dimed - that was -
Nickel and Dimed was my first venture into this.
It's called emersion journalism I have since found out long
after doing it, but where you put yourself bodily
into a situation and write about it.   There is something of a tradition
of this certainly in American literature.
There were crusading journalists in the early 20th century who,
you know, went to work in meat packing plants
or factories or things like that.
There was, in the 1960s the book Black Like Me where a white man -
you know about that book -
he actually had his skin dermatologically darkened
and then spent three weeks in the American South and wrote about that.
In the '70s a German guy named, last name Volroth, disguised himself,
went undercover as a Turkish guest worker,
and his book was quite a sensation in Germany.
There are, I think, pros and cons to this kind of journalism.
The big frustration in it to me is that you can't suddenly say, "Oh,
by the way, I'm a journalist, and I now have a few questions I'd
like to ask you, you know."   [ laughter ]
"Freeze the frame; I've got a lot of questions for you."
You can't do that.   You can't come out.
At least in my experience people don't believe you if you try.
[ laughter ]
And that was my experience in Nickel and Dimed is that when I wanted
to tell some people that I had been working with and had gotten
to know why I was really there they never listened or didn't believe me.
You know, in one case I remember telling this younger woman,
and I said, "You know, I'm actually a writer and I've been doing this
as an expos about working conditions."
"Oh? Oh?" Not a flicker of, you know, agreement on this.
I finally ended up saying, "Go to the library.
I'm in the card catalogue!"   [ laughter ]
You know, the problem is not to get into the undercovers;
the problem is to get back out!   [ laughter ]
Which is one reason I never wanted to do - you know, there's a,
I can't remember her name.
Somebody will remember the name of the author,
went into mental hospitals in the 19th century, I think.
Who was that?
Anyway, try getting out by saying, "Excuse me,
I'm an investigative writer."   [ laughter ]
"That's why I'm here."
So, you know, in this case though, in the case of Bait
and Switch, it was trickier.   I did - was really undercover.
In Nickel and Dimed I used my own name.
In this one I changed my name.
I set for myself the task of finding a white collar, a professional job,
a corporate job in the field of public relations
because that is something that goes with being a writer,
at least I wanted to at least be saying I could, you know,
doing something I - saying I could do something
that I could actually do and I could do, I think,
PR if anybody is interested in hiring one.
[ laughter ]
You know, I thought this was going to be a lot easier than Nickel
and Dimed because obviously it wouldn't be physically laborious.
It wouldn't be physically challenging the way blue collar
work, the kind of jobs like a nursing home aid and maid
with a house cleaning service and hotel housekeeper that I'd had
in Nickel and Dimed, were extremely hard physically.
So I thought this couldn't be that hard and besides if you're looking
from the outside I don't think you could really tell the difference
between an unemployed white collar person and a freelance writer.
[ laughter ]
You know, that's where kind of being a freelance something is
like being unemployed.
So, but I found it was a lot harder than I could ever have imagined.
You know, first - where to begin?   How do you do a job search today?
Well, I knew there was the Internet and, of course, you know,
I had the goal of getting my resume in shape to post it
on the Internet job sites and everything like that,
but I felt I needed extra help.
I've never had a corporate job, I know very little bit
about the corporate world, which maybe was good for this experience
because I was definitely an outsider.
But, it was from the start, from the very start,
a very surreal experience.
This may reflect my outsiderness but I don't know, I'll leave it to you.
I had my own kind of cultural expectations of the corporate world.
I thought, you know, I've had a science background
and I've been a journalist.
I am a member of what one of Bush's aids once rather mockingly called
"the reality based community," you know,
le fact, logic, things like that.
Any other members of this little sub-culture here?
[ laughter ]
You know, and then I thought the corporate world would have
to be similar: facts, logic, you know.
You can't fool around when you've got a bottom line to meet.
But my very first career coach, well,
I couldn't understand how he was telling me
but it did involve the Wizard of Oz.   [ laughter ]
And it finally turned out that what he was getting around to was
that I should take a personality test.
Okay, you know, whatever.
I had taken personality tests to get into some
of the blue-collar jobs I held with Nickel and Dimed.
Those tests were fairly easy.
You get questions like, "In the last year I have stolen ( )."
[ laughter ]
Put, you know, "Check dollar amount below worth
of goods from my employer."
Now, if you can't get that one right, you know,
forget about a job I would say.
Or questions like "Agree or disagree.
It is easier to work when you're a little bit high."
[ laughter ]
You know, that's a pretty tricky question that one.
But and, you know, so I take the test.
It was something called the Enneagram test,
that is E-n-n-e-a-g-r-a-m - you've heard of it?
Somebody's nodding.
You have, all right, well, this is based on - it's derived from Sufism,
Ancient Celtic Lore, a Jesuit philosophy
and a few other things thrown into the new age pastiche.
I will say, honestly, I didn't know how to answer most of the questions,
so - you'd have to decide whether some word applied to you.
One of the words was "wow," w-o-w.   [ laughter ]
Am I "wow"?   Are you "wow"?
I mean, how would you answer that?   [ laughter ]
So, I just sort of - you know, they said,
"Don't think, just answer quickly."   I did.
[ laughter ]
And then my coach told me my results.
There were some good things about me but the bad thing was -
the thing I had to work on or be aware of,
the problem area - he said is writing.
I should avoid occupations -   [ laughter ]
- involving writing.
And, well, anyway, I dropped him, you know, I thought well - But,
you know, this is, my deeper thought was I already said what I want to do
or do, which is PR in this case.   What if I test like an embalmer?
[ laughter ]   It's a little late.
It's a little late.   This is what I do, PR.
Why are you doing this?
Well, I have my own theory I'll tell you in a minute of why they do it.
But. I went on.
I had, I actually went to - and, you know,
in the meantime I'm always pictured that I am always
at all times doing these Internet job applications and, you know,
tweaking my Internet resume and going to networking events.
And at a certain point I decided maybe there's something about me.
I mean nothing's happening; months are going by.
Maybe I need to upgrade my image.   So I went.
I found an image management consultant.
[ laughter ]
You know, it's the corporate, how the way you dress
in the corporate world, is very, you know, carefully,
precisely specified, and I hadn't realized that.
I thought, you know, something like this might be all right.
Ha-ha.   [ laughter ]
Well, actually - you're laughing at me but looking
around this room I don't know!   [ Laughs ]
.   [ laughter ]
A lot of you fall short and I'm   [ laughs ]
. So, you know, I decided I'd better, you know,
this is something I have to check out.
So I'm just going to read you a little, you know,
one more little serial glimpse here.
So I'm at the image management consultant's office.
Just as I would prepare for a visit to the dental hygienist
with extra brushing and flossing I have put unusual effort
into my appearance today, mascara as well as eyeliner, lipstick enhanced
with gloss, jacket and slacks, tailored pink shirt, et cetera.
Only now as I await Prescott - that's the name I've given
to my consultant - only now are the multiple defects
in my ensemble emerging.
My pant stocks, which I had taken to be black in the gloom
of my hotel room, are actually navy blue although my jacket is black.
That could be fatal right there.   [ laughter ]
My watch cost $19.00 fifteen years ago
and the band no longer matches the face.
Then there is the problem of the slacks,
which I got at the sales rack at the Gap.
As I see for the first time, the zipper does not come all the way up.
[ laughter ]
When Prescott returns I layout my situation.
I have been consulting for several years now and need
to reconfigure myself for the corporate world
but have only the vaguest idea of how to proceed.
He nods, approvingly congratulates me for coming to him.
"Some job seekers," he said, "Neglect the visuals."
And then he explains to me, you know - which was very interesting -
about why the visuals are so important, why such details
of how you dress are so important, because you are signaling,
by conforming in detail, that you are a "team player."
In other words, that you are willing to conform in many other ways.
He tells me that, you know, corporations vary
and that one thing I could do is
if I have an interview call the company,
call the receptionist before the interview
and ask her what the power gals are wearing unless, of course,
occurs to me, the receptionist hates the power gals -
[ laughter ]
- and maliciously advises me to show up in harem pants and bustier.
[ laughter ]
Now, we proceed to the material at hand, which is me.
As in so many of my coaching experiences we begin
by categorizing me as a type.
Prescott says I am "angular" in shape,
my face is shaped "like a diamond", which doesn't sound so good to me,
it sounds like a kind of a pointy-head.
[ laughter ]
But, in fact, refers to my cheekbones.
They are wonderful.   I can keep them.
[ laughter ]   And then he goes on.
But then we come to the problems, the bad things.
See, there's a problem for women
in this very precise kind of corporate dressing.
Men have their uniform, although they can screw up.
It's perfectly possible.
But for women it's still very tricky.
I knew because I read the Dress for Success books
in advance not to look too feminine.
Shoulder length hair could be very bad, could, you know,
give you away as a flake of some kind.
[ laughter ]
You certainly don't want to look too sexy.
I had read that.   I felt I had that under control.
[ laughter ]
But, I was wearing a jacket actually sort of like this
with an angular lapel and then the angular tailored shirt under it.
Well, this was not good.   [ laughter ]
It turns out, he said, I am not looking feminine enough.
I've gone too far in the masculine direction.
Apparently, too many angles
around the neck area are very frightening to men.
[ laughter ]
And, so I went out after this and, you know,
I got myself a suit with a curve lapel.
Not that that worked either.   [ laughter ]
Anyway, then he goes onto - I'm skipping stuff on the cosmetics
and stuff - but finally he says, "As for body language,"
and then he speaks to me in a rather therapeutic tone.
"The way you're holding your hands on your waist,
you seem to be holding something in."
This is true.   [ laughter ]
I release one hand and sent it over to pick up my coffee cup
but the other hand must remain
at its post covering the gap in my zipper.
[ laughter ]
So, that is one little glimpse into the world of job searching.
You know, there is an industry out there that helps or,
depending on your point of view,
preys on the white-collar job seeker.
There are these, the coaches I've mentioned.
There are boot camps.   I went to one.
That's an intensive experience to turn you into a lean,
mean, job-seeking machine.   [ laughter ]
There are these image makeover people.
And all of this - and, of course, networking events,
some of which are free and non-profit, some of which are not.
And there are firms.
I had some dealings with one in Washington, D.C.,
here where for only $4,000 they would've given me some really
great contacts.
But the interesting thing to me is that this industry,
which is called the transition industry by some,
is only about 10 years old.   This is something new.
It does not - there's not something like this for blue-collar people
because they, well, don't have much assets.
Most white-collar people don't have a lot either but they might,
so it's a tempting market.
And as far as I can figure out the reason why it began to arise
and burgeon in the mid-1990s is that there was a very striking change
in corporate culture, corporate policy in the '90s.
Now, in the relationship toward white-collar mangers
and professionals there had never been much corporate loyalty toward
the blue-collar people, and we saw them laid off in droves in the '80s
as manufacturing went overseas.
In the '90s it was the turn of the white-collar people
and the change simply put was away from seeing your managers
and professionals as assets to be nurtured and towards seeing them
as expenses to be eliminated.
So, you had people like Jack Welch at GE and Al Chainsaw Dunlap
at Sunbeam, you know, who took pride on the number
of people they could eliminate every year.
Wall Street applauds when this happens and it, you know,
has now kind of built into corporate culture a constant churning
out of people, not necessarily the worst people
or the low performers by any means.
I was very struck by the number of people I talked to who were -
you know, real laid off people - at the networking events
who would tell me that they had gotten a promotion or some kind
of award or other recognition
for achievement shortly before their firing.
Now what's that about?
Well, if you get a promotion you earn more money,
meaning your salary is a more tempting cost-cut.
As a friend of mine who works as a professional in software
at GE put it, you know, getting a raise is
like having a bull's eye painted on your back.
[ laughter ]
Which is perverse, if you think about it, really perverse,
if you're going to be weeding out your people
who are your high achievers.
Anyway, I tried to focus on my search
in the emersion journalism spirit here,
but I was continually distracted by what seemed to me bizarre,
irrational, and surreal aspects
of the corporate world as I got nearer to it.
You know, this emphasis on personality tests for one thing -
I mentioned the Enneagram test, much more common
as the Meyers-Briggs test -
anybody here ever take the Meyers-Briggs test?
[ mixed response ]   Do you know your type?
[ mixed response ]
Yeah. You know you've got to be an E, right?
Can't be an I.   Maybe you can if you're a librarian.
[ laughter ]   Can you be an I?
Oh.   [ Laughs ]
. Well, in PR you can't be an I, I'll tell you that.
[ laughter ]
But these tests have no scientific validity whatsoever;
they have no predictive value.
You know, with the Meyers-Briggs test they have found
that people can take it in the afternoon
and have a different personality than they had in the morning -
[ laughter ]   - or from day-to-day.
There's nothing to it.
In fact, what I was very strongly getting the sense of and being told
in so many words again and again is really there's only one personality
that's wanted and that is somebody who is cheerful, upbeat,
positive thinking at all times and likeable.
Likeable is a big word.
That those - and of course obedient, which you already could guess
from the conformity in clothes.
But that's - I think what they are doing
with those tests really is trying to weed out the people
who might glaringly not fit in.
There's no - on Meyer's-Briggs you actually cannot be the kind
of maniac who would come to work with an automatic weapon
because that is not in the personality types.
So they don't even have that justification for giving the test
but they can, if they want to,
weed out the introverts or something like that.
And introverts are not popular outside of libraries, I think.
[ laughter ]
Which is - but it gets even more peculiar.
You know, I found - and this I'm talking -
my sources here are career coaches, networking group leaders
in various parts of the country, and business success advice books.
I reviewed about, or in one kind of mass review, about 15 of them
for The New York Times last summer.
You might have, if you noticed that in the Times Book Review.
So I have read a lot of business success advice books.
Somebody has to do it.   [ laughter ]
And what you find from all of these sources is that one of the reasons
for the emphasis on always being positive thinking,
which is an interesting - you know it's an old theme
in American culture.
It goes back at least to Mary Baker Eddie, Christian Science,
to mid-20th century, Norman Vincent Peele,
and Dale Carnegie and things like that.
So it's and Est in the '70s.
But the explanation is that if you beam out positive thoughts
to the world good things come to you.
If you beam out negative thoughts bad things come to you.
Now, it goes further to there are writers and coaches
who will tell you that you control the universe
with your thought forms.
There are medications for people who believe that, I think.
[ laughter ]
But the, what was so disturbing to me about that because I was
at first getting this - what do we call this bit of irrationality,
this bit of mysticism, really - in settings, networking settings,
boot camp settings, were lots of laid off white collar people.
And in that context it's sheer victim blaming.
What? You've been looking for six months?
You've been looking for two years?   Well, what's wrong with you?
You know, there's no - in these settings - there's no mention
of the economy or of corporate policy or anything like that.
It's always you, you, you.   What's wrong with you?
And the coaches would say that.   Well, let's talk about Barbara.
What's wrong with her?
You know, that would be the way it was put.
Now, another thing that goes along with this, and I think comes
under the heading of what I would call a kind of stream
of irrationality in corporate culture is a lack of emphasis
on skills and experience as compared to things
like likeability and cheerfulness.
One digression on that I have to tell you.
Last - was it this week or last week?
Last week The New York Times front page you might have seen the article
about how pharmaceutical companies are now hiring college cheerleaders
to be their sales reps.   [ laughter ]
And that had been a job I had, that actually flipped through my mind
when nothing was coming up in PR because I had plenty of chemistry
and biology background and could imagine having deep conversations
with physicians about that new methyl group they put
on the Benzene ring and how
that will make people more potent and more, you know -
[ laughter ]   - dry nosed or whatever the goal is.
[ laughter ]
But, I didn't have the major qualification.
I was never a cheerleader!   [ laughter ]
I'm not a cheerleader!
You know, anyway, that's carrying the upbeat stuff a little far.
So there's - but my first clue that things like experience were not
so much in one's favor is with the second career coach I went
to after the Enneagram fellow and I told her I was a little concerned
about my age, that I'm coming back into the job market, you know,
well into middle age, let's put it and how,
you know, would that be a problem?
She said, "Well, of course, you will have nothing that reveals your age
on your resume, which is going to go out on the Internet so, you know,
people don't see you right away."
And I said, "Well, how could I do that?"
And she said, "Well, you don't list any experience
that goes back more than 10 years."   Now that took my breath away.
You don't want this, all these experiences I've listed?
They were fake experiences in my case but -
[ laughter ]   - all right.
But they were based on real ones, you know, that I was trying
to highlight different aspects of what I could do in PR.
And no. No.
You want to look as young an inexperienced as possible,
and now since then, you know,
I've met so many middle-aged job seekers who've said to me, "Yeah,
didn't you realize you've got to dumb down that resume?"
Now that's something to think about.
Now I've had in my course of my life as a journalist many criticisms
of corporations, drug companies for many obvious reasons,
the health insurance companies, all kinds of things, but now I,
coming out of this experience with Bait and Switch, I find I'm ready
to become a management consultant.
You know that I don't understand how they get things done.
And then I had kind of a revelation
after the book was published actually, you know,
realizing that this is the kind of culture,
this emphasis on likeability, people being dressed well,
people being upbeat is what got us Michael D. Brown heading up FEMA -
[ laughter ]
- if I can say that in a government building here today.
[ laughter ]
Yeah, you know, that there is a flabbiness here,
a kind of a softness where the emphasis seems to be less
on what can you do than are you going to be an easy person
to get along with in the office with us?
Are you going to be likeable?
There's a lot of discussion going on now
about how will the United States...how will U.S. business
survive the challenge of the rising economies of India and China,
and I tend to doubt that the start ups
in Bangalore give the Enneagram test to potential employees.
[ laughter ]
I tend to think that they go for skill and a track record
and that we may be in trouble, you know, as not because our kids don't
like trigonometry when they were teenagers -
I wished they liked trigonometry, frankly.
I agree with Thomas Friedman on that, you know,
I'd like to see us take science education more seriously.
But I think staring us in the face is a major problem
with the American business enterprise, speaking collectively.
It's reflected in the fact that our CEO's now average 10 million dollars
a year, that's 2005 numbers, and that their ratio of earnings
to average worker earnings is over 400 to one now.
Compare that to Japan where it's 20 to one,
Germany where it's 14 to one.
You know, we have enormous concentration of wealth at the top.
We have a lot of kind of, it seems to me,
like slack in the upper middle
and the upper reaches of the corporation.
The experience was fascinating in its way, funny a lot of the times,
but what was not so funny was to meet and get to know people
who had experienced these involuntary job losses
and to see how quickly they could move down a downward trajectory
after a job loss, and I talked to a lot of people.
You know, it's not that the average person anymore has,
or middle class person, has a lot of savings to tide them
over for six months when they lose a job.
The average household's savings today are in the negative numbers,
meaning that, you know, if some terrible blow comes along
like a layoff there's no cushion there.
People talk to me about, well, selling a home, obviously,
auctioning possessions off on eBay.
Single people talked about moving back in with their parents.
Even middle-aged single people talked about that.
But, you know, it's not easy.
You have to, especially if you're putting money into some
of these job-seeking helps, so-called.
There are also some real Catch-22s along the way.
One of them is that more and more companies, now 36 percent
of large companies was the last number I had anyway from '04,
are requiring a perfect credit rating
as a condition for employment.
Now that's one thing you don't have after a few months
of unemployment is a perfect credit rating.
You know, it's - there is a real Catch-22.
The other Catch-22, which maybe everybody else
in the world was aware of, I certainly wasn't,
was that the longer you are unemployed the less likely you are
to be rehired.   Why? I don't know.
But it's called a gap on your resume.
You can't have a gap on your resume.
My original resume for this project had a gap, which I was going
to explain as due to homemaking and raising children
until I noticed people looked at me as if I'd said it was a gap due to,
you know, collecting welfare for 30 years or something
and it was just not allowable at all, complete contempt for that.
A gap on your resume is worse than a gap in your zipper, I think -
[ laughter ]   - in this world.
So, you know, I've been talking about this book recently
and to different groups around the country and trying to emphasize
to middle class people that, yes, there is a tendency sometimes
in the middle class to look down on more menial workers,
blue collar people, the kinds of people I met
in the Nickel and Dimed work.
That tendency may be reinforced by college education, I don't know.
But layoffs now, you know, we can expect it whoever we are and,
you know, you can even just see what's been happening
in the last few weeks with GM, with Merck,
many other companies announcing large layoffs.
And at a certain point a laid off white collar person is going to have
to probably have to swallow his or her pride and say I've got
to do something, and then they'll go down to, you know, Best Buy
or Wal-Mart or Circuit City or whatever and take a job
at $8.00 an hour and join the working poor.
Incidentally, at that point of course,
that person leaves the unemployment statistics.
Problem is over as far as the unemployment numbers are concerned.
But that that happens and so that, you know, we've got to get
over this traditional kind of class prejudice and understand
that whoever you are, you could be one year, six months away
from people doing kinds of tasks that you may, you know,
sort of screen out because they seem so menial or even insignificant.
And then we have to find a way to come together around, you know,
preserving the middle class and helping people survive
who are long-term among the working poor.