class trip

Last night, students in my honors seminar and I took a field trip down to the main branch of the Detroit Public Library to hear Barbara Ehrenreich speak. A woefully small crowd turned out for the presentation, which received little to no advertising. I didn't hear a mention on the local NPR station. No feature in the Metro Times (our local alt-weekly). I mean, this is a NYTimes bestseller. Sigh.

Ehrenreich distinguishes herself as both rhetor and rhetorician, equally skilled at employing and analyzing rhetoric. She offered last night her familiar critique of want-ads, job fairs, and personality inventories, picking apart ways that these genres construct job seekers as inherently flawed/failed individuals.

One useful (especially useful for the honors class--in which we're studying working-class culture and rhetoric) distinction she made between hiring practices in working-class vs. professional-class fields is that working-class jobs use personality tests whose purposes are easy to de-construct ("is it okay to use illegal drugs at work?") as disciplinary tools. Everybody knows you're supposed to answer such a question with a resounding NO, she argues in Nickle and Dimed; the point of the question is to remind employees that they better not do drugs. Professional-class jobs use personality tests that are more opaque ("do you get bored at parties or do you always have a good time in social settings?"), seeking to locate workers who are cheerful, obedient, and outgoing.

One interesting moment at the presentation: Somebody in the crowd asked Ehrenreich what she thought of immigration policy and its effect on the problematic workplace cultures she deconstructs in Nickle and Dimed and Bait and Switch. She reponded, first, by emphasizing that immigration and outsourcing are two separate issues and, second, by talking a bit about outsourcing. As Wafa pointed out after the reading, Ehrenreich sometimes talks like a politician.