The View from Flyover Country

by Sarah Kendzior

  Our connections and commerce are dependent on our screens. Pay attention, pay attention, to the men behind the screens.

  “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth,” the Dawn of the Dead trailer intoned thirty-five years ago. There is plenty of room in this hell: downtowns replaced by malls replaced by nothing. Old deserted buildings in cities, new deserted buildings in suburbs, always an available parking space, always a worker desperate for work.

  Do not rejoice at the fall of the mall. The setting may have been artificial, but the people in it were real.

  —Originally published July 1, 2014

  PART II

  The Post-Employment Economy

  Surviving the Post-Employment Economy

  A lawyer. A computer scientist. A military analyst. A teacher.

  What do these people have in common? They are trained professionals who cannot find full-time jobs. Since 2008, they have been tenuously employed—working one-year contracts, consulting on the side, hustling to survive. They spent thousands on undergraduate and graduate training to avoid that hustle. They eschewed dreams—journalism, art, entertainment—for safer bets, only to discover that the safest bet is that your job will be contingent and disposable.

  Unemployed graduates are told that their predicament is their own fault. They should have chosen a more “practical” major, like science or engineering, and stayed away from the fickle and loathsome humanities. The reality is that, in the “jobless recovery,” nearly every sector of the economy has been decimated. Companies have turned permanent jobs into contingency labor, and entry-level positions into unpaid internships.

  Changing your major will not change a broken economy.

  People Devalued

  In the United States, 9 percent of computer science graduates are unemployed, and 14.7 percent of those who hold degrees in information systems have no job. Graduates with degrees in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and medicine—are facing record joblessness, with unemployment at more than twice pre-recession levels. The job market for law degree holders continues to erode, with only 55 percent of 2011 law graduates in full-time jobs. Even in the military, that behemoth of the national budget, positions are being eliminated or becoming contingent due to the sequestration.

  It is not skills or majors that are being devalued. It is people.

  Academics face particular derision for their choice of profession. “You got a PhD—what did you expect?” they are told when they note that 76 percent of professors work without job security, usually for poverty wages.

  It is true that the academic job market has been terrible for decades. But until 2008, PhD’s could have expected more. Since 2009, most academic disciplines have lost roughly 40 percent of their positions, while the backlog of qualified candidates continues to grow. Most PhD’s work as adjunct faculty or in the new, euphemistic sectors of high-brow impoverishment: “non-stipendiary fellow,” “special assistant professor,” or “voluntary development opportunity.”

  Best of Bad Options

  Despite the dire employment conditions of higher education, young people continue to enroll in graduate school. Detractors roll their eyes: Why would a young person spend years earning a degree of questionable value? Why not “go get a job”? To which the twenty-something laughs, having graduated into an economy where peers spend years vainly looking for a job, finding only unpaid internships or low-wage contingency labor, often while living at home. A funded graduate program, with health insurance, seems a welcome escape.

  “But it is not just about your current earnings,” the detractor continues. “It is about the wages you lose while in the program.” To which the thirty-something, having spent her adult life in an economy of stagnant wages and eroding opportunities, takes the twenty-something aside and explains that this is a maxim she and her peers, too, were told, but from which they never benefitted. She tells the twenty-something what she already knows: it is hard to plan for what is already gone.

  We live in the tunnel at the end of the light.

  If you are thirty-five or younger—and quite often, older—the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay raise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.

  Higher education is merely a symptom of a broader economic disease. As universities boast record endowments and spend millions on lavish infrastructure, administrators justify poor treatment of faculty, or “lecturers,” by noting that they: 1) “choose” to work for poverty wages, and 2) picked specializations that give them limited “market value”—ignoring, of course, that almost no one is valued in this market, save those who are reaping its greatest profits.

  The college-major debate—in which “skill” is increasingly redefined as a specific corporate contribution—extends this inequity to the undergraduate level, defining as worthless both the student’s field of study and the person teaching it. But when worthlessness is determined by the people handing out—or withholding—monetary worth, we have cause for reassessment.

  Failure of the System

  It is easy to decry a broken system. It is harder to figure out how to live in it.

  What must be made clear is that this is not a crisis of individual choices. It is a systemic failure—within higher education and beyond. It is a crisis of managed expectations—expectations of what kind of job is “normal,” what kind of treatment is to be tolerated, and what level of sacrifice is reasonable.

  When survival is touted as an aspiration, sacrifice becomes a virtue. But a hero is not a person who suffers. A suffering person is a person who suffers.

  If you suffer in the proper way—silently, or with proclaimed fealty to institutions—then you are a hard worker “paying your dues.” If you suffer in a way that shows your pain, that breaks your silence, then you are a complainer—and you are said to deserve your fate.

  But no worker deserves to suffer. To compound the suffering of material deprivation with rationalizations for its warrant is not only cruel to the individual but gives exploiters moral license to prey.

  Individuals internalize the economy’s failure as a media chorus excoriates them over what they should have done differently. They jump to meet shifting goalposts; they express gratitude for their own mistreatment: their unpaid labor, their debt-backed devotion, their investment in a future that never arrives.

  And when it does not arrive, and they wonder why, they are told they were stupid to expect it. They stop talking, because humiliation is not a bargaining chip. Humiliation is a price you pay in silence—and with silence.

  People can always make choices. But the choices of today’s workers are increasingly limited. Survival is not only a matter of money, it is a matter of mentality—of not mistaking bad luck for bad character, of not mistaking lost opportunities for opportunities that were never really there.

  You are not your job. But you are how you treat people.

  So what can you do? You can work your hardest and do your best. You can organize and push for collective change. You can hustle and scrounge and play the odds.

  But when you fall, know that millions are falling with you. Know that it is, to a large extent, out of your hands. And when you see someone else falling, reach out your hands to catch them.

  —Originally published November 3, 2013

  Meritocracy for Sale

  On April 24, 2013, the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights announced it was having an auction to raise money to “carry forward Robert Kennedy’s dream of a more just and peaceful world.” Through the auction website Charitybuzz, bidders could compete for a variety of prizes: a visit to the set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a personal meeting with Ryan Seacrest, a tour of Jay Leno’s car collection. Or a six-week unpaid internship at the United Nations, where the recipient will “gain
inside knowledge of just how the UN really operates.” The listed current bid? Twenty-two thousand dollars.

  “This truly is the ultimate internship opportunity for any college or graduate student looking to get their foot in the door,” the website proclaimed. For more than what many colleges cost in annual tuition, the highest bidder would receive “tremendous opportunities to make invaluable connections.”

  One would suspect that a college student who can pay $22,000 to work twenty-five hours a week for free in one of the most expensive cities in the world needs little help making connections. But that misconstrues the goal of unpaid internships: transforming personal wealth into professional credentials. For students seeking jobs at certain policy organizations, the way to get one’s foot in the door is to walk the streets paved in gold. In the post-employment economy, jobs are privileges, and the privileged have jobs.

  Unpaid and “pay to play” internships have long dominated policy fields, but the $22,000 asking price signified a barrier to entry so galling the UN issued a statement in response. “Internships at the United Nations are not for sale and cannot be put up for auction. We are trying to find out the details of how this came about and have contacted charitybuzz.com,” a UN representative wrote to Inner City Press, who reported on the case.

  When the story broke, I contacted Charitybuzz, who confirmed the auction’s existence and said they would speak to their “contact at the UN” for details. The Robert F. Kennedy Center continues to list the auction under the tagline “Spend six weeks as a United Nations intern with Bruce Knotts and the UN Committee on Human Rights,” while the UN continues to deny it without offering details. It is difficult to tell what is going on. Whatever the end game, someone is willing to drop $22,000 to play it.

  Barriers to Entry

  UN internships may not be up for auction, but they are, in essence, for sale. The United Nations does not pay its interns, making it very difficult for someone who is not independently wealthy to take an internship. The only thing that distinguishes the alleged auction from the UN’s normal practice is that the unspoken class discrimination is made blatant.

  “Given the high cost of living in key UN cities, such as New York and Geneva, undertaking a UN internship is an experience that few can afford, especially those from the very developing countries the organization strives to serve,” wrote the group Unpaid Is Unfair in a 2012 petition calling on the United Nations to stop using free labor.

  Their call went unheeded. The United Nations’ website includes a form for calculating the personal expenses an intern incurs—expenses the UN conservatively estimates at $2,500 per month, not counting travel to New York City or health insurance. Interns are forbidden from taking other paid work during their two-month term, and they are not allowed to apply for jobs at the UN for six months following the internship. “A possible source of employment would be the United Nations Volunteers Program,” the UN website suggests. This program pays no salary.

  “For an organization that prides itself on inclusion, diversity, and equality, the UN’s refusal to compensate its interns has created a system that counters those very ideals,” writes former UN intern Matt Hamilton, noting that only 5 percent of UN interns come from the least developed countries. Young people who care about international justice—including those who witness firsthand its erosion in poor, repressive states—cannot afford to work jobs structured on noblesse oblige.

  The United Nations is far from the only organization refusing to pay its interns. Most human rights, policy, and development organizations pay interns nothing, but will not hire someone for a job if he or she lacks the kind of experience an internship provides. Privilege is recast as perseverance. The end result hurts individuals struggling in the labor market but also restructures the market itself.

  Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone. They send the message that work is not labor to be compensated with a living wage, but an act of charity to the powerful, who reward the unpaid worker with “exposure” and “experience.” The promotion of unpaid labor has already eroded opportunity—and quality—in fields like journalism and politics. A false meritocracy breeds mediocrity.

  Worst of all, unpaid internships in policy and human rights send the message that fighting poverty, inequality, and other issues of injustice is something that only rich people should do. Qualities that should be encouraged in society—like empathy and the willingness to stand up for others—are devalued when ordinary people are told that they literally cannot afford to care.

  “I think right-wing populists hate the ‘liberal elite’ more than economic elites because they’ve grabbed all the jobs where you get paid to do something that isn’t just for the money—the pursuit of art, or truth, or charity,” notes David Graeber, an anthropologist whose ideas helped shape the Occupy movement. “All they can do if they want to do something bigger than themselves and still get paid is join the army.”

  Fair and Just

  On the day the story of the alleged $22,000 UN internship broke, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman assured us that our world is fair and just. After proclaiming that the world is “tailored for the self-motivated” and the “boundaries are all gone,” he argued, “We’re entering a world that increasingly rewards individual aspiration and persistence and can measure precisely who is contributing and who is not. This is not going away, so we better think how we help every citizen benefit from it.”

  While perhaps an argument unto itself on the erosion of meritocracy—some were fooled into thinking it was created by the parody website Thomas Friedman Op/Ed Generator—Friedman’s column sheds light on how the wealthy tend to believe our economy works.

  Friedman encourages young people to “invest in themselves,” seemingly unaware of how literal an investment this is nowadays, and how few young people have the resources to do so. He praises hard work, but he does not acknowledge the dreams deferred—the young people who would give anything for the chance to work hard and succeed, but cannot afford the cost of entry; the young people who gave everything, and are left jobless and in debt.

  What happens to the American Dream deferred? The UN internship auction—whatever it may actually entail—is in the end a good thing, because it made plain a system of privilege and bias few want to acknowledge. Economic discrimination is often not visible. Nor are the people it leaves behind.

  What a relief it would be if every unpaid internship were an auction—if instead of a vague line about how the intern must “cover their own costs,” the organization would tally up those costs and see who is able to pay them. The rest of us could watch, from the sidelines, as bias long denied plays out in public, as wealth morphs into merit before our eyes. Let them do their bidding in the open, and show us what it costs to succeed.

  —Originally published May 4, 2013

  Survival Is Not an Aspiration

  On June 12, 2013, Low Pay Is Not Okay, a group fighting to raise wages for fast food workers, released a video criticizing a budgeting guide created by McDonald’s. The guide showed that McDonald’s workers cannot survive on a McDonald’s salary. Aside from including dubious figures—$20 a month for health care, $0 for heating—the guide left out essentials like child care, food, and clothing. Low Pay Is Not Okay noted that even by McDonald’s calculations, workers would need at least $15 per hour to make ends meet. The video went viral, and the guide was widely criticized.

  But some argued that the guide was reasonable. “When I lived in St. Louis, my roommate and I each paid $425 per month [in rent],” wrote the Washington Post’s Timothy B. Lee, ignoring that St. Louis fast food workers are on strike because they cannot afford to live on their current wages. He praised the guide for “offering practical advice on how to live on a modest income,” a sentiment echoed by Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum, who deemed it “an extremely conventional collection of good financial advice.”

  Defenders of the McDonald’s budget use the same word to describe
it: realistic. (Both Drum and Lee use this term.) The logic is that if people can literally survive on minimum wage—that is, not drop dead—then their wages are justified. Ignored in the plea for realism is the day-to-day reality of McDonald’s workers—not whether they can live, but how. In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, privation should not come with the job description, and survival should not be an aspiration.

  “Worrying about the future is the hardest part, because at $7.25, I don’t have a future,” wrote Stephanie Sanders, a McDonald’s worker, in an essay for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Like many fast food workers, Sanders is an adult who never thought she would end up in the food service industry. While the unemployment rate in America has remained largely steady in 2013, the underemployment rate has soared, and Sanders, a former saleswoman, has found herself trapped. Her temporary job has become a permanent sentence.

  As economic analyst Robert Reich observes, “Being wealthy in America today means not having to come across anyone who isn’t.” For the last decade, the American media have railed against the “obesity crisis,” blaming fast food outlets for poor public health. That the people who prepare this food lack the money to eat or feed their children—“We all worry about going hungry or ending up homeless,” writes Sanders—attracts far less outrage.

  Journalist Mark Oppenheimer calls the elite Americans obsessed with locally grown and organic food “the new Puritans”—and like the old Puritans, they tend to have a Calvinist take on those less fortunate. “Most of the middle-class ‘liberal’ parents I know have allowed lifestyle decisions about what they wear, eat, and drive to entirely replace a more ambitious program for bettering society,” he writes. The plight of the McDonald’s worker, like McDonald’s itself, is seen as outside their purview.

  The Myth of Upward Mobility

  This lapse in priorities—in which things we buy are thought to be morally superior to people who sell them—parallels a change in the American perception of employment and social status. Jobs are no longer jobs but symbolic positions, indicative of where you come from and determinative of where you go.