• 62% of American workers expect to receive a pension upon retirement
• 41% of American workers actually have a pension plan

Life just doesn’t work that way people.

Source: Employee Benefit Research Institute, 2007 Retirement Confidence Survey, cited in “In the Vanguard”, summer 2007.

I normally don’t write reviews of books or movies that I’m going to pan. I like to find things I can recommend to friends, not things to avoid and I know that even famous authors getting reviewed by some obscure person with only a couple of readers still don’t necessarily enjoy negative reviews. I make an exception in this case because Bronson says in the closing remarks (p. 430-31): “And so my pool of nine hundred interviews was only ankle-deep in some areas and I now wish I had more diversity… Please don’t condemn me. Be assured that while you’re reading this, I’m out hearing more stories, doing my work, hammering out the rest.” So my point isn’t to condemn Po Bronson, but to say that I think the companion volume could be a lot better. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that the companion volume could be a lot different, perhaps in such a way that it wouldn’t really speak to those who penned the laudatory reviews cited on the cover and first pages. A different volume, however, might speak to the people in my tribe who, I think, would mostly feel utterly disconnected and alienated by the stories Po has in this volume. I should point out that in some sense I should belong to Bronson’s tribe (educated, middle-class, white), but even for me the book left me feeling dry. So on the off chance that someday Po Bronson finds himself among the six readers of Taken For Ranted, here’s a very long review.

The book has promise, but it is annoying for a number of reasons. First and foremost, is that the title and an undercurrent early in the book suggest that we are more than our jobs and this book will deal with the “ultimate question” (whatever that is). The title would certainly suggest that it goes well beyond work, unless you believe that your job is what you do with your life and finding meaning through your work is how one answers the ultimate question. The opening paragraphs (p. xix) start out like this: “We are all trying to write the story of our life. We want to know what it’s ‘about’… we want to know where we’re headed… This book is about that urge… [It's about] Those who fought with the seduction of money, intensity, and novelty, but overcame their allure.” For those of us who travel in circles where people float from job to job, often taking much of the year off and living in a van to climb, ski, or surf somewhere, the idea that their job is what they are doing with their lives seems ludicrous to them. Despite some hints that Bronson might actually consider covering some of these people and finding out whether they find their lives gratifying and whether there are possible alternatives to conceiving of ourselves in terms that are utterly bound to jobs, not one such story appears in the entire book. Of course, in one sense he could have gotten around this simply by promising less in his title and in the early bits and just delivering on that more modest promise. Perhaps I shouldn’t get so hung up on the title and I should just accept that it is merely a book about work and career, and not an open investigation of finding meaning in one’s life, but if the title and opening had promised to deliver what the book actually delivers, I probably wouldn’t have purchased it.

There is also a structural problem. These people, even with their MBAs and law degrees, went through some transformative times. You can think of their messy experience unfolding in real time as the novel. Their experience was varied, rich, came on its own time, was often confusing and unclear while happening. Then they got in touch with Po Bronson and told him their story, sifting a bit for relevant details and boiling it down, but also talking to him for hours and exchanging many letters. Think of his experience of their stories as the movie. Not as rich and satisfying, but still having some meat. Then Bronson boils them down to a few pages and passes them on to us. No matter how many times he laments that the stories come out sounding too sensible and linear, it’s impossible for them to be otherwise and, try as he might, they are now reduced to their essence and the richness of the experience even of the movie, let alone the novel, is gone. Think of this as the review of the movie. That’s what we get as readers of this book. Unfortunately, the review of the movie based on the novel is a far cry from the novel itself. I don’t think there’s anything at all a writer can do about that and I don’t blame Bronson. The truth is, if he devoted an entire book to any one of these stories, it would not get published and even if it did, could the reader extract any lessons from just one story? So it’s not that it’s badly written, it just goes to the heart of why career books pretty much always annoy me and this one is no different.

The bigger problem with the book, as I alluded to with respect to climbing/ski/surf bums, is the set of people he profiles. I kept thinking I had finally gotten to a chapter concerning stories that would relate to me, but alas was again and again disappointed. One woman, when her story opens, is unemployed, has no phone and is living in her car. This looks like it’s shaping up to be a story like some of the climbers I see around Yosemite or like struggling workers in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. That is, until we find out that the person in question is an unemployed laywer (I think, I can’t find that story) who is unemployed because she lost her job in the Clinton administration when Bush came to power. Similarly, there is a chapter called “Ski Bums”. Here, I thought, I would at last find a couple of members of my tribe: people who are tending bar in the winter in order to have days free to ski, and then doing something utterly unrelated in the summers. No, this is a couple of successful telecom execs who went out and bought a tree nursery for the price of a very expensive house (a million dollars?) and now run a successful business. Earth to Po, here are a few requirements for begin considered a ski bum:

1. You do not have a day job. You may be able to break this rule if your day job is ski instructor or ski patrol, but most people would still reject that as valid ski bumming since you’re not skiing for yourself during your days, which makes you a ski industry worker, not a ski bum.
2. You do not work the same job year round. You might break this rule if you live in a great ski town and have a job that allows for skiing almost every day in the winter and you have that job precisely because it allows you to ski most days in the winter, but again, this is really pushing things.
3. What you do is ski. Your job is not generally what you do in your mind.
4. You do not own a company unless, again, it is located in a prime ski location and you can take most of your days off. Even if it meets those conditions, to meet the ski bum litmus test, the reason you are in that business is because it gives you time to ski. It is not an accidental by-product.

The book is littered with MBAs, lawyers and refugees from the Clinton administration – how can so many of them find their way into one small book about finding meaning in your career, let alone about finding meaning generally? I just couldn’t care less about the story of another MBA who “stepped down” to something less stressful. The book is practically devoid of stories of people who are from a working class background, people who are from whatever background but chose to live a blue-collar life (there is one lawyer turned truck driver and that is one of the better stories), and people who transcend the “work thing” and simply don’t define themselves in terms of their means of paying rent, but in terms of what they do (that word again).

I don’t know where my people are. I’m thinking, for example, of my neighbor up the street who celebrated graduation from college with one last hurrah – a long hike. After weeks on the trail, he came to Yosemite, low on funds right about the time a lot students were quitting their summer jobs. Nic Fiore (who’s own work story would be a great profile) asked him if he wanted to work a couple of weeks up in Tuolumne to get a bit more money for the rest of his hike. That was eighteen years ago and he’s still here, never having used his college degree and working as a waiter. Another neighbor came for five days with friends. It was raining and they ditched him, but he wanted to stay the full five days. He also ended up casting aside his college degree: at the end of five days he was driving a bus and had has been here 28 years. I remember being up in Denali National Park, hanging out with a bellhop and a woman with some job I don’t recall. I said something very neutral about lawyers and the woman said “Ohhhh. Lawyers!” I looked in bewilderment and she said “Tell him.” Then the bellhop started in on his tale. Born and raised in New York City, he went to NYU and then Columbia Law School (or was it the other way around?) and immediately upon graduation took a job with a large New York firm. After a few years, I forget how many, but more than two, he finally got his first vacation. He decided on two weeks in Alaska. Once he arrived at Denali, he knew two weeks wasn’t enough. He called and asked for two more. They said okay. At the end of the month, he called and asked for a one month leave of absence. They said okay. And then he told me “By that time I was already a bellhop at the hotel. That was the last contact I had with my firm. That was eight years ago. A couple of years ago I went back to New York for a month to visit my family. I was there ten days and just couldn’t stay there anymore.” What all of these people have in common is that they found a place that felt like home, and though they couldn’t work in the field they had trained in and didn’t have any family near by, that feeling of a place they belonged trumped everything else.

Meanwhile, some of my friends have stories that are more like the ones in the book, but still what distinguishes them is that they have not found meaning through their job. They have found jobs that give them space to have meaning and joy elsewhere in their lives and I can’t recall a single story in Bronson’s book that falls into that category. My friend Jim uses his PhD in English to teach occasional classes, but otherwise teaches skiing and organizes biking programs. Theresa hated being in a lab and, like Jim, her first job out of grad school was teaching skiing. She stumbled through a perverse job the following summer: a slightly-above-minimum-wage job that consists of counting all the cash taken in during the day in Yosemite. Tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of actual bills, not computer numbers, going through her hands while getting paid about $60 a day. But then she was rescued. As a ski instructor, her boss’s boss’s boss was a guy named Stewart. He knew that the mountaineering and cross-country ski school was looking for an assistant manager and told the manager, “Theresa is a certified ski instructor, she’s really into the outdoors, climbs hard and I think she’s not very happy over at cash ops. Go talk to her.” So there she is, happily working at the mountaineering school despite a PhD in molecular biology, a degree that actually is worth something on the open market, unlike Jim’s English PhD or my history PhD. But she isn’t happy because her job gives meaning to her life. She’s happy because it’s a good job by most measures (nice co-workers, nice working conditions, work that’s pretty fun), but it doesn’t get in the way of her life. She doesn’t have to go in at 10:00pm and check on her fruit flies.

Before going off on a long personal digression, I have to say that I would like to see a book filled with people who really looked beyond work to find their place in the world. There are thousands of stories out there of would-be Warren Miller’s who camp in ski area parking lots, but never become famous film-makers. There are certainly hundreds of climbers who cycle through Yosemite every year and then migrate to Joshua Tree and El Potrero Chico for the winter, taking any old job in the interim to give them enough to live on. Not many live up to Dale Bard’s standard, one of the great climbers of the 1970s, who purportedly lived off $500 for one whole year, but there are lots of them who are living their dreams on a few thousand dollars a year and doing it by choice. That’s just a slice of the world that I know. I’m sure there are other tribes I don’t know that could easily fill a book with people who have found fulfillment in ways that are much further from the norm than almost all of Po’s stories. Michel Foucault once said that his goal as a writer was to show people how free they are, by which he meant, show them that fundamental institutions and perceptions of the world that appear immutable actually came into being over time and through circumstance and as such, they can be changed over time and through circumstance. The realm of possibility is so much grander than we can imagine if we don’t have a thoughtful perspective on the world. This is ultimately what left me feeling unsatisfied with the stories in the book. They seem so traditional, so inside the norm, such classic American success stories. Maybe in Po Bronson’s dot com bond trader circles, becoming a high-school teacher constitutes stepping off the success train, but for most people it’s a respected job that pays above the median American salary for a given age cohort. These aren’t stories that open my mind to the broad possibilities about how one can live one’s life. There isn’t a single person in the book living “off the grid” which seems like the one story that a book like this absolutely needs. So if you’re an MBA thinking of stepping off the fast track to become a teacher or horticulturist and, having done so, will feel like you’ve answered the “ultimate question”, by all means read the book. Otherwise, wait for the sequel.

Having said that, I won’t say there was nothing at all in the book that spoke to me, and if have a tolerance for personal biography, this is mostly about why I persevered to the end of this book and what it had to say that did speak to me. My own transition is in its early stages, but so far it mirrors Theresa. After fifteen years in academia, full-time telecommuting on a research project for the last six years, I just felt I couldn’t take another day alone in a room in front of a computer and became a full-time ski instructor. So far it’s the most fun I’ve ever had at work and I’m not sure what summer will bring, but it’s not about the dream job for me. It’s about a job, any job really, that has contact with flesh and blood human beings and lets me stay in Yosemite.

There are little snippets here and there, I must say, where I recognize parts of my own story. Carl Kurlander (p. 161) goes from Hollywood scriptwriter to academia, “one of the only cultures with a higher bullshit quotient than Hollywood.” When it’s time for Carl to give his first colloquium, “He tried to conform to their conventions, following an outline and draining his analysis of any personal stories, but eventually he couldn’t help it…. Carl would tell a funny story and the graduate students would nod knowingly with recognition that Carl had clearly never been to graduate school.” It is a sad fact that academia is perhaps the only broad area in the world where being boring is entirely excusable. I was prepared for this since I had had the good fortune to get to know the philosopher Michel Foucault who told me one evening as he hurried out of a reception after one of his lectures “I don’t know what it is about my colleagues, but after forty minutes, I’m so bored.” So when I gave my first academic paper, peppered with anecdotes and jokes, I was steeled for an audience that wouldn’t laugh. In fact, they laughed heartily throughout the whole thing and the editor of a journal asked to publish the piece. However, another person at the journal opposed publishing it and demanded that I give her a written copy. I gave her the exact text that I had read, word for word. Her response: “This is so much better than the paper that you read. It was just impossible to take that work seriously with everyone smiling and laughing.” Alone in her studio, she was able to drain the delivery of any humor and think of it as research. She went on to recommend publication and to tell my graduate advisor that she wished she could attract people of my caliber to her program (it was published as “Cette loi ne durera guère”, Bulletin de la Soc. d’Hist. et d’Arch. de Genève, 1995). But that was a first indication that academia would be a hard path for me. Writing in this journal, however, has shown me that I have a long way to go in getting away from academia. I still think in academic terms (citing sources) and I had expected to be a lot funnier, more like I am in conversation, but when I put words into print, somewhere the humor center shuts off and I blame years in academia for that.

Another academic in the book, this one specializing in poetry (p. 386), “was a leading presence in the department, but at night he watched hockey games for pleasure rather than read… On the cusp of success, there was no love of poetry left.” I don’t know as I was a leading presence, but I did manage to win Fullbright and publish a book in a foreign language while in grad school and my dissertation has been solicited for publication, but having beaten that dead horse too long, I just have no desire to see it in print. So I guess by most standards, I was reasonably successful in grad school, though I also came a hair’s breadth from failing my doctoral comps, so by another measure I suppose I wasn’t a leading presence. In any case, if I still had the passion, I think I could have landed a university teaching job somewhere, but by the end of it, the thought of teaching at a university literally gave me nausea. The basic observation that grad school could kill your desire to read held true for me. If not for the gym, I would have simply died in grad school. After squeaking by in my comps and drained of interest in history, I ran 5+ miles a day and spent another three hours in the gym. I got real fit and thought that my desire to read broadly in my field would return “soon,” but the sad fact is that it never did. Though I still retained an interest in archival research in my specialty for several more years, I’ve never really read a book outside my micro-specialty but within my broad field since my comps. Worse still, pretty much from the day I started grad school, I quit reading fiction. I remember quipping to someone that I had written two books since the last time I had read one, and it was true. Jim, my ski instructor friend told me that the best part of leaving academia for him was reading literature again. I remember when I finally decided for certain not to pursue a professorial career, I renounced my snobbery for the classics and I threw off the persistent feeling like I should be keeping up on literature in my field (which is done by skimming and perusing, not reading) and went on a year-long science fiction binge and it felt wonderful (by the way, Vernor Vinge, Deepness in the Sky, is a wonderful book).

More recently, I’ve realized that falling back on some old skills from before my days as a historian and mixing part-time contract computer programming in with being a full-time telecommuting historical researcher was not a solution as it’s just one more activity alone in an office. There were a few other quotes that resonated there:

• “‘That’s it. I cannot sell one more modem,” she vowed. But do what? She knew what she wanted: She missed human contact” (p. 244).
• “A bad day working at home is a sad and lonely thing, and if a few bad days land in a row, then an editing job starts to sound pretty appealing” (p. 281).
• “Fuck biology, I like people” (p. 284).

The problem with these sections that I do relate to, perhaps, is they come too late. They are all old thoughts to me at this point. Perhaps if I had picked up the book ten years ago, when I had the thoughts but not the actions to back them up, they would have validated my thoughts and feelings. I don’t think so, though, because that’s not really the way I work. I benefit more from new ways of seeing things than from having company in my beliefs. I keep coming back to the feeling that the book would mean a lot more to me if the range were greater. I imagine Bronson is receiving fan mail which will include stories that even after the nine hundred he received for the book, will blow his mind. Let’s hope he writes them up some day and blows our minds.

As far as I can tell, most rapaciously for-profit, ultra-free-market businesses like Wal-mart only change their stripes for one of four reasons:

1. Workers elect politicians who look out for them and enact laws that balance the power between employers and employees. In post-Reagan America, one has come to expect that legislators will do little to help those who don’t make massive donations to their campaigns and we have hopefully seen the zenith of that trend with Sauron and the Nazgul (whoops, I’m confusing them with Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz again). Leaving aside for the moment why it has come to this in America, as long as Wal-mart exists in a society where the rank and file workers won’t even vote in their own interest, it’s hard to fault Wal-mart overly much for taking advantage of the situation.
2. Workers band together in unions that are willing to put themselves at great risk and face violent corporate goons if need be and, on occasion, be violent themselves, in order to prevent companies for always bidding them down by bringing in people who will work at subsistence wages, threatening them with termination if they complain, try to change things of, God forbid, unionize. Despite workers’ rights being attacked all over the country in every industry, unionism remains in decline and Wal-mart is a known opponent of any attempt to unionize, so I suppose the critics of Wal-mart recognize that’s not likely to achieve rapid results either.
3. The labor market is so tight for workers of the sort that the company needs, that the free market leads to a bidding war. Unfortunately, this is usually true only for skilled positions and it is out of the control of activists, legislators and companies, short of methods of governing fertility and immigration.
4. Consumers band together and apply moral pressure on companies whose practices they find unacceptable. The boycott that got Home Depot to reduce its dependence on number from old-growth forests being one such case. This is the one good thing about our massively scaled free market with its giant and omnipresent corporations. Given that Wal-mart is ubiquitous, it becomes possible to solidify a national movement around a Wal-mart boycott in a way that it simply isn’t possible boycott all business that pay low wages and offer not health coverage. By making one company a target it is possible to focus people’s action, but more importantly it is possible to share information all across the country. What’s true for Berkeley is true for Peoria.

So I understand that in order to be effective against Wal-mart, moral pressure is perhaps the most effective tool, while the Wal-mart critics hope that legislation like that recently passed in Maryland after gubernatorial veto will spread across the country and that unionism will see a renaissance in America. That seems unlikely, by one thing my training as a historian has taught is that one should never project current and recently past trends into the future. The future doesn’t work that way.

While I understand, I nevertheless find the tack taken by the critic on the radio disheartening because

1. Wal-mart may be the largest employer in America, but in aggregate small businesses employ far more people and very often they offer no better conditions, pay and benefits than Wal-mart. In fact, according to a spokesman for the Chamber of Commerce, 25 million uninsured Americans work for companies with fewer than ten employees (Washington Post, Jan 13, 2006).
2. Neither Wal-mart nor any other company should be in the business of providing health benefits or any other benefits any more than we want our children’s schools funded by Wal-mart directly (rather than indirectly through taxes) or our road repairs prioritized by Wal-mart executives (would the road past Target ever get fixed?). It is absolutely terrible for workers to have their health care of all things tied to their job. When you lose your job, one would hope that you would have a safety net, but in our current situation, if you lose your job, your only protection is COBRA coverage, which is often prohibitively expensive, since the insured now has to pay, and people lose their insurance. We need a comprehensive health care solution that is utterly and totally independent of employment. As much as this makes more sense for employees, it makes more sense for corporations too, who have a huge health-care monkey on their backs. So in short, I disagree with the fundamental premise that Wal-mart should offer health insurance. Rather, we need to get Americans to pledge never to vote for a politician who does not have major health care reform as one of his or her top three issues.
3. I would rather trust to good laws, than to good men and woman. I don’t want to guilt Wal-mart into throwing a bone or two to workers, I want to pass laws that will compel all employers to pay living wages and maintain dignified working conditions and I don’t expect any one corporation to lead, though I’m gratified when one does.

This last point was the one that prompted this essay. In the Italian Renaissance, the “rhetorical writers” (commonly known as humanists as well as their predecessors, the dictatores) argued that “what matters most in good government is not the fabric of institutions, but rather the spirit and outlook of the men who run them” (Skinner, p. 46). They believed that good government was achieved through the moral education of the men who would end up running the government. On the other side were the scholastic theorists who “present themselves less as moralists than as political analysts, pinning their hopes less on virtuous individuals than on efficient institutions as the best means of promoting the common good and the rule of peace” (Skinner, p. 60). In other words, they believed that well-designed institutions could constrain evil men and promote the common good.

The scholastic viewpoint ultimately is what lies behind the American idea of checks and balances. The system only fails if several institutions are taken over by evil men and women willing to work in concert with each other. In fact, even if all institutions are taken over by evil people, if they disagree, there is still the possibility that they will govern reasonably well. We prefer to elect people who are good, but sometimes someone evil like George W. Bush gets elected, and yet in general the machinery of government in America rolls along just fine.

I see in the rhetoric I hear from the critics of Wal-mart, the same mentality toward corporate governance as the Renaissance humanists had toward state governance. I believe, however, that the scholastics were correct on that point: better to trust to laws and institutions than to the virtue of men. The Maryland law is a rather unfortunate half-measure with the potential to reap great benefit down the line. The law only affects privately held companies with over 10,000 employees who spend less than 8% of revenue on health care. As it turns out, the only company that fits that description in Maryland is Wal-mart. Again, I think it is fundamentally wrong-headed to tie health care to employment, but if more states enact such measures, as the AFL-CIO hopes they will (Fox News, January 19, 2006) one can hope that the Wal-marts of the world will be up in arms and will make common cause with progressive activists as corporations desperately try to shift the health care burden from themselves to the government, which will be a good thing for business and a great thing for workers. It will make workers as free to move, as companies are free to fire them, rebalancing the distribution of power. Employees will not be stuck in a job because they are afraid of losing health benefits.

So while it troubles me that we focus on Wal-mart rather than all companies, and we focus on social pressure rather than legislation (albeit with some important legislative victories) and we focus on private-sector solutions, the glimmer of hope is that this pressure and these legislative half-measures will start to really hurt powerful corporations and we can look to the day when Wal-mart lobbyists join progressive activists in pushing single-payer health care that will finally trickle down to those 25 million Americans who are uninsured and working for small businesses.

Sources:

• Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, volume I (see also, pages 44-45, 80).
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
• Md. Passes Rules on Wal-Mart Insurance, John Wagner and Michael Barbaro, Washington Post, April 6, 2005; Page A01.
• Md. Legislature Overrides Veto on Wal-Mart Bill, John Wagner, Washington Post, January 13, 2006; Page A01.
• Maryland Wal-mart Health Care Legislation Passes, Joe Trippi, January 13, 2006.
• AFL-CIO to Take Maryland’s ‘Wal-Mart Health Plan’ Across Nation, Turner Brinton, Fox News, January 19, 2006.
• Wakeup Walmart
• Walmart Watch
• Vermont Walmart Watch

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