Pride and Prejudice

By Katha Pollitt, The Nation. Posted April 25, 2003.

How do we know the economy is in bad shape? Unemployed white male hotshots are back in the news. "This man used to make $300,000 a year," reads the New York Times Magazine's cover. "Now he's selling khakis." The grim black-and-white cover photo shows a resentful-looking bald man with a clipboard and Gap tag, sporting a Silicon Alley hipster's five-day-old beard. He's "interactive industry pioneer" Jeff Einstein, one of three men profiled in "Commute to Nowhere" by Jonathan Mahler who lost their high-paying jobs when the New Economy tanked and have had trouble resigning themselves to the kinds of jobs that are left: selling pants for Jeff; substitute teaching in the public schools for Lou Casagrande, a former information-technology consultant (at $100,000 a year); and volunteering as a "networking" coordinator for Tom Pyle, who'd left the stressful life of banking ($200,000) for the calmer waters of the nonprofit sector ($100,000), only to be laid off within six months.

After more than a year holding out for the next big thing, their wallets are thin, their cars are falling apart, their self-esteem is wilted and their marriages aren't in such great shape either: Jeff takes the Gap job only because his wife finally threatens to evict him if he doesn't start helping out with the rent. (Just between you and me, I suspect he could have done better but took the Gap job just to spite her.) It's all about masculinity, Mahler informs us. Women have been as likely to lose their jobs as men in the current climate, but "for most women, survival trumps ego; they simply adapt and find some job." I like that "simply." No cover story there.

But wait. Those $10-an-hour jobs, the ones we're supposed to pity the men for having lowered their masculine dignity to take, look kind of familiar, don't they? They're the "good jobs" women on welfare are encouraged to get, the ones that are supposed to transform them from mooching layabouts to respectable, economically self-sufficient, upright and orderly citizens. (Of course, both Tom and his stay-at-home wife recoil at the possibility that she may have to get a job. I guess this is because, unlike poor single mothers, she's a "homemaker.")

What happened to all those homilies about personal responsibility and the dignity of a job -- any job -- that were trotted out to justify forcing welfare mothers to work off their checks at subminimum wage by cleaning toilets in public parks or scraping chewing gum off subway platforms? Somehow, those sermons don't apply to Mahler's guys, but only to those single mothers of small children who get up at dawn for long bus rides to jobs as waitresses or hotel maids or fast-food workers -- jobs that one calls "menial" at the risk of being tarred as an elitist snob by welfare-reform enthusiasts. The point is not so much work -- the exchange of labor for pay and benefits -- but work experience: work as behavior modification. For Mahler's subjects, work is about masculine identity, so a low-status job is worse than none. Poor women apparently have no dignity to be affronted.

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