When Did Our Jobs Turn into a Joke?

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The white-collar workspace hasn’t always conjured up visions of monkeylike morons shuffling papers and wasting time on the Internet. When the United States began shifting to a postindustrial society in the aftermath of World War II, writes Nikil Saval in the Winter 2008 issue of the culture journal n+1, corporations like General Electric and IBM offered a new breed of white-collar workers highly secure, salaried work, along with decent benefits and abundant vacation time. What’s more, working meant something.

By the 1980s, however, economic instability had prompted companies to spread resources thin—to cut pay, slash benefits, and eliminate good jobs in favor of low-pay positions—in order to beef up profit margins. Swaths of Generation X watched their boomer parents get dropkicked in return for decades of good, hard work. Perhaps most notably, those who were affected responded by doing very little to protest—and white-collar workers have been rolling over ever since.

 “Young technical and professional workers are as bewildered by the ‘new economy’ as manufacturing workers have been for a generation,” labor activist Jim Grossfeld writes in the January 2007 issue of the online political journal the Democratic Strategist. However, in “White Collar Perspectives on Workplace Issues,” Grossfeld’s study for the Center for American Progress, an important difference between the two groups is revealed. Whereas blue-collar laborers organized to protest workplace issues such as unsatisfactory wages and benefits, white-collar workers have gone on the defensive with a disillusioned attitude. Believing instability and declining workplace conditions are “unavoidable in today’s economy,” and that corporations are too formidable, they’ve concluded that nothing can be done but to lower expectations and dodge disappointment. Reject loyalty and avoid betrayal.

The standards slid, unchecked. These days, U.S. workers put in longer hours than workers in any other developed country and take the least vacation. If they’re actually insured, the benefits are often astronomically expensive. There’s no stability, either; white-collar workers hold an average of nine jobs before the age of 35. Instead of getting angry, they turn a scorned cheek to their employers, defiantly laughing along with The Office heroes at the absurdity of it all.

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