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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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This Land
Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation by Barbara Ehrenreich |
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Rating: |
** |
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(Mildly Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Snippy The sixty-two essays in Barbara
Ehrenreich’s new book, This Land
Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, are organized into seven
major themes, and each essay is only a few pages long. Each essay highlights
some way in which America is polarized. Here’s an excerpt, all
of the chapter titled, “French Workers refuse to Be ‘Kleenex,’” pp. 139-141: Was
it only a few years ago that some of our puffed-up patriots were denouncing the French as
"cheese-eating surrender monkeys," too fattened on Camembert to
stub out their Gauloises and get down with the war on Iraq? Well, take
another look at the folks who invented the word liberte.
They've been
marching, rioting, and burning up cars to preserve a right Americans can only
dream of: the right not to be fired at an employer's whim. The French government's
rationale for the new labor law that triggered the protests was economically
impeccable, as economic reasoning goes these days: make it easier for
employers to fire people and they will be more eager to hire people, thus
reducing France's appalling unemployment rate of 9.6 percent. Furthermore,
the law will apply only to people under twenty-six, and the terminations can
occur only during the first two years of employment. So why is Paris burning? Maybe the rioters sense a
logical fallacy in the government's proposal: fire more people so more people can
be hired? What corporations call "flexibility"—the right to dispose
of workers at will—is what workers experience as disposability, not to mention
insecurity and poverty. The French students who are tossing Molotov
cocktails don't want to become what they call "a Kleenex
generation"—used and tossed away when the employer decides he needs a
fresh one. You
may recognize in the French government's reasoning the same arguments
Americans hear whenever we raise a timid plea for a higher minimum wage or a
halt to the steady erosion of pensions and health benefits. What? scream the
economists who flack for the employing class—if you do anything, anything at all,
to offend or discomfit the employers they will respond by churlishly failing
to employ you! Unemployment will rise, and you—lacking of course the health
care and other benefits provided by the French welfare state—will quickly
spiral down into starvation. French
youth aren't buying this kind of argument, probably because they know where
the "Anglo-Saxon model," as they call it, leads. If you have to
give up job security to get a job, what next? Will the pampered employers be
inspired to demand a suspension of health and safety regulations? Will they
start requiring their workers to polish their shoes while hand-feeding them
hot-buttered croissants? Non to
all that, the French kids are saying. We only have to look to America—or, for
that matter, China—to see where that will take us. Of
course the French aren't entirely fair in calling their nemesis the
Anglo-Saxon model. It's the specifically American model they have to fear. I
was giving a talk in England, ancestral home of the Anglo-Saxon race, when a fellow
in the audience asked me how people could be fired without "due
process." For a moment I thought I had misheard or been misled by one of
those incomprehensibly quaint English
regional dialects. But no, in the UK a person who feels she has been wrongfully
dismissed can turn to an employment appeals tribunal and, beyond that, to the
courts. I had to explain that in the United States you can be fired for just
about anything: having a "bad attitude," which can mean having a
funny look on your face, or just turning out to be "not a good
fit." Years ago, there was a theory
on the American left that someone—maybe it was me—termed worsism: the worse
things get, the more likely people will be to rise up and demand their
rights. But in America, at least, it doesn't seem to work that way. The worse
things get, the harder it becomes even to imagine any kind of resistance. The
fact that you can be fired "at will"—the will of the employer, that
is—freezes employees into terrified obedience. Add to
that the fact that job loss is accompanied by a loss of access to health
care, and you get a kind of captive mentality bordering on the kinkily
masochistic. Beat me, insult me, double my workload, but please don't set me
free! Far be it from me to advocate
the burning of cars and smashing of store windows. But why are American
students sucking their thumbs while the Bush administration proposes a $12.7 billion
cut in student loans? Where is the outrage over the massive layoffs at Ford,
Hewlett-Packard, and dozens of other major companies? And is the
poverty-stricken quarter of the population too stressed by their mounting
bills and multiple jobs to protest cuts in Medicaid and already pathetic
housing subsidies? Compared to those
"surrender monkeys," we're looking like a lot of soggy used
Kleenex. Readers
are likely to cheer at Ehrenreich’s perspective, or cry foul. This Land
Is Your Land is best read in short bursts, no more than an essay or two
at a sitting. Otherwise, her tone begins to get too snippy to appreciate. In
small doses, a reader can think about the issue, and appreciate her satire,
or ignore her view and move on. Steve
Hopkins, August 15, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the Seeptember 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/This Land Is Their Land.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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