If you live in the United States and work for a living, you probably think that your household wages put you and your family squarely in the social category deceptively tagged “the middle class.” Most wage earners in the U.S. identify themselves this way, no matter whether their incomes are greatly above or greatly below the actual middle on any given chart.

But did you know that the actual middle of the income scale (statistically speaking) provides way less money than is required to live a middle class American life as depicted on TV and in the media at large?

Most Americans don’t seem to know that.

For example, many households enjoying annual incomes in excess of $100,000 consider themselves to be middle class and say so freely, often while fretting about how much they will have to pay in taxes next year.

During the last presidential campaign, households earning over $250,000 argued vigorously that in America today, $250,000 is a solidly middle class income—especially in big cities—and that any plan to rescind the Bush tax cuts for households earning more than that was therefore a direct attack on the middle class.

Yet according to data collected by the U.S Census Bureau in 2005, only 15% of the households in the United States earn over $100,000 and only 1.5% of the households in the U.S. earn over $250,000. By any mathematical standard, the top 1.5% of a group of wage earners cannot be considered to be in the “middle” of anything.  And yet, they clearly want to say that they are.

You Are Solidly Middle Class If Your Household Income Is Between $28,000 and $250,000

Families earning the dead center median household income of $44,389 also think of themselves as middle class. That figure—$44,389—is the halfway mark, the number at which exactly 50% of the households fall short and 50% don’t, so claiming to be middle class if you land here at least makes statistical sense. A household earning $44,389, depending on withholding and the number of deductions and so on, takes home about $600-$650 each week.

But—and this is kind of a big ‘but’—this $45K median household income is most frequently split between two working halves of a married couple, neither of whom earns anything close to middle income wages.

For instance, the median annual income for a man in the U.S. currently is just over $45K and for a woman it is just over $33K, but the median HOUSEHOLD income is around $45K-$51K (depending on which numbers you tap). How is it then that a household that earns $45K-$51K can lay claim to middle class status?

Most of these households achieve their ‘middle class’ status by combining one part-time income and one below-median income. In reality, both of the adults have lower than median wages. Neither of them separately approaches middle class status, but when they pool their wages we accept their claim to being part of the ‘middle class.’ Retaining that identity tends to be very emotionally important to them.

It gets even more disturbing when we look at American wages more carefully. Consider this: Half of the households in the United States live on less than $45,000 per year. That’s HOUSEHOLDS, not individuals—kids, parents, grandma or grandpa and the dog—all scraping by on a combined income of less than $45K annually.

Nearly a third of those households earning under $45K (or exactly 28.22% as of 2005) make less than $25,000 annually. $25,000 for an entire household still doesn’t put that household at the official government poverty level (which by the way has remained essentially stationary since the 1960s).

A person making $25,000 per year takes home between $325 and $365 clear each week. How many people could support a family on that? How reasonable is it to expect families to survive on this?

What Does a Middle Class Lifestyle Really Cost?

If you look at recent household income charts compiled by the U.S. Census, the smallest number of households are found at the $75K-$100K level. Yet in order for a household to maintain a middle class lifestyle the way that lifestyle is portrayed on TV and in the media, $75K is pretty much the minimum household income required.

Assuming our imaginary middle class family can find a home for around $130,000 (not likely in some areas), and assuming two newer automobiles cost between $25,000 and $40,000 each (which they do), weekly expenses to keep a home, two cars, and a couple of kids in a suburban subdivision break down like this:

• Mortgage (with taxes and insurance escrowed): $1200 or more
• Car payments: $200-300 each, or around $500
• Car insurance: $200
• Utilities: $300 (minimum, this will vary wildly according to locale and may be MUCH, much higher)
• Food: $600 (assuming a family of 4, $150 per week on groceries and sundries)
• Public school fees for two kids: $50
• Cable, Internet connection: $130
• Cell phones: $100
• Health insurance (employee portion only): $150
• Out-of-pocket health care costs w/deductibles paid and 20% maximum limit reached: $275
• Dental work, car repairs and other surprise one-time expenses: $300
• Gasoline/commuting costs for two cars: $100

Total these expenses up and what is needed to cover them comes to right around $4000 per month or $1000 clear each week. To clear $1000 weekly, you need an annual salary of right around $75K. That salary will barely get you into this coveted middle class lifestyle. Nothing can go wrong, no emergencies can occur. You can’t send your kids to private school. Saving anything at all will be nearly impossible. Forget 401K contributions—not gonna happen with these kinds of outside financial obligations. Notice that I have also not included a clothing budget, a VISA card payment (or any unsecured debt—even though the average in the U.S. is around $8,000 per person), or any cash for vacations or leisure activities—only the bare necessities are in this total.

Where we will all be working very soon (if we’re lucky)

Reality Check, Please!

So why bring any of this up at all? Why bring it up now?

I only bring it up because 1) the media and politicians CONSTANTLY focus on the needs and problems of the middle class as if there actually is one, and 2) I think the term ‘middle class’ in America has become a code word for something like ‘normal’ or ‘not poor’; or even uglier, ‘not irresponsible’, or uglier still, ‘white or with white values—good Americans, the good ones, not those bad ones with no money’. 

When people who are not statistically middle class by actual income rush to identify themselves with an elite group to which almost no one really belongs, it begs the question, “Why?” What’s up with that? When did working for a living or having less become shameful? When did we start judging one another purely on our stuff and our personal stash of cash?

Even during the Great Depression, people were nicer and more realistic than that.

Why not tell the truth about income and embrace the truth? Why not talk about real situations in real terms of declining wages and increasing pressures and costs? Why not talk about class in a way that addresses what the majority of Americans are really experiencing day in and day out instead of pretending that some of us are better than others by virtue of our appearance, expressed values, and financial worth?

Statistically speaking, it can be easily shown that most ‘middle class’ Americans are anything but middle class, and that those few who have managed to drag themselves and their familes across the threshold of a middle class lifestyle often owe so much money in unsecured debt that they are constantly on the verge of falling into the economic abyss.

The truth is, the American middle class has been gone for at least a decade, and the gap between the working poor and the incredibly rich gets bigger every day.  Until that fact starts to get some uptake in political rhetoric and in everyday discussions about ideology and ideas, I don’t see how opportunity in America comes back.

Until we stop pretending and start organizing, I think it just gets worse.


The state of Kansas is closing half of its schools. Chicago is closing schools. California is raising tuition at its state universities over 30% in a single year, which means that many students will have to drop out before they finish, saddled with crushing private debt and poor prospects for decent employment. In a fit of pique, a school board in Rhode Island recently fired ALL the teachers at Central Public High School when the teacher’s union wanted to negotiate the board’s demands.

The board had asked Central High teachers to work longer hours, to spend more time outside of class tutoring individual students, and to use their lunch periods eating with students in the cafeteria instead of in the teacher’s lounge alone or with each other. The demands from the board were in response to consistently lower test scores delivered by that specific school.

The teachers had already agreed to most of the demands, but wanted to negotiate some of the details. Rather than sit down with the teachers’ union, the school board simply fired the entire staff: principal, guidance counselors, teachers, and all. Sevety-four employees. That’ll teach ‘em!

Central High is located in one of the poorest districts in Rhode Island, where the median income by household is a mere $22,000 per year. That fact is scarcely coincidental.

The U.S. public education system now ranks near the bottom of a list of education systems in all developed nations when it comes to effectiveness and accessibility. A study conducted by the United Nations in 2002 ranked Germany as the only country with a less effective public education system than the United States, but went on to qualify their findings with the following statement:

“It is clear that educational disadvantage is born not at school but in the home,” said the report. “Learning begins at birth” and is fostered by “a loving, secure, stimulating environment.”

In other words, it isn’t the lousy teachers, nor the cushy curriculum, nor inadequate testing, nor lower standards of educational achievement, but the fact that, among all the developed nations in the world, the children most likely to access public education in the U.S are also the children most likely to live in abject poverty—with parents who cannot read, write, or get a job and who may not be home or even around, ever.

In other words, (and I want to phrase this delicately so as not to offend anyone) “IT’S NOT THE TEACHERS YOU FREAKING PENNY-PINCHING BUREAUCRATS.”

It’s the lack of any sort of social safety net whatsoever for the kids and their families. If children come to school hungry, sleepless, undisciplined, unsupported, and uninterested, you could fill the schools with an army of Mr. Chips clones and the current problems would persist.

Kids need to eat. They need security and care. They need to know they matter and that they have real oppoturnities should they apply themselves. Too often, in communities all across the U.S., they have none of these things. Blaming the teachers for that won’t fix those problems.

As the situation with state funds becomes more and more critical across the U.S., states are using “No Child Left Behind” and a desire to “make someone pay” for the poor quality of U.S. schools as an excuse to fire teachers and destroy public education. Bad test results? Close the school!

Talk about throwing the baby out with bathwater!

Money is very tight. Here in Michigan (which isn’t too far behind California on a list of states most likely to fall into the ocean at any minute—-and we aren’t even ON an ocean), the goverhor just offered 29,000 Michigan teachers an early retirement buyout. If the teachers don’t take the buyout, the consequences for the state budget will be ghastly. If the teachers do take the buyout, the consequences for public education in Michigan will be ghastly.

Although no one is talking about it too openly, there is a certain latent (sic: de facto) racism in these harsh new attitudes. Which schools are most likely to be shut down for poor performance? Inner city schools.

In many parts of the U.S., public schools are funded by property taxes. This means that public schools in ‘good’ neighborhoods automatically have more money and more resources than schools in ‘bad’ neighborhoods. Schools in good neighborhoods also are more likely to have student populations that are well fed and clothed, and to have parents of students who themselves have time to read, study, and work professional jobs—thus setting an example that encourages their kids to do likewise.

In parts of Michigan, some grade school teachers start their day by feeding their students out of their own pockets, because they know the students will be hopelessly inattentive until they get some food in their bellies. For many young students, the food they get at school will the food they get. Period.

In fact, one of the most outspoken conservative proponents of No Child Left Behind has recently come out as its most vocal critic. Diane Ravitch was on NPR recently promoting her new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System. In the book Ravitch explains in disturbing detail how No Child Left Behind is being used to privatize American education by giving bureaucrats a legal reason for shutting down public schools, starting with the inner city and moving outward.

The U.S. cannot reimagine itself as a national power while destroying its children and firing its teachers. Already our students are not keeping up in math and science, and this is even true of students who come from ‘good’ schools.

At the state university extension where I briefly taught part-time, MOST incoming students needed some form of remedial coursework before they could even begin to take basic freshman classes. These were not inner city kids—we had precious few of those—these were kids from the suburbs who couldn’t read well, write well, or add a column of figures.

Meanwhile, countries that educate their children well, for free, are taking the lead on the world stage.

We don’t need a new pedoagogy, and we don’t need higher testing standards. We need to truly value kids, teachers, and education, in that order, instead of just giving lip service while withholding funds and support. At this point, the social problems destroying public education are complex and huge, and the will to fix them seems woefully absent.

Economists aren’t a lot of fun to listen to, but if you’re feeling uncomfortable and can’t seem to figure out why (given that the economy is now officially on the mend!) the video clip above is worth watching. University of Massachussetts Economics Professor Richard Wolff explains what has been happening to the American worker for the past 30 years more clearly than anyone else I’ve seen anywhere thus far. 

But you don’t have to take Wolff’s word for it or mine. His statistics are drawn straight from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (I downloaded the PDF file right to my desktop and you can do the same if you’re interested. Or, you can check out this brief distillation written by a University of Chicago economics PhD candidate that’s a bit more readable).

These increasing productivity/declining wage trends have been verified and underscored by U.S. economic think tanks of all political persuasions and none of it is really news. Basically, productivity—the measure of how much work is done by any given worker in a single hour—has been going up for thirty years running, but during that same thirty years, wages for that work have been steadily getting smaller.

In other words, if it feels like you’ve been working harder and harder for less and less money lately, it’s probably because you are.

During this thirty year period of declining wages and harder and harder work, employers also all but eliminated the guaranteed pension plan as part of a standard full time wage and benefit package, replacing it in some cases with 401K plans that could easily vanish overnight (as many people unhappily discovered after the dot com crash of the 90s and again after the mortgage loan crash of 2008).

Another development that began about 12 years ago and is escalating rapidily even as I write this is increasing health insurance costs. This happened alongside a dramatic increase in the share of health expenses employees have been expected to pick up.

Most of the personal bankruptcies in the U.S. today are tied to a parallel personal health crises, and most of the people involved were insured when they got sick. Sometimes they were kicked off their insurance policies by the carrier, sometimes they lost their jobs due to their illnesses, but more often their out-of-pocket expenses simply exceeded their capacity to pay—even with expensive private health insurance coverage.

So, just as paychecks were already being stretched to the breaking point by rising costs accompanied by declining wages and benefits, health care expenses were rocketing off the chart, and they continue to do so.

Today, lucky employees who still have group health plans for their families through a job can expect those plans to cost an average of $13,375 per year—up from $6,438 per year in 2000. In fact, in 2008 alone the cost of an average health care plan went up 5% while wages increased an average of only 3%.

Even a family of four with a yearly household income of $70,000-$100,000 (the smallest group of wage earners in the country, statistically speaking, and $20k-$50K above the average household) would be hard pressed to pay $13,375 for an insurance policy PLUS all out-of-pocket expenses, non-covered costs, and deductibles if required to do so. 

Wage erosion in the U.S. has been swift, steady, and devastating over the past three decades, even without taking into account the rapidly increasing costs associated with basic living expenses like food, energy, and shelter. (None of this data takes cost of living increases into effect—a set of statistics which, by the way, has been monkeyed with so severely over this same period that it is fodder for its own separate post.)

I put these numbers out here to show that the problems working Americans face right now (or maybe it is more accurate to say the problems non-working Americans face) have been in building for a very, very long time. What we witnessed recently with the mortgage crash and the nearly 13 million jobs that have been lost since then is akin to end stage cancer: the disease was active for many, many years before it started to kill the patient in dramatic and painful ways.

You might think that since employers were working their employees harder and harder for less and less pay during these three decades, those employers must have struggling mightily themselves—but no! Turns out this same historical period was one of unprecedented corporate profitability; a time during which CEO pay increased almost 400 TIMES over what it was in the early 1970s. Mergers and acquistions were announced on a seemingly hourly basis and profit was concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

The problem with all of this is fairly straightforward:

We currently have a ‘consumer economy’ driven by the spending of working people who basically have no money. Many of them are no longer even working. For awhile, they were able to keep spending by using unsecured credit and tapping their home equity—those days are over. So if we are waiting for ‘consumers’ to get out there and ‘consume’ again so that jobs can come back, we may be waiting a really, really long time. 

I bring this all up here because I don’t think we can formulate serious solutions to U.S. employment problems if we stay focused on outdated political ideologies and assigning blame. At some point, we will have to face the problems themselves, and it seems to me we’ve already waited 30 years too many.

I do think some hopeful trends are emerging. None of it will be easy, but I think there are opportunities mixed in with all the damage and mess.

I promise to talk more about those in future posts.

Yesterday I was listening to an NPR program about how small businesses are adapting to the downturn in the economy. Talk focused on the usual tips and tricks for pounding the pavement and interviewing well and what not, and then about how small businesses are reluctant to hire and prefer to just work their present staff harder if businesss is good, but then the tone got progressively darker.

A woman PhD called in and said that even though she has a lifetime of professional experience and excellent credentials, she has been unable to secure any kind of conventional job (nevermind employment in her field of expertise) since being laid off over a year ago. She is currently working for herself, drumming up freelance gigs online and paying a 10% referral fee to the job board for each project she wins. (Most freelance boards take a percentage of the payment once the freelancer completes a project).

This caller made the point that she is doing the exact same work she used to do at her old professional job, but now she makes substantially less money (when she can get projects). Working for herself, she makes about what she made in the workforce when she first graduated college in 1991.

In addition to the reduced pay and the pressure of having to constantly drum up work, she no longer has health insurance and she has to pay all of her own business expenses including: maintaining her own internet connection and software, driving to and from client meetings and to and from sites where she does her contract work, job board fees, and more.

To have a shot at being awarded projects, she has to bid against hundreds of other freelancers, some of whom are living in foreign countries with reduced costs of living, or who live in the U.S. but are willing to do the work for almost nothing for their own personal reasons (lack of confidence, desperation, other wage earners in the household). Although these competitors do not usually possess her skills or her expertise, their presence in the provider pool drives down the price she can command for her skills as contract laborer. Her skills do give her an edge in winning contracts, but they do not get her decent pay.

She made the following excellent point:

Given that contract labor is now so readily available to both corporations and small businesses at a fraction of the cost of carrying a professional employee (and all the costs of a benefit package), what incentive do businesses (large or small) have to ever hire American professionals again?

Why should we expect that these kinds of jobs will ever come back?

I confess it’s a question I’ve had in my own mind on more than one occasion.

Today the U.S. Department of Labor announced that the unemployment rate is holding steady at 9.7% and that ‘only’ 36,000 jobs were lost in February. Does anyone still believe these figures? Is there a person working or not working today who doesn’t just assume that these figures are cooked and cooked and cooked again until they give the very best spin on things? Even after all that, the figures look positively dreadful because they are positively dreadful.

Over six million people in the U.S. have been out of work for over six months. And that’s the official figure. (Watch the clip above for a clearer understanding of the real numbers.) Even if the U.S. sees positive job growth in March, most economists estimate it will take at least five years of steady sustained job growth for the country to get back to anything resembling full employment.

Government jobs bills may help some, but when you get right down to it, how many wind turbines can we build in the U.S. anyway? How will creating jobs caulking windows help people like the NPR caller—people who spent years acquiring professional skills and expertise that have now been so radically devalued that they can barely provide a stable, entry level wage within the U.S.?

At the other end of the spectrum, students in California were busy holding mass protests the same day as the NPR call-in show. Tuition at state colleges in CA is going up over 30% in a single year, and many of the students have already borrowed beyond their capability to pay back their loans and are now facing the very real possibility that they will have to drop out before their education is complete. They want to know what kind of future they can possibly have now, saddled with loads of privately financed college debt, no degree, and little prospect of getting a full-time job of any kind?

In fact, the NPR caller mentioned she is still paying off $150,000 in student loans—19 years after graduation—while watching the pay she can command drop with each passing year.

The elephant in the living room is clearly corporate greed and bogus government talk of an impending economic recovery. Wouldn’t it be better to have an honest discussion about the real longterm prospects for full employment in the U.S. than to keep pretending like any minute here the consumer confidence index will pop up and everything will magically be all better? Do we really have a jobs problem? Or are we looking at a much, much deeper policy problem? Something that has been buidling for decades?

If jobs are not coming back soon, if more people in the U.S. will want jobs than can get jobs for years to come, if this crisis is going to last another year or three or five or ten, then we really need to get some kind of social safety net in place and we need to do it fast.

Once that is accomplished, all of us will need to take a long hard look at our future as a nation and face the fact that most of us are going to have to accept a radically lower standard of living for the forseeable future. It’s not good news, but if we at least are talking about reality we can plan accordingly.

On the other hand, we could just go on pretending that one day we will all wake up, whip out our credit cards again, and it will all be magically better… somehow.

Somehow, I think it won’t. Not soon anyway.



The Crash of 2008 hit everyone pretty hard, but in some ways it hit Baby Boomers hardest. Not only did many Boomers take a major hit to 401K plans that were already woefully underfunded (or even leveraged to send kids to college or make escalating mortgage payments), lots of them also lost the jobs they planned to keep working at way past their normal retirement age.

And guess what? Turns out employers don’t much want to hire older workers, especially older white men—a group they expect the bail on them the moment the economy recovers.

In fact, it isn’t all that much of a stretch to imagine that when it comes to corporate cost-cutting and decisions about downsizing, sending a pink slip to an older employee instead of a younger one probably looks like a pretty good idea. An older employee may be perilously close to collecting on an (often underfunded) pension plan that has long since been phased out for new hires, and that same older employee probably carries health insurance that costs the corporation twice that of the 19-year-old down the hall.

In fact, the 19-year-old might not even opt into the employer-subsidized health insurance plan.

He often needs the money in his check a lot more.

That means that there are lots of people in their late forties, 50s, and even 60s and older who need jobs desperately and can’t get them right now, even though they have a lifetime of professional experience under their belts, excellent skills, advanced educations, and the kind of maturity and insight that makes them expert trouble shooters and negotiators.

Whenever I see clips like the one above, I’m always amazed and a bit put off by the relentless positivity of the featured geezer. Two years out of work and this guy is energized and inspired by his fruitless, endless effort to get a job way beneath his capabilities? Really? What kind of drugs is he taking? Can I have some?

Since I am such a geezer myself (I’ve been unemployed since October 2008, although I do make a modest income freelancing), I can assure you I do not get up every morning and do a little happy dance before suiting up and throwing myself full force at the endless entry level cube farm opportunities posted on Monster and Career Builder this week.

No, I know by now that:

1) They are the same crappy ‘opportunities’ (‘no-pportunities?’) that were there last week.

2) If I spend hours each day applying for these awful jobs I will never hear back from 98% of them, and…

3) That’s if I’m lucky.

If I’m unlucky, I will get an interview in about six weeks. Like this poor bastard in the video clip, someone at the interview will definitely say SOMETHING about my age, even though at 56 I consider myself pretty damn cute.

The person interviewing me will be all of 23 but no older than 32, and will tremble at my crinkly eyelids and geriatric hideousness while trying hard to feign tolerance and respect. (Yes, my child, someday this will happen to you too!) This torture will drag on through several personality and skill tests and re-interviews, and will almost certainly include the opportunity to prove that I can still pee in a cup without making a mess.

At the end of it, if God really, really hates me, I’ll get the job.

But God doesn’t hate me. Not that much anyway. So here I am.

Now what?

Here’s where we get to the good news.

According to a feature article in today’s New York Times, downsized workers over 55 are starting their own businesses in record numbers, and the success rate for these businesses is quite high. Older workers have the skills, the confidence, and often the money (in the form of a severance package or nest egg) to invest in a start up and actually succeed. Many service-oriented businesses require almost no cash investment to get going: All that is needed is a few paying clients and good word of mouth.

Self-employment is possibly the easiest business to start. Just start working. For yourself. Although people who own franchises and other small businesses that require cash backing often look down their noses at  self-employed people (seeing them as something akin to a housekeepers or gardeners; something lowly and stigmatic), the fact remains that, if a corporation doesn’t want to pay you for your skills, other people just might.

You just have to find those other people.

That’s no small task, and the trials and tribulations therein are fodder for another post. But many, many older workers are setting out this way by necessity.

It will be interesting to see how that plays out. Stay tuned for more on the drawbacks and rewards of such a life, and other reports from the dispossessed front lines.

If you haven’t been living in a cave for the past few months, you’ve probably already heard the story of Jackie Ramos, the Bank of America credit card CSR who was fired for deliberately refunding ‘convenience fees’ and for putting people who were in dire staits on repayment programs instead of piling on punitive late fees and freezing their interest rates at 29.9%. Ramos has lately been featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as well as in countless news programs, blogs, and financial editorials.

Jackie Ramos not only obeyed her employer’s instructions (by doing what was ‘best for the customer and best for the bank’), she also simultaneously disobeyed her employer’s instructions (by refunding fees and making payment arrangements that almost no one really qualified for). She also put her crazy-making story on You Tube—earning her rousing cheers of “you go, girl!” from millions of people angry at the banks as well as endless criticism from banks and conservatives who were critical of her.

In truth, Ramos’s double-bind problems are the problems of just about every CSR who works in today’s opportunistic financial services industry—an industry that, according to economist Kevin Phillips in his book Bad Money, now makes up over 20% of U.S. GDP (compared with just 10% in 1950).

That GDP statistic becomes even more alarming when you look at what it really means: It means the main product traded and exported by the U.S. is no longer steel, blue jeans, corn, oil, or Fords, it’s debt.

In 1950, the financial sector (comprised of banks, credit card companies, mortage firms, investment houses, etc.) held about 7.5% of the total outstanding debt in the United States. By 2006 that percentage had ballooned to 31.7% of the total U.S. debt.

In fact, if you look at U.S. industries as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, financial services (at over 20%) and health care (currently at over 17% and growing fast) make up nearly HALF of all goods and services currently produced in the United States.

You might say one arm makes us sick (the financial sector) and the other fixes us up (the health care sector) so we can go back and create more sickness again (via the financial sector). If current trends continue, by 2025 the U.S. will be involved in almost nothing but creating hideous financial problems that are partially solved in medical institutions for prices no one can afford, which in turn will add to the financial problems.

It’s a reliable business model all right, but is it really a good one?

The following clip shows MBNA CSRs raising similar concerns about their pretend ‘jobs’:

Having worked in the call center of a major regional bank for a year and a half, I can vouch for the veracity of these clips. What shocks me about them though is not the practices themselves—we all know they exist—what shocks me is how mundane these practices are now; how normal they have become.

Most of the people I worked with at the bank where I pushed financial products on poor people until I could no longer stand to do so, would laugh at these CSRs. My co-workers mostly saw themselves as movers and shakers, tough salespeople who did what needed to be done and laughed all the way to the bank. The atmosphere was thick with sports cheers, testosterone antics and contests, and loud ‘woot woots’ every time someone made a big ‘sale’ at the expense of a confused widow or misguided debtor.

All the best salespeople had horns and noisemakers at their desks.

But I do feel heartened that at least a few people are finally beginning to ask the right questions and ask them publicly, at great risk to their own well-being (where are they going to work right now?) and despite all the mocking and vitriol they sustain from people who keep these jobs (hey it’s a dog eat dog world! Don’t blame me! Pussies!)

Suppose an employer with more money than God offered you a chance to whack old ladies in the head with a baseball bat for $100 a whack in addition to your $10 hourly wage and a sort-of-adequate benefit package.

Would you do it?

Some people would think, “You know, these old ladies are going to die anyway. And I have my whole life ahead of me. I can whack at least three old ladies in the head per hour and there’s my next house payment and a new car, and my kids go to private school. Screw those old ladies.”

Other people whack the first couple of old ladies and start to feel bad about it and leave or get fired.

And still other people say, “No way. Whack your own old ladies you wealthy scum.”

So here we are. And this is the question before us today. We can’t blame all of it one the banks if we willingly participate in activities we know to be predatory nonsense and thievery. At some point, it does come down to individual responsibility, and we all must in the end decide what we will do for money and what we will not.

What would you do?

Don’t think for too long. This opportunity expires at midnight, certain restrictions do apply.

As anyone who has ever navigated the corporate workplace knows, relentless positivity is essential to success in today’s corporate world. Negativity has become a sin worse than theft, lying, or being a bit too fat or too old. Negative workers are quickly and severely reprimanded. If they keep kvetching, they will generally be fired.

‘Negativity’ is a broad term however. In today’s workplace ‘negativity’ can refer to anything from critical thinking of any kind to not smiling enough (what is enough?) to asking too many (or any) pertinent questions about what looks like a serious impending problem. I personally knew one CSR who was reprimanded for popping a balloon as a ‘joke’, not because of the noise it made, but because it could have been construed by other employees as a ‘negative’ form of humor.

Do constantly grinning, chirpy employees really do a better job than surly ones?

In Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich says no. Ehrenreich credits the cult of positive thinking with nearly crashing the world economy in August of 2008, pointing to example after example of specific highly-placed employees who sounded the alarm about the impending crash and were subsequently fired for ‘negativity.’

A recent study published in the November/December 2009 edition of the Australasian Science journal found that negative employees “…are less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages,” than are employees who maintain an unchanging smiling facade and look only for the best in every situation.

Ehrenreich describes how, during the 1990s, the cult of positive thinking became untethered from any connection to reality or functionality within the corporate world. Corporate America, giddy with the waves of easy cash produced by rapid financial deregulation, openly embraced a chaos-theory model of CEO performance. This new model claimed that success was not tied to an understanding of the specific business itself, but rather to an intangible attitude that drew wealth to the particular CEO.

The idea was that success lay more in the unique worth of individual personalities (positive ones!) than in performance and business expertise. CEOs from some of the largest corporations in the world began to regularly attend sweat lodges and Law of Attraction workshops, all the while rigidly enforcing a ban on negative feedback from underlings. CEOs were hired without regard to any real understanding of the corporation they were about to run, but rather on their fame and image and strength of intangible mojo.

The money kept rolling in, so it was easy to justify this behavior. Clearly, irrational idiocacy was much more effective than genuine business acumen. In actuality, the temporary flood of money bore no relationship whatsoever to CEO attendance at New Age Workshops or any given CEOs mojo quotient, but was rather a temporary effect of a classic financial bubble as it inflated regardless of what anyone did or didn’t do.

Today, enforced positive thinking serves other purposes within corporate organizations. Though enforced positivity can easily be shown to have quantifiable negative effects on productivity and profitability, requiring unquestioning chirpiness in all employees does create a compliant, easily-controlled workforce. It helps to keep the money at the top, and to insulate executives from the consequences of their actions, all the while making corporate policy more and more delusional and surreal.

Ehrenreich’s antidote to relentless positivity is NOT relentless negativity, but rather, realism. Realism makes for grounded business models and sane commerce, but it doesn’t appeal to the less than one half of one percent of persons in America who are currently hogging all the money. They understandably see nothing in it for them.

So stop smiling. Do ask questions. Do get angry. Do channel that anger productively.

And do stay tuned for upcoming personal examples of corporate dysfunction in action, as well as lots of ideas about what to do about it and what can happen next if we decide to care.

The video clip above is subtitled but it’s well worth watching all the way through. The clip presents a rare, realistic view of what it means to be a “Customer Service Representative” or “CSR.” What’s more, the video was produced by the workers themselves, not the corporation hawking the photos of fakely smiling faces happily meeting your every need.

The CSRs in this clip eventually did try to organize their call center (that is, they tried to install a labor union). Similar organization efforts have taken place in call centers around the world in recent years, including the U.S. (AT & T and Verizon call centers have both been targets of organizing efforts), but what typically happens in the case of call center worker attempts at organization is that, when all is said and done, the corporation simply shuts the call center down without warning and moves it somewhere it thinks a union can’t wriggle in. I personally worked with a call center rep for Verizon who won “Employee of the Year” one day, and the very next day was unemployed because the center was shut down. So she came to our call center, where she was quickly every bit as miserable as she was at her last pretend job.

Maybe you’re thinking, “OK Pam, but why should I care?”