Sarah Kendzior

For Al Jazeera English, I have a new article on low-wage workers and the end of upward mobility in America:

This lapse in priorities – in which things we buy are thought to be morally superior to people who sell them – parallels a change in the American perception of employment and social status. Jobs are no longer jobs but symbolic positions, indicative of where you come from and determinative of where you go.

The McDonald’s worker, the argument goes, deserves what she gets because she is a McDonald’s worker. The professional, it is said, deserves her success because she is a professional. But over the last decade, the barriers to entry for white-collar professions have dramatically increased while the pathways out of poverty have eroded. The job you work increasingly reflects the money you already had.

Upward mobility was once the hallmark of the American dream. Downward wages have made that dream unachievable for Americans born poor. One McDonald’s worker, Devonte Yates, is struggling to complete an Associate’s Degree in criminal justice – the path to a stable life through education so often recommended. But Yates can barely buy food on McDonald’s wages, much less pay his tuition.

Education is a luxury the minimum wage worker cannot afford. This message is passed on to their children. “My son is about to graduate from kindergarten, and I don’t even have enough money to get his cap and gown, and that’s only $20,” says McDonald’s worker Carman Iverson.

While many service workers live in poverty, well-off and well-educated professional workers increasingly find themselves working for poverty wages or for nothing at all. The Atlantic is one of many media outlets who covered the plight of the underpaid McDonald’s worker – while simultaneously refusing to pay many of their own writers.

Young Americans seeking full-time employment tend to find their options limited to two paths: one of low-status, low-paying temp jobs emblematic of poverty; another of high-status, low-paying temp jobs emblematic of wealth. America is not only a nation of temporary employees – the Walmart worker on a fixed-day contract, the immigrant struggling for a day’s pay in a makeshift “temp town” – but of temporary jobs: intern , adjunct , fellow.

Read the full article, The American dream: Survival is not an aspiration.

Inspired by this Guardian article on joblessness in Europe, today I tweeted about the myth of the “skills gap” – a catchphrase frequently trotted out to explain away mass unemployment among the young. I will write about this more in the future, but for now, the tweets:

One of the most pernicious myths of the prestige economy is the “skills gap”.

There is no skills gap. The best-educated generation in history has skill to spare. What they do not have are opportunities.

“Skill” has been redefined as a specific corporate contribution. You cannot obtain “skill” through university, no matter your major.

You cannot obtain “skill” upon hire. Companies have ended on the job training. They have replaced entry level jobs with unpaid internships.

Young workers are not able to prove their abilities. The only thing companies want them to prove is that they are willing to work for free.

The myth of the “skills gap” serves to blame individuals for a systemic problem. It moves attention away from mass corruption in hiring.

There is no skills gap. There is an opportunity gap.

You can follow me on Twitter @sarahkendzior

For Al Jazeera English, I took on a subject on which I am indisputably an expert: complaining. Naturally, I came down on the side of the complainers:

In an America built on the reinvention of reality, critical words make people uneasy – and so do those who speak them. In 1996, Alan Greenspan famously chided the financial community for “irrational exuberance”. They ignored him, and America became a bubble economy – housing, credit, technology, higher education. Those who warned of collapse were derided and dismissed: they were only complaining.

When the bubbles popped, and the jobs disappeared, and the debt soared, and the desperation hit, Americans were told to stay positive. Stop complaining – things will not be like this forever. Stop complaining – this is the way things have always been. Complainers suffer the cruel imperatives of optimism: lighten up, suck it up, chin up, buck up. In other words: shut up.

The surest way to keep a problem from being solved is to deny that problem exists. Telling people not to complain is a way of keeping social issues from being addressed. It trivialises the grievances of the vulnerable, making the burdened feel like burdens. Telling people not to complain is an act of power, a way of asserting that one’s position is more important than another one’s pain. People who say “stop complaining” always have the right to stop listening. But those who complain have often been denied the right to speak.

Read the full article, In Defense of Complaining, at Al Jazeera English.

I have a new interview with the website PolicyMic on what I call the prestige economy.

The interview touches on a number of subjects – unpaid internships, the rising price of higher education, inequality and immobility, media, and geography of industry – and is worth checking out if you’re a fan of my work. (Or if you’re not.) The interviewer, Sam Bakkila, asked fantastic questions and contributed some great insights.

Here is an excerpt, on success in the prestige economy:

The first thing to realize is that success does not matter. This is true in two ways.

Success does not matter because, in a prestige economy, success has nothing to do with employability. Achievements are irrelevant in a system that rewards money over merit, brand over skill. You can do everything right and the door will not open unless you hold it open with money. That is the way the prestige economy is designed. That is why we now require years of unpaid internships and exorbitant advanced degrees. But the irony of the prestige economy is that even those who can pay to play cannot find a job that pays them.

Prestige rewards prestige, but older prestige has realized that younger prestige will work for more prestige — that is, for free. Even the winners are losing.

Second, prestige is success decreed by institutions. Success decreed by institutions means nothing when institutions are rotting. If you take an unpaid internship at a prestigious organization, you are banking that the prestige imparted by this affiliation will help you later. There is a good chance it will not. Institutions that use unpaid labor are hastening their own demise. They are sinking in quality and destroying their own reputations, which is what they bank on to hire unpaid labor in the first place.

Using short-term unpaid labor is a strategy of desperation. Take the long view — where are these companies headed? What will it mean to say you worked there in a few years? Is it worth your unpaid time?…

If you grew up in the prestige economy, you have been trained to see life as a competition. But if you are young, you are losing no matter what. You will have better luck in the long run by rearranging the social order, rebuilding broken institutions, and broadening opportunity for all.

Read the full article, Why You Should Never Have Taken That Prestigious Internship, on PolicyMic.

And here is Eric Garland’s entertaining take:

“Always set on outdoing herself, my colleague Sarah Kendzior is hacking the culture of fancy degrees and “prestigious” unpaid internships to bits, putting the bits in a 55 gallon drum, pouring gasoline in the drum, lighting the whole thing on fire – then firing nukes at everything within a 100 mile…”

(Death of the Prestige Economy)

Most media portrayals of the so-called “millennial” generation – people born roughly between the late 1970s and the late 1990s – portray them as lazy losers living in their parents’ basements. What most miss is that a third of millennials are parents themselves. In a new article for Al Jazeera, I take on the challenges millennial parents face as the generation with the most debt in American history:

Millennials are a favourite target of the media, who portray their economic plight as a character flaw. In a recent cover story, “The Me Me Me Generation”, TIME declared millennials “lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents”. While generational trolling spares no cohort, there was something particularly callous about TIME‘s depiction of young adults facing the worst economy since the Great Depression.

“Have you seen your intern on Rich Kids of Instagram?” Atlantic‘s Elspeth Reeve writes, noting that the TIME portrayal seems modelled on privileged interns able to work for free. “If so, he or she is probably not the best guide to crafting the composite personality of a generation that fought three wars for you.”

“Adults still living with their parents” is the classic millennial trope. What is forgotten is how many millennials are parents themselves. As of 2010, 34 percent of US residents aged 18-29 had children, according to one poll. Fewer than one-third of people in this age group have a full-time job. They have minimal savings and the highest student loan debt in recorded history. Most cannot afford cars, homes, health insurance or other material goods once considered basic elements of life in the US. A generation that can barely stand on its feet is in charge of another generation’s welfare.

Read the full article, The Millennial Parent, at Al Jazeera English. And thank you to the Atlantic for naming it one of the best columns of the day.