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Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

“Less mutable qualities, like age, may have worked against me too. My résumé revealed only that I was probably over forty. But even that relatively youthful status could have repulsed many potential employers. Business journalist Jill Andresky Fraser warned me that a forty-plus woman was unlikely to be hired except by someone seeking a “motherly secretary,” Katherine Newman, among others, has documented corporate age discrimination, quoting, for example, a Wall Street executive who told her, “Employers think that [if you’re over forty] you can’t think anymore. Over fifty and [they think] you’re burned out.”

Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

Work

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

This book delves into the complexities of the American Dream, highlighting the tactics employed by companies to lure customers with promises of a better life, only to deliver subpar products or services. The author analyzes the psychological and economic impacts of these practices on individuals and society as a whole. more

Author

Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich is an American political figure born on August 26, 1941. She is known for her activities in labor movements, social justice, and gender equality. more

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“Middle-class Americans, like myself and my fellow seekers, have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security. This has never been true of the working class, most of which toils away at wages incommensurate with the effort required. And now, the sociologists agree, it is increasingly untrue of the educated middle class that stocks our corporate bureaucracies.”

“Capitalism, as Marx observed—with surprising admiration for its dynamism—never promised stability, and it’s been a generation since blue-chip companies like IBM offered their white-collar workers a job for life. As the best-seller Who Moved My Cheese advises, dislocated professionals must learn to adapt to new flavors of cheese as the old ones are taken away. But when skilled and experienced people routinely find their skills unwanted and their experience discounted, then something has happened that cuts deep into the very social contract that holds us together.”

“Suppose that the [career] transition zone encouraged free-ranging discussion. What might the topics of conversation be? For a start, people might want to address the question of what is happening in the corporate world today; in particular, why does experience seem to be so little valued and accomplishment so unreliably rewarded? Some may object that corporate world is a vague abstraction, concealing a rich diversity of environments, but it was in common use among my fellow job seekers, who often expressed hopes of escaping from it—into a small business, for example, or what they saw as a more meaningful form of work. In saying that I was searching for a corporate position, I seemed to be moving in the opposite direction from many of my fellow seekers, who often expressed a strong desire to get out.”

“When dusk falls on us, as it will, To dim the light of lives outlived, When night is next, when sleep is sure, When nothing’s left to lift— I will be glad. The work of a day Well done, this rest its good reward, The best we’ve earned and what We’ve won, this doorway opening. Our lives are like this: years moved on Beyond the words that started them.”

“For many of us, feminism denotes the task of abolishing all organized scarcities, from the private nuclear household to the nation. It’s the deprivatization of love, via the insurgency of mothers of every gender against the patriarchal institution of motherhood, the decoupling of survival from the wage, the destruction of markets, the ecological insistence on interspecies responsibility, the decarbonization of every mégapole, and the communization of continent-wide architecture: waterways, seed banks, and libraries. It’s a local proletarian strike against work (that always already gendered and stolen substance otherwise called alienated labor) and a planetary revolution in values that prioritizes care over accumulation. It’s a perfectly good name, too, for the horizon wherein work’s myriad precarious, abject, wageless, mad, incarcerated, and otherwise remaindered victims are avenged. As a revolutionary movement, feminism abolishes gender qua differential, while remaking genders qua lush, interesting, and pleasurable difference.”