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DEATH OF A YUPPIE DREAMThe Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class

By Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich

ROSALUXEMBURGSTIFTUNGNEW YORK OFFICE

Table of Contents

Class Analysis for the 21st Century. By the Editors........................................................................1

Death of a Yuppie DreamThe Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class.........................................................2


The Emergence of a New Class...................................................................................................3

Between Labor and Capital.......................................................................................................4

TheCapitalistOffensive..............................................................................................................6

Technological Change and the PMC.......................................................................................7

The Crisis of the Liberal Professions........................................................................................8

The Legacy of the Professional Managerial Class.....................................................................9

Background Notes: The Recent History of the Professional-Managerial Class www.rosalux-nyc.org/backgroundnotes1

PublishedbytheRosaLuxemburgStiftung,NewYorkOffice,February2013

Editors: Stefanie Ehmsen and Albert ScharenbergAddress: 275MadisonAvenue,Suite2114,NewYork,NY10016Email: [email protected]; Phone:+1(917)409-1040

TheRosaLuxemburgFoundationisaninternationallyoperating,progressivenon-profitinstitutionforciviceducation.Incooperationwithmanyorganizationsaroundtheglobe,itworksondemocraticandsocial participation, empowermentof disadvantagedgroups, alternatives for economic, and socialdevelopment,andpeacefulconflictresolution.

TheNewYorkOfficeservestwomajortasks:toworkaroundissuesconcerningtheUnitedNationsandtoengageindialoguewithNorthAmericanprogressivesinuniversities,unions,socialmovementsand politics.

www.rosalux-nyc.org

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Class Analysis for the 21st Century

Saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, unemployed or working part-time for not much more than minimum wage: the struggling recent college graduate has—thanks to Occupy Wall Street—becomeanewiconicfigureontheAmericancultural landscape.Tomany itseemsthatanimplicit promise has been broken: work hard, get an education and you will ascend to the middle class.

MiddleclassisafamouslyflexibletermintheUnitedStates,buthereitseemstomeansomethingclosetowhatBarbaraEhrenreichandJohnEhrenreichfirstlabeledthe“professional-managerialclass”(PMC) in 1977. This class of college-educated professionals is distinct from—and often at odds with—both the traditional working class and the old middle class of small business owners, not to men-tionwealthybusinessowners.Organizedintolargelyautonomousprofessionsdefinedbyspecializedknowledgeandethicalstandards,membersofthePMCattimes—fromtheProgressiveEratotheNewLeft—wereinstrumentalinmobilizingforprogressivecauses.

Today, the PMC as a distinct class seems to be endangered. At the top end, exorbitant compensation andbonuses have turnedmanagers into corporate owners. At the bottom, journalists have beenlaidoff, recentPhDshavegonetoworkaspart-time, temporaryadjunctsrather thantenure-trackprofessors,andthosenowiconicrecentgraduateshavetakentothestreets.Inthemiddle,lawyersanddoctorsaremoreandmorelikelytoworkforcorporationsratherthaninprivatepractices.Onceindependent professionals, they are now employees.

Inthisstudy,BarbaraEhrenreichandJohnEhrenreichdeployanall-too-rareexampleofclassanalysisastheyrevisittheconceptoftheprofessional-managerialclass.Againstthebackgroundofthisnewclass’historicalevolutionsincethelate19thcenturyanditsriseinthe20th, the authors focus on the morerecentdevelopmentofthePMC.Inthe1970s,thisclassseemedascendant.Anincreasingper-centageoftheworkforceheldprofessionaljobs,andmanymembersofthePMChadfoundadistinctpoliticalvoiceintheNewLeft.Since1980,however,thingshavelookedlessrosy.Ascapitalattackedthe autonomy of the liberal professions, the rightwing media tapped into working-class resentment ofthe“liberalelite.”Morerecently,whilecollegeeducatedworkers,despitetheimpactoftheGreatRecession,havecontinuedtodorelativelywellasademographiccategory,thePMCasaclasscapableofactinginitsowninterestseemstobeanincreasinglyirrelevantproductofthe20th century.

Historically,membersof thePMChavedesignedandmanaged capital’s systemsof social control,oftentimestreatingworking-classpeoplewithamixtureofpaternalismandhostility.Asadvocatesforrationalmanagementoftheworkplaceandsociety,however,thePMChassometimesalsoactedasabufferagainsttheprofitmotiveasthesolemeaningfulforceinsociety.Today,membersofthePMCface a choice. Will they cling to an elitist conception of their own superiority and attempt to defend theirownincreasinglytenuousprivileges,orwilltheyactinsolidaritywithotherworkingpeopleandhelp craft a politics capable of creating a better world for all?

Stefanie Ehmsen and Albert ScharenbergCo-Directors of New York Office, February 2012

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Every would-be populist in American politicspurportstodefendthe“middleclass,”althoughthere is no agreement on what it is. Just in the lastcoupleofyears,the“middleclass”hasvar-iously been defined as everybody, everybodyminusthefifteenpercentlivingbelowtheFed-eralpovertylevel,oreverybodyminustheveryrichest Americans. Mitt Romney famously ex-cluded“thoseinthelowend”butincludedhim-self(2010income$21.6million)alongwith“80to90percent”ofAmericans.PresidentObama’sefforttoextendtheBush-era“middleclasstaxcut”excludesonlythoseearningover$250,000a year, while Occupy Wall Street excluded only the richest one per cent. The Department ofCommerce has given up on income-baseddefinitions, announcing in a 2010 report that“middleclassfamilies”aredefined“bytheiras-pirations more than their income [...]. Middle class families aspire to home ownership, a car, college education for their children, health and retirementsecurityandoccasionalfamilyvaca-tions”—whichexcludesalmostnoone.1

Class itself is a muddled concept, perhaps es-pecially in America, where any allusion to the differentinterestsofdifferentoccupationalandincome groups is likely to attract the charge of “classwarfare.”Everyoneintuitivelyrecognizesvariousdistinctionsevenwithinthevague“mid-dle class” of political discourse, but we havehardly any way of talking about them. Sociol-ogists slice the class spectrum in many, seem-

1 Romney is quoted by, among others, CBS News, Sep-tember21,2011,www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20109658-503544.html.TheDepartmentofCommercereport, Middle Class in America,January2010.

ingly arbitrary, different ways, while those inthe Marxist tradition insist that a group is not aclassunless ithasdevelopedsomesenseofcollectiveself-interest,asdid,forexample,theindustrial working class of the late 19th through the late 20th centuries. If class requires somesortof“consciousness,”orcapacityforconcert-edaction,thena“middleclass”conceivedofasa sort of default class—what you are left with after you subtract the rich and the poor—is not veryinteresting.

But there is another, potentially more produc-tive,interpretationofwhathasbeengoingoninthemid-incomerange.In1977,wefirstpro-posed the existence of a “professional-man-agerial class,”distinct fromboth the “workingclass,” from the “old” middle class of smallbusiness owners, as well as from the wealthy class of owners.2Thenotionofthe“PMC”wasanefforttoexplain(1)thelargely“middleclass”roots of the New Left in the sixties and (2) the tensions that were emerging between that groupandtheoldworkingclass intheseven-ties, culminating in the political backlash that led to the election of Reagan. The right em-braced a caricature of this notion of a “newclass,”proposingthatcollege-educatedprofes-sionals—especially lawyers, professors, jour-nalists, and artists—make up a power-hungry

2 Barbara and John Ehrenreich, The Professional-Man-agerial Class, Radical America 11 (2), March-April 1977, pp. 7-31, and reprinted, together with a number of commentaries, in Pat Walker, Between Labor and Capital. South End Press: Boston, 1979. Many of the themes of the original article were further elaborated in Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. Pantheon: New York, 1989.

Death of a Yuppie DreamThe Rise and Fall of the Professional-Managerial Class


EHRENREICH & EHRENREICHDEATH OF A YUPPIE DREAM

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“liberal elite” bent on imposing its version ofsocialismoneveryoneelse.

Butmuchhaschangedsincewesurveyed theAmericanclasslandscapeoverthirtyyearsago.Job opportunities for the supposedly liberal professions, which were expanding in the six-ties, have in some cases, such as journalism,undergoneadevastatingdecline.Otherprofes-sionaljobshavebeenseverelydowngraded,asillustrated by the replacement of tenure-track professors with low-wage “adjuncts.” Yet oth-ers (doctors and other health workers, lawyers) have been absorbed into large corporationsor corporation-like enterprises. On the mana-

gerial side of the class, college-educated pro-fessionals seem to have been fully integratedinto their corporate enterprises—to the point where stock options have effectively trans-formedmiddle-andupper-levelexecutivesinto “owners.”

Inthissetting,wehavetoaskwhethertheno-tionofa“professional-managerialclass”,withitsown distinct aspirations and class interests, still makesanysense,ifitdidinthefirstplace.DoesthePMChaveanyideologicalorsocialcoheren-cy?Canitstillmuster,asitdidatvarioustimesin the 20th century, some notion of a political mission?

The Emergence of a New Class

There was little need for a class of profession-als when modern capitalism emerged in the IndustrialRevolutionofthelateeighteenthandearlynineteenthcentury. Inthesimplestcase,theownerraisedthefundstofinancetheenter-prise and directed the production process (and in many early cases, had himself contributed to thedesignanddevelopmentofthemachineryofproduction).Hewassimultaneouslyfinancer,owner, chief engineer, and chief manager.

By the end of the nineteenth century, as capital-ist enterprises grew, this do-it-yourself business model was increasingly obsolete. The growing sizeofcapitalistenterprisesrequiredmorecap-italthananindividualcouldsupply,morevariedand complex technology than a single person could master, more complex management than oneorafewownerscouldprovide,morestabil-ity in labor relations than police and hired thugs could offer, and ultimately more stability inmarketsthanchancealonewouldprovide.Butit was also increasingly possible to meet these needs because the new concentration and cen-tralizationofcapitalmeantthatbusinessown-erscouldaffordtohireexpertstodothework

of management, long-term planning, and ratio-nalizingtheproductionprocess.

By the early 1900s American capitalism hadalso come to depend on the development ofanationalconsumergoodsmarket.Items,likeclothing,whichpreviouslyhadbeenproducedat home, were replaced by the uniform prod-ucts of mass production. The management of consumption came to be as important as the management of production and required the effortsoflegionsoftrainedpeopleinadditiontoengineers and managers: school teachers, pro-fessors, journalists, entertainers, social work-ers,doctors,lawyers,admen,“domesticscien-tists,” “experts” in child rearing and romanceand practically all other aspects of daily life, etc. Bythe20th century, social theorists were begin-ning tonote theemergenceofa “newmiddleclass”or“newworkingclass”composedofpro-fessional and managerial workers—what we latercalledthe“Professional-ManagerialClass” (PMC).

The PMC grew rapidly. From 1870 to 1910alone, while the whole population of the


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United States increased two and one thirdtimes and the old middle class of business entrepreneurs and independent professionals doubled, the number of people in what could be seen as PMC jobs grew almost eight fold.And in the years that followed, that growth onlyaccelerated.Althoughavarietyofpractical

and theoretical obstacles prevent making any preciseanalysis,weestimatethataslateas1930,people in PMC occupations still made up less than 1% of total employment. By 1972, about 24%ofAmericanjobswereinPMCoccupations.By 1983 the number had risen to 28% and by 2006,justbeforetheGreatRecession,to35%.3

3 Precise figures and accurate comparisons are hard tocomebyforseveralreasons:TheBureauofLaborStatis-tics’definitionsandgroupingsofoccupations,methodsofgatheringdata,etc.havechangedseveraltimesovertheyears,anddefiningsocialclassdistributionpurelybyoccupational distribution is both theoretically problem-aticandconfoundedbyfactorssuchashavingfamilieswith two wage earners, with sometimes only one, some-times both in PMC occupations. Data above are fromH.D.AndersonandP.E.Davidson,Occupational Trends in the United States (Stanford,1940);U.S.BureauofCensus,Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial times to 1957; andU.S.BureauofCensus,Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1973, 1981, 2001, and 2008.

Between Labor and Capital

The relationship between the emerging PMC and the traditional working class was, from the start,rivenwithtensions.Itwastheoccupation-al role of managers and engineers, along with many other professionals, to manage, regulate, and control the life of the working class. They de-signedthedivisionoflaborandthemachinesthatcontrolled workers’ minute by minute existence on the factory floor, manipulated their desirefor commodities and their opinions, socializedtheirchildren,andevenmediatedtheirrelation-ship with their own bodies.4 As experienced day to day, contacts between teacher and student, manager and worker, social worker and client, etc. featured a complex mixture of deference and hostility on the part of working class people and paternalism and contempt on the part of the PMC.

At the same time though, the role of the PMC as “rationalizers”of societyoftenplaced themin direct conflict with the capitalist class. Liketheworkers,thePMCwerethemselvesemploy-ees and subordinate to the owners, but since whatwastruly“rational”intheproductivepro-

4 See, inter alia, Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. MonthlyReviewPress:NewYork,1974;JohnEhrenreich(Ed.), The Cultural Crisis of Modern Medicine. Monthly Re-viewPress:NewYork,1978;SamuelBowlesandHerbertGintis,Schooling in Capitalist America. Basic Books: New York, 1977; and Stewart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. McGrawHill:NewYork,1976.

cess was not always identical to what was most immediately profitable, the PMC often soughtautonomy and freedom from their own boss-es.Avigorouscritiqueofunbridledcapitalismdevelopedwithin the early 20th centuryPMC,withsomeProgressiveerathinkers,likeVeblen,proposing that theirs was the only social group capable of impartial leadership, based on sci-ence rather than on any narrow class interest. EdwardA.Ross,aProgressiveideologuewhoisalso considered the founder of American sociol-ogy,arguedin1907that

Social defense is coming to be a matter for the ex-pert. The rearing of dykes against faithlessness and fraud calls for intelligent social engineering. If in this strait the public does not speedily become far shrewder… there is nothing for it but to turn over the defense of society to professionals.

In its own defense, butwith considerable en-couragement from the capitalist class, the PMC organized itself into professions. The Carnegie


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Foundation,basedonsteelmoney,fundedthereports that launched the medical, legal, and engineering professions in the early 20th cen-tury; railroad and banking money underwrote thedevelopmentofthesocialworkprofession.Statelicensingboardsdefinedthenewprofes-sions and limited practitioners to those who (a) professed to uphold a set of ethical standards and (b) could demonstrate that they had mas-tered a specializedbodyof knowledge, acces-sible only through lengthy training. The claim to specialized knowledge now seems obviousand necessary, but at the time the emerg-ing professions had little such knowledge to call their own. Even today, it is not clearwhya lawyer needs a liberal arts education or a pre-med student needs to master calculus. Advertised as “reforms,” such requirementslargelyserveto limitaccesstotheprofessionsas well as to justify a broad claim to autono-my from outside interference in the practice of the profession—particularly from business interests.

Bythemid-twentiethcentury,jobsforthePMCwere proliferating. Public education was ex-panding, themodernuniversity came intobe-ing, local governments expanded in size androle, charitable agencies merged, newspaper circulation soared, traditional forms of recre-ationgavewaytothepopularcultureanden-tertainment (and sports) industries, etc.—and allofthesedevelopmentscreatedjobsforhigh-lyeducatedprofessionals,includingjournalists,social workers, professors, doctors, lawyers, and “entertainers” (artists and writers amongothers).

Some of these occupations managed to retain a measure of autonomy and, with it, the pos-sibility of opposition to business domination. The so-called “liberal professions,” particularlymedicine and law, remained largely outside the corporate framework until well past the middle ofthe20th century. Most doctors, many nurses, andthemajorityoflawyersworkedinindepen-

dent(private)practices.Inthecaseofdoctors,as late as 1940, there was still little medicaltechnologyinuseandnosignificanteconomiesofscalewerepossible.Evenmuchprofession-al nursing could be done outside the hospital by nurses who were self-employed or who worked for small, local agencies. Some lawyers did work directly for corporations or in large lawfirmsservingcorporations,butthemajorityremainedinlocal,solopracticesservingnearbysmallbusinessesandindividualsandusinglittle technology.

Other professionals, such as teachers, profes-sors, and social workers, were employed in the “not-for-profit”orgovernmentalsectorswheretherewaslittleincentiveforcorporationstoin-trude.Universities,forexample,werestillrela-tively smallandelite. (In theearly1930s,onlyabout a million students were enrolled in col-leges and universities nationwide—about tenpercentofthe“collegeaged”population).Manyof these universities could trace their originsto churches and other non-profit groups andremained in the not-for-profit sector; others(the landgrantuniversities)were inthepublicsector. Educational work was highly labor inten-sive,andtherewasnoobviousway,atthetime,to automate or streamline student-teacher in-teraction and make universities a profitableundertaking. Social Service agencies, whichemployed a third of a million or so social work-ersandtherapists,wereevenlesstemptingtoentrepreneurs and corporations because their services, which were mainly directed at thepoor,offerednoopportunity forprofit.Soso-cial workers were left pretty much left to run their own agencies.

The most historically fractious group within the PMC—the“creative”professions,includingjour-nalists and editors, artists, musicians, and archi-tects5—also retained a considerable autonomy

5 Bureau of Labor Statistics, Detailed Occupation of the Eco-nomically Active Population, 1900-1970.


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well into the late20th century. Although many ofthesewereemployedbyfor-profitcorpora-tions(e.g.,newspapers,bookpublishers,mov-ie studios, and ad agencies), a substantial and very visible minority remained self-employed.Insofaras theiroccupational rolewas topushtheboundariesofmassconsumerculture,eventop corporate management often recognizedand tolerated their eccentricities, at least to an extent.

In the 1960s, for the first time since the Pro-gressiveEra, a large segmentof thePMChadthe self-confidence to take on a critical, evenoppositional, political role. Jobs were plentiful, a college education did not yet lead to a lifetime ofdebt,andmaterialismwasbrieflyoutofstyle.

Beginning in the seventies, the capitalist classdecisively re-asserted itself, which is to saythatmany individualswithin itor immediatelybeholden to it began to raise the alarm: Prof-its rates were falling, and foreign competition was rising in key industries like auto and steel. College students and urban blacks, inspired by thirdworldnationalistmovements,weretalkingopenlyabout“revolution;”thetraditionalwork-ingclasswasengagedinthemostintensewaveof strikes and work actions since the 1940s.Business leaders who could see beyond the confinesoftheirownenterprisesdeclaredthatcapitalism itself—or, inmore, attractive, liber-tarian-sounding terms, “free enterprise”—wasunder attack.

The ensuing capitalist offensive was so geo-graphically widespread and thoroughgoing that it introduced what many leftwing theorists today describe as a new form of capitalism, “neoliberalism.” Thatcher in theU.K., PinochetinChile,andReaganintheUnitedStatesallup-

The Capitalist Offensive

held the ideal of unfettered and expanded free enterprise: reductions in the welfare state, the deregulation of business, the privatization offormerlypublicfunctions,“free”trade,andtheeliminationofunions.WithintheUnitedStates,eliteorganizationsliketheBusinessRoundtablesprang up to promote pro-business public pol-icies, assisted by a growing number of founda-tionsand think tanksprovidingan intellectualundergirding for neoliberal ideology.7

At the level of the individual corporation, thenewmanagementstrategywastoraiseprofitsby single-mindedly reducing labor costs, most directly by simply moving manufacturing off-shoretofindcheaperlabor.ThoseworkerswhoremainedemployedintheUnitedStatesfaced

7 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford UniversityPress:Oxford/UK,2005.

College students quicklymoved on from sup-portingthecivilrightsmovement intheSouthandopposing thewar inVietnamtoconfront-ing the raw fact of corporate power throughout American society—from the pro-war inclina-tions of the weapons industry to the gover-nanceoftheuniversity.6Therevoltsoonspreadbeyond students. By the end of the sixties, al-mostallof the liberalprofessionshad“radicalcaucuses,” demanding that access to the pro-fessions be opened up to those traditionally excluded (such as women and minorities), and thattheserviceethicstheprofessionsclaimedto uphold actually be applied in practice. The first “EarthDay,” staged in1970,openedupanew front in the attack on corporate domination and priorities.

6 AmoredetaileddiscussionoftherelationshipbetweenthePMCandthemovementsofthesixtiescanbefoundinBarbaraandJohnEhrenreich,“TheNewLeft:ACaseStudyinProfessional-ManagerialClassRadicalism.”Rad-ical America 11 (3), May-June 1977, pp. 7-22.


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aseriesofinitiativesdesignedtodisciplineandcontrol themevermore tightly: intensifiedsu-pervisionintheworkplace,drugteststoelimi-nateslackers,andincreasinglyprofessionalizedeffortstopreventunionization.Cutsinthewel-fare state also had a disciplining function, mak-ing it harder forworkers to imagine survivingjobloss.

Most of these anti-labor measures also had aneffect,directlyor indirectly,onelementsofthe PMC.Government spending cuts hurt thejobprospectsof socialworkers, teachers, andothers in the “helping professions,” while thedecimation of the U.S.-based industrial work-

ing class reduced the need formid-level pro-fessional managers, who found themselvesincreasinglytargetedfordownsizing.Buttherewas a special animus against the liberal pro-fessions, surpassed only by neoliberal hostility to what conservatives described as the “un-derclass.” The awakening capitalist class hadbegun to nurture its own intelligentsia, based in the new think tanks and the proliferating rightwing media, and it was they who promot-ed the ostensibly populist idea of a “liberalelite.”Crushingthisliberalelite—by“defundingthe left” or attacking liberal-leaning nonprof-it organizations—became a major neoliberal project.

Technological Change and the Professional-Managerial Class

Of course, not all the forces undermining the liberal professions since the 1980s can betraced to conscious neoliberal policies. Tech-nological innovation, rising demand for ser-vices, and ruthless profit-taking all contribut-ed toan increasinglychallengingenvironmentfor the liberal professions, including the “cre-ative ones.”8 In medicine, new technologiessuch as magnetic resonance imaging, which were too expensive for solo practitioners,pulled physicians into employment by hos-pitals and group practices that were them-selves often owned by hospitals. By 2010,9 more than half of practicing U.S. physicianswere directly employed by hospitals or by inte- grateddeliverysystems,comparedtothe24%

8 Foradetaileddiscussionandexplanationofthetrans-formation of the lot of health care professionals, law-yers, journalists, writers, editors, and the like, seeJohnEhrenreichandBarbaraEhrenreich, “BackgroundNotes: The Recent History of the Professional Manageri-alClass,”www.rosalux-nyc.org/backgroundnotes1.

9 GardinerHarris,“MoreDoctorsGivingUpPrivatePrac-tices,”The New York Times,March25,2010;RobertKoch-erandNikhilR.Sahni,“Hospitals’RacetoEmployPhysi-cians—The LogicBehindaMoney-LosingProposition,”The New England Journal of Medicine,May12,2011.

of doctors who were salaried employees in 1983.10

There was a similar change in the legal pro-fession. Driven largely by a dramatically in-creased demand for legal services, large —even“mega”—firmsreplacedprivatepractices.Around1960, therewere fewer than forty lawfirmsemployingasmanyasfiftyormorelaw-yers; today there are many hundreds, twen-ty-one of which employ more than one thou-sand lawyers each.11 Currently 42% of all prac-ticing lawyers work in one of the biggest 250firmsorinotherinstitutionalsettings(corpora-tions,government,orthenot-for-profitsector).

The sheer size of hi-tech hospitals andmegalaw firms seemed to require increasingly bu-reaucratic forms of organization. Hospitalshired professional managers to take a role once

10 P.R.Kletkeetal, 1994,1996, cited in JohnB.McKinlayandLisaD.Marceau(2002),“TheEndoftheGoldenAgeofDoctoring.” International Journal of Health Services 32 (2),379-416.

11 America’s Largest 250 Law Firms.InternetLegalResearchGroup.www.ilrg.com/nlj250/attorneys/desc/1.


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played by doctors; law firms came under theswayofseniorpartnersspecializinginmanage-ment.Universities,whichhadbeenundergoingaparallelgrowthspurtsincethe1960s,beganto depend on the leadership of business school graduates. As a result the work experience of the“liberalprofessions”hasbeencomingtore-semble that of engineers, managers, and others inthebusinessserviceprofessions—morelikea cog in a machine and less like an autonomous practitioner. The pressure in all of these insti-tutions—profit-makingandnonprofit—istocutcosts and drive up “sales,” whether these aremeasured in “billablehours,”classsize,or thenumber of procedures performed.

The Internet is often blamed for the plight ofjournalists,writers, andeditors, but economicchange preceded technological transformation. Inthe1990sawaveofcorporateconsolidationandaggressiveprofit-takingsweptthroughthecorporations that produce newspapers and books. Journalism jobs began to disappear ascorporations, responding in part to Wall Street investors, tried to squeeze higher profit mar-

ginsoutofnewspapersandTVnewsprograms.“Editors at papers across the country becameincreasingly frustrated that editorial decisions were being made not in order to keep the pa-persafloat,buttopropelprofitlevelseverhigh-er.”12 Mergers simultaneously transformed the book publishing industry, as new corporate managers, whether from Bertelsmann or Vi-acom or News Corp, pressed for higher rates of return, meaning blockbusters rather than works of literature or scholarship.

Theeffectsof these changeson the tradition-ally creative professions have been dire. Staffwriters, editors, photographers, announcers, and the like facedmassive layoffs (more than25% of newsroom staff alone since 2001), in-creased workloads, salary cuts, and buy-outs. Authors had to make do with diminishing ad-vances; freelance writers, artists, and pho-tographers found themselves in straitenedcircumstances well before the recession. And while the Internet provides new outlets forthe creators of “content,” it offers little or no compensation.

12 FederalCommunicationsCommission(n.d.).TheMediaLandscape. http://transition.fcc.gov/osp/inc-report/IN-oC-1-Newspapers.pdf.

The Crisis of the Liberal Professions

Then,injustthelastdozenyears,thePMCbe-gantosufferthefateof the industrialclass inthe 1980s: replacement by cheap foreign la-bor.13 Earlier, business analysts had promised a newglobaldivisionof labor inwhichthethirdworldwouldprovidethe“hands”formanufac-turingwhile theU.S. andotherwealthy coun-

13 Although good statistics on the outsourcing of profes-sionaljobsarehardtofind,someeconomistsestimatedthatby2010morethantwothirdsofamillionprofes-sionaljobs,previouslydoneintheU.S.,wouldbedoneabroad. These ranged from reading x-rays to transcrib-ing legal depositions to graphic design. Formore de-tailed discussion and sources, see John Ehrenreich and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Background Notes: The RecentHistoryoftheProfessional-ManagerialClass”,op.cit.

tries would continue to provide the “brains.”So it came as a shock to many when, in the 2000s, businesses began to avail themselvesof new high speed transmission technologies to outsource professional functions. Hospitals sentagrowingvarietyof tasks—suchasread-ing x-rays, MRIs and echocardiograms—to beperformed by lower paid physicians in India.Law firms outsourced document review, re-viewof litigationemails,and legal research toEnglish-speakers abroad. The publishing indus-try sent out editing, graphic design, and—for


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textbooks—evenpartsofcontentcreation.Cor-porations undercut U.S.-based engineers andcomputer professionals by outsourcing product designanddevelopment.

Bythetimeofthefinancialmeltdownanddeeprecessionofthepost-2008period,thepainin-flicted by neoliberal policies, both public andcorporate, extended well beyond the old in-dustrial working class and into core segments of thePMC.Unemployedandunderemployedprofessional workers—from IT to journalism,academia, andeventually law—becamea reg-ular feature of the social landscape. Young peopledidnotlosefaithinthevalueofaned-ucation, but they learned quickly that it makes moresensetostudyfinanceratherthanphys-icsor“communications”ratherthanliterature.The old PMC dream of a society rule by impar-tial“experts”gavewaytotherealityofinescap-able corporate domination.

ButthePMCwasnotonlyavictimofmorepow-erfulgroups.Ithadalsofallenintoatrapofitsown making. The prolonged, expensive, andspecialized education required for profession-al employment had always been a challenge to PMC families—as well, of course, as an of-ten insuperable barrier to the working class. IfthechildrenofthePMCweretoachievethesame class status as their parents, they had to be accustomed to obedience in the class-room and long hours of study. They had to be disciplined students while, ideally, remaining capable of critical and creative thinking. Thusthe“reproduction”oftheclassrequiredacon-siderable parental (usually maternal) invest-ment—encouraging good study habits, helping with homework, arranging tutoring (and SAT preparation), and stimulating curiosity about academicallyapprovedsubjects.

Upuntilthesixties,atleast,thePMCwasgen-erally successful in reproducing itself. Access to collegewasgrowing,tuitionswerestillrelative-ly low. Then the cost of college skyrocketed. To

take one example, tuition at the publicly fund-edUniversityofCalifornia,Berkeley,rosefromabout$700a yearback in the1970s tomorethan$13,000peryearnow,a rateof increasefargreaterthanthatinthecostoflivinggener-ally and certainly greater than salaries. (Tuition is,ofcourse,farhigheratprivateinstitutions).Consumer prices as a whole have increased115%since1986,butduringthesametime,col-lege tuition increased 498%.14 Part of the rise, especiallyinthelargeruniversities,isdirectlyat-tributabletothecorporatizationoftheuniversi-ty—its proliferating layers of administration, the growth of its real estate holdings, and its aggres-siveeffortstocourtstarprofessorsandpayingstudents. As tuition rose, parents from the PMC often found themselves too rich for their chil-dren to qualify for needs-based scholarships but too poor to pay for their children’s education themselves.

The solution, of course, was to have the stu-dent him or herself rely on loans, backed by the federal government. Today the averageundergraduate student graduates with some $25,000 in outstanding debts and little likeli-hoodoffindingagoodjob.Bylate2011,aggre-gate student loan debt was greater than either aggregate car loan debt or aggregate credit card debt.15 Graduatestudentsareevenworseoff.Forexample,themediantuitionatprivatelaw schools rose from$7,385 in 1985 to over$36,000in2011,andthemediandebt16 of recent

14 Gordon H. Wadsworth, “Sky Rocketing College Costs,”InflationData.com, June14,2012;DonnaM.Desrochersand Jane V.Wellman, Trends in College Spending 1999-2009 (DeltaCostProject2011);NationalCenterforEdu-cation Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics,2010,Table345. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt 10_345.asp?referrer=report.

15 TheProjectonStudentDebt.Student Debt and the Class of 2010. November 2011. http://projectonstudentdebt.org/files/pub/classof2010.pdf;MetaBrown,etal.,“Grad-ing Student Loans,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York, March5,2012.

16 American Bar Association. Law School Tuition, 1985-2009. www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/le-galed/statistics/charts/stats_5.authcheckdam.pdf; LawSchool Admissions Council, Financing Law School, www.lsac.org/jd/finance/financial-aid-repayment.asp.


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graduatesisover$100,000;althoughonly30-35% of recent law school graduates are actual-ly finding permanent, full-time jobs requiringa law degree. Higher degrees and licenses are no longer a guaranty of PMC status. Hence the

iconic figure of theOccupyWall Streetmove-ment: the college graduate with tens of thou-sands of dollars in student loan debts and a job paying about $10 a hour, or no job at all.

College-educatedworkerscontinuetothriveasa demographic category. But a demographic category is not a class.Decadesagothecollegeeducated population and the PMC were almost co-extensive.Butnowacollegeeducationhasbecome the new norm, with employers in a growing number of occupations favoring de-gree-holders not so much because of any spe-cialized knowledge or skills they possess, butbecausetheyhavedemonstratedthedisciplineto get through college. They can follow instruc-tionsandmeetdeadlines;theyhavemastereda bureaucratic mode of communication. At most, only half to two thirds of the increase inBAandMAdegreessince197017 appears to represent any increased need for training for people in occupations such as medicine, law, social work, or computer and information sci-ences that indisputably require postsecondary education. Today a motel manager, for exam-ple, needs a degree in “hotel and restaurantmanagement,”eventhoughhotelsandmotelshave beenmanagedperfectlywell for severalthousandyearswithout“professional”training.

So in the hundred years since its emergence, the PMC has not managed to hold its own as

17 BasedonfiguresinNationalCenterforEducationStatis-tics, Digest of Education Statistics, 2010, Table 282, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_282.as-p?referrer=list.Whiletheexpansionofcollegeanduni-versityenrollment is insignificantmeasuredueto theneedforamorehighlytrainedworkforce,asignificantpart seems to be associated more with the historical prestige of the college degree itself and with the lack of availabilityofjobs.

a class. At its wealthier end, skilled profession-als continue to jump ship for more lucrativepostsindirectservicetocapital:Scientistsgiveup their research tobecome “quants”onWallStreet;18 physicians can double their incomes byfindingworkasinvestmentanalystsforthefinance industry or by setting up “concierge”practicesservingthewealthy.Atthelessfortu-nateendofthespectrum,journalistsandPhDsin sociology or literature spiral down into the retail workforce. In between, health workersandlawyersandprofessorsfindtheirworklivesmore and more hemmed in and regulated by corporation-like enterprises. The center has not held.Conceivedas“themiddleclass”andasthesupposedrepositoryofcivicvirtueandoccupa-tional dedication, the PMC lies in ruins.

More profoundly, the PMC’s original dream—of a society ruled by reason and led by public-spir-itedprofessionals—hasbeendiscredited.Glob-ally, the socialist societies that seemed to come closest to this goal either degenerated into heavily militarized dictatorships or, more re-cently, into authoritarian capitalist states. With-intheUS,thegrotesquefailureofsocialisminChina and the Soviet Union became a propa-ganda weapon in the neoliberal war against the public sector in its most innocuous forms and a coreargumentfortheprivatizationofjustabouteverything.But thePMChasalsomanaged todiscredititselfasanadvocateforthecommon

18 Vgl. Scott Patterson, The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It, NewYork2010.

The Legacy of the Professional-Managerial Class


11

good. Consider our gleaming towers of medical research and high-technology care—all too of-ten abutting urban neighborhoods character-izedbyextremepovertyandforeshortenedlifespans.

ShouldwemournthefateofthePMCorrejoicethat there is one less smug, self-styled, elite to stand in the way of a more egalitarian future? A case has been made here for both responses. On the one hand, the PMC hasplayedamajorrole in the oppression and disempowering of theoldworkingclass.Ithasofferedlittleresis-tance to (and, in fact, supplied the manpower for) the right’s campaign against any measure thatmight ease the lives of the poor and theworking class.

On the other hand, the PMC has at times been a“liberal”force,defendingthevaluesofschol-arship and human service in the face of therelentless pursuit of profit. In this respect, itsrole in the last century bears some analogy to the role of monasteries in medieval Europe,which kept literacy and at least some form of inquiry alive while the barbarians raged out-side. As we face the deepening ruin brought on by neoliberal aggression, the question may be: Who, among the survivors, will upholdthose values today? And, more profoundly,is thereanyway tosalvage thedreamof rea-

son—or at least the idea of a society in which reasonablenesscanoccasionallyprevail—fromthe accretion of elitism it acquired from the PMC?

Any renewal of oppositional spirit among the Professional-Managerial Class, or what remains of it, needs to start from an aware-ness that what has happened to the profes-sional middle class has long since happened to the blue collar working class. Those of us who have college andhigher degrees have provedto be no more indispensable, as a group, to the American capitalist enterprise than those who honed their skills on assembly lines or in ware-houses or foundries. The debt-ridden unem-ployed and underemployed college graduates, the revenue-starved teachers, theoverworkedandunderpaidserviceprofessionals,even theoccasional whistle-blowing scientist or engi-neer—all face the same kind of situation that confronted skilled craft-workers in the early 20th century and all American industrial work-ersinthelate20thcentury. Inthecomingyears,we expect to see the remnants of the PMC in-creasingly making common cause with the rem-nants of the traditional working class for, at a minimum, representation in the political pro-cess.ThisistheprojectthattheOccupymove-ment initiated and spread, for a time anyway, worldwide.

For further information on the transformation of the health care, legal, and journalistic professions:

Background Notes: The Recent History of the Professional Managerial Class By John Ehrenreich and Barbara Ehrenreichwww.rosalux-nyc.org/backgroundnotes1


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