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White Collar Blues: An Interview with Nikil Saval
5.20.14
by Jake Blumgart

Even at a time of low pay and degraded working conditions, meritocratic notions surrounding white collar work are hard to dispel.

Many Americans spend an ungodly amount of their lives in an office. They spend more time with their colleagues than their friends and family. And unlike the office jobs of yore, today’s white-collared masses are not rewarded with pensions or job protections. Instead, like the blue-collar economy, the professional workforce is beset by the same forces of precarity, wage stagnation, and terrible benefits.

N+1 editor Nikil Saval’s new book Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, takes a look at the history of white collar working conditions, their promise of social mobility, and the office dweller’s strange place in America’s class structure. “No other workplace, no matter how degraded, has been such a constant source of hope about the future of work and the guarantee of a stable, respectable life,” he writes.

In the nineteenth century office, workers held an awkward position between the forces of labor and capital, often siding with the latter despite periodic upsurges in organizing. The office worker was, according to Saval, a symbol of reaction during the Red Scare following World War I, in much the same way “hardhats” were popularly considered the embodiment of backlash in the early 1970s.

Saval has worked in a few publishing houses, but now toils in the freelance trenches. Cubed is his first book ...

More here - https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/white-collar-blues-an-interview-with-nikil-saval/