Carhartt Economy, Prada Policies

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

It was a sentence that only the New York Times could have written: “Obama’s overtime proposal threatens ‘Devil Wears Prada’ economy.”

Noam Scheiber’s report will not surprise you. The Obama administration, in a fit of lame-duck unilateralism, has declared that almost all workers, including those in salaried administrative and managerial positions up to nearly $50,000 a year, must be paid time-and-a-half for any work beyond 40 hours in any given week. This threatens to be “disorienting” for entry-level workers in “prestige professions,” including the low-earning assistants to big-shot publishing and media figures such as the young woman working for a lightly fictionalized Anna Wintour in the popular novel.

Jill Salayi, general manager of (note the name!) Workman Publishing, sent a letter to the Labor Department arguing that these new rules would in the long run be bad for the overwhelmingly young people in these jobs. “Less will be asked of them, which means they will not receive sufficient career development or see timely advancement.”

Well.

A constant and serious problem with American policy-making is that our policy-making class and the media class that explains that process to the general public both are dominated, almost entirely, by college graduates, mainly from a relatively small number of prestigious institutions, and mainly drawn from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. They are a tribe, much more so than they realize: At New York’s Harvard Club (I am not a member) some time back, I was standing near the door waiting for my friend when a disheveled member who clearly had been having a bad day walked in and distractedly handed me his car keys, expecting me to park it. I thought briefly about stealing it, but it wasn’t a good enough car to merit the trouble.

The policy-making class is, unsurprisingly, very intellectually narrow, and its main interest is . . . its interests, consciously or not. From a certain point of view, this is understandable: If you have an Ivy League graduate degree and a spouse with the same, a household income in the six figures (and the first figure is not a 1), some social status, a measure of intellectual cultivation (you’ve read books that you didn’t have to), etc., life looks pretty good, and it is natural to conclude that people who have desperately unhappy, poor, disordered, insecure, unstable lives would be a great deal happier — and a great deal less trouble to society — if their lives looked more like yours. This is why so much of the policy thinking of our best-and-brightest is directed toward the question of how to get more yobs into four-year degree programs, which blends rather easily into concerns about the appalling student-loan burdens of Bryn Mawr and Haverford graduates.

It is also easy for such people to think: Of course the Obama administration’s rules weren’t meant for people like us! It’s those poor, hapless, un-degreed, burger-flipping proles who require federal intervention. Not editorial assistants at big publishing companies, promising young men and women who once belonged to the Groton badminton club or the Pudwhackers or whatever the glee club at Harvard is called.

I once tried to hire a very smart young woman graduating from a reasonably good college to work at a small newspaper I edited, where she’d been an intern. She turned me down to work for less money at a big book publisher in Manhattan, where the cost of living is about four times what it is in the Philadelphia suburbs. But her reasoning was solid: She didn’t want to work at small-town newspapers for the rest of her life — she wanted to work for a big-time publishing company, and if that meant being poor for a few years in her middle 20s, she’d rather be poor at 26 than regretful at 35.

This is, you’ll note, a behavior that takes roughly the same shape as saving and investing: forgoing present comforts for the hope of large, meaningful returns in the future.

But here’s the thing: It isn’t only rich white kids bound for prestige jobs in New York or Washington who make that decision.

“Less will be asked of them,” and therefore less given in the way of advancement, is a dynamic that applies to young assistant managers at Burger King just as it does to assistants aspiring to editorial positions at Vogue. Work is lumpy in magazine publishing (ask anybody working on the print side of a fortnightly journal of opinion), a fact that is so deeply ingrained into media culture that the idea of even tracking one’s hours is alien. But if the workweek goes over 40 hours, nobody is surprised. In elite jobs, that is taken for granted, because your job associates you with something to which you wish to belong, and, besides, what else are you going to do when you’re 24 and broke?

But does it occur to no one that an extra ten hours at ordinary pay might be very welcome indeed for a person in an hourly job who isn’t there because he grew up wanting to work in a warehouse outside of Lubbock, Texas, but because he is in desperate need of money? Or that development and advancement are things that happen in jobs that do not require college degrees, too? Or that there are people in this world who cannot distinguish themselves by being cleverer or more creative than the rest of their colleagues but who can distinguish themselves simply by outworking everyone else?

These people, and their virtues, deserve more than the implicit contempt of those in the “Devil Wears Prada” economy and the ignorant attentions of the New York Times.

Cut them off at the feet with your backward, intrusive, clumsy, beef-witted attempts to help and that’s just the tragic, unforeseen (but not unforeseeable) consequence of progressives with the best of intentions. But mess with Caitlyn’s publishing-assistant gig and you get an outpouring to outdo Yoko Ono in the angst and wailing department.

Stop helping. You aren’t.