NOTIFÍQUESE; “E”

However, as the large corporations and conglomerates have grown and extended their tentacles into virtually every neighborhood, all but the very least profitable areas of economic life have been removed from the game, and ever fewer workers see real opportunity in their freedom to enter the competition and become their own bosses. This diminished sense of opportunity is an important side effect of corporate expansion. If not offset by new sources of perceived

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opportunity, it would soon lead to serious trouble for the corporations themselves, because the perception of opportunity is key in selling the undemocratic workplace to those at the bottom— the workers—whose cooperation the corporations need. Opportunity is held up as something that makes up for the hierarchical nature of the system of production. People would resent more strongly and oppose with greater unity a setup that they felt not only deprived them of dignity but also denied them any opportunity to achieve it.

Widespread belief in individual opportunity protects the system from potentially devastating attack—it protects a backward setup in which a minute number of people exercise control over the nations huge amount of capital in industry, agriculture and transportation, while vast numbers of people work that capital and get nothing more than monetary compensation for their time. Individual opportunity is a powerful component of American ideology, powerful enough to elicit support for the system from all quarters, even from many exploited and unorganized workers who are at their bosses' mercy 4 _{If workers destined to be used up and discarded by employers cling}

nevertheless to "the American Way," it is not because they are ignorant of their destiny, but because they sense it. They feel that their only ray of hope for a satisfying life emanates from the "opportunity" the American system offers. Ironically, the more agonizing the position of such individuals in the hierarchy, and the more desperate their craving for a way out, the more emotional may be their defense of the system. Thus, through the ideology of individual opportunity, the system can keep the majority of workers in stressful and alienating jobs, and even get some enthusiastic support, just by maintaining the opportunity for a few workers to escape their survival-oriented work lives.

How do the corporations keep the crucial ideology of opportunity alive now that they no longer pretend that you have any real chance of entering into competition with them? Through a simple shift in the mechanism: Now your vehicle for escape is propelled not by your opportunity to compete with the corporations, but by your opportunity to compete within them.

The classic strategy, of course, is to "start at the bottom and work your way up" on the job. However, work is increasingly organized in ways that obstruct or completely block this pathway. With the ever-finer division of job tasks, for example, employees learn fewer skills doing their jobs, so that their work does not naturally broaden their knowledge and prepare them for advancement. Their narrow assignments typecast them and keep them playing the same

specialized job roles even when they change employers. Workers who manage to overcome this problem face increasingly strict barriers that prevent them from advancing beyond

nonprofessional jobs unless they have the right paper credentials, which they cannot get at work. Hence today’s model strategy for positioning yourself within the employing institutions, which have no compunction about hiring people to start at the bottom and stay there, is to start (or start over) at the professional level. The opportunity to "start your own business and be your own boss" has in large part been replaced by the opportunity to "become a professional and have some autonomy" within somebody else’s organization. We will see, though, that this coveted autonomy is restricted in the most fundamental way.

Today’s emphasis on finding your opportunity within the corporations keeps alive the ideology of opportunity—an ideology that serves the corporations indirectly by generating support for the hierarchical setup as a whole, as mentioned above. But the shift in the location of opportunity does something extra for the employers. It channels your efforts to escape into the direct service of the corporations: To become eligible for the better jobs within the corporations, you work to develop the skills that the corporations value. Thus the name of the biggest game in the land of opportunity today is making yourself more valuable to the bosses. And because the employers

assess your value mainly by examining your credentials, the paper chase is on. A few generations ago, what worker would have sought college credit for work experience, an advertising point for colleges today? Who would have cared much about mail-order term papers and degrees? Today, more than ever, workers see their great opportunity for escape from unsatisfying working lives in terms of further schooling, professional training, degrees, credentials, licenses and certificates. Local college parking lots fill up after 5 p.m. Employers eagerly pay the tuition, even though worker turnover is high and few of the workers who do stick around will be reassigned to more productive jobs based on their evening studies. The company springs for the course fees less to upgrade its workforce than to sustain the ideology of opportunity and keep employees oriented toward individual rather than collective solutions.

Wage workers are not the only ones forced to adopt new career strategies because of the large corporations' tightening grip on the economy. As C. Wright Mills notes in White Collar, his classic study of the new "little man": "Rather than carry on his fathers business, many a boy has been trained, at: his parents' sacrifice, to help man some unit of the big-business system that has destroyed his father's business."5

But there is a rub: The number of openings for professional positions is limited, and no one is guaranteed a slot. For those forced to defect from family business to big business, having to actually compete for a position as a subordinate employee adds insult to injury. For workers, the limitation on openings is simply a reminder that, for them, the more the system evolves, the more it stays the same. As those who shift out of family businesses enter into competition with the children of professionals for the limited number of professional jobs, workers without either of these advantageous backgrounds find that, once again, as with their right to compete with the corporations, only relatively few workers can benefit from the opportunity to compete within them. The fact that so many workers are actively pursuing at least some long-term program of officially recognized "self-improvement"—almost to the point that it is a national mania—does not mean that a large number of higher-level positions are waiting for people to fill them. It simply means a large number of people are not satisfied with their positions, and a rather narrow path to better ones has been laid out. Each step along the path has been specified in detail,

effectively standardizing and circumscribing workers' efforts toward advancement. The pursuit of opportunity has been rationalized and institutionalized.