George
Orwell did it because he was broke. Barbara Ehrenreich did it to find out why
some people are always broke. And according to the New York Times, a 25-year-old named Sean Aiken is
blogging about it at OneWeekJob.com to find his passion. Converting a string of
jobs into literary non-fiction gold is easy to do if one can withstand the
indignity of taking a menial job long enough to get the paragraphs out.
Compared to those mentioned, the lot of business-tech writer and consultant
Alex Frankel was relatively easy. To put together his new book Punching In, he worked at hip companies like
Apple and Starbucks to find out how these places find, mold and create loyalty
in their bottom-level employees. Surely Orwell would have preferred being an
Apple Genius to washing the dishes of Paris aristocrats.
Frankel
wasn't able to penetrate the personality tests of Whole Foods or stand out in a
group interview at the Container Store, but he did stints at five companies for Punching In.
Under an assumed identity as a grad student without much retail experience,
Frankel scrunched jeans at Gap and struggled to answer Mac users' esoteric
questions while observing his fellow employees and the way they felt about
their jobs. In each case, Frankel provides a tantalizing glimpse into the
corporate self-image of the companies as delivered in training and day-to-day
operations to their employees, from the differences among UPS uniforms to how
Enterprise Rent-a-Car uses customer satisfaction to decide its employees'
eligibility for promotion.
Though
his targets are unconventional, Punching In offers few surprises, unless
tidbits like Gap's insistence that employees only wear Gap clothes or
non-branded apparel to work come as a surprise. Whether Frankel wasn't able to
work at his target companies long enough to experience the indoctrination he
was seeking, or because he claims to be resistant to such branding attempts, he
never fully answers the question: Why do people want to be a barista or a UPS
guy, anyway? Perhaps he could have used a little more of Ehrenreich's
perspective in recognizing his co-workers for whom these jobs are careers, as
well as the way those companies might encourage or, alternately, undercut that
goal. With his anecdotes that never form a complete picture, the case study he
wanted to live is bland enough for CEOs to read on airplanes.