Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 2014
#4, 2014 Skandies
So this is one of those movies that doesn’t reveal what is even happening for the first several scenes—who just called her? why is she crying? did her family just die in an accident or something? But eventually all is revealed, and the rest of the movie is quite straightforward. Sandra took a leave of absence from her job at a solar panel factory while battling clinical depression. Now she’s ready to return—or says she’s ready, though she’s popping a Xanax every five minutes—but her boss just held a vote: having seen that the company can get by with sixteen employees rather than seventeen, should he welcome Sandra back, or should he lay her off and give everyone a €1000 bonus? The phone call is from a friend telling Sandra that people voted for the bonus, fourteen to two. But it wasn’t a secret ballot, and the head of the company agrees to re‑run the vote first thing Monday morning, giving Sandra the weekend to drum up support.
And that’s the movie: Sandra races around Liège to ask each of the fourteen co‑workers who voted against her to reconsider their vote. These fourteen are strikingly diverse both demographically and in their reactions to Sandra’s entreaties: one breaks down crying and begs for her forgiveness, one pretends not to be home and has her young child answer the intercom, one even gets violent. What all fourteen encounters have in common is how fraught they are: all of these people are living close to the bone, and while Sandra needs to keep her job to keep her family out of social housing, her co‑workers impress upon her that this €1000 bonus will make or break their household budget. A thousand euros! Welcome to the triumphant recovery of the 2010s, when stocks are through the roof, unemployment is through the floor, and in one of the richest countries in the world, people with full‑time jobs in the booming tech sector still have to fight over scraps.
A recurring theme in these articles over the years has been the way that, to the extent that a primary goal of an economic system should be to make the most of the potential of the population, ours does a shitty job. The shittiness takes several forms. For instance, many have lamented the way that, as the centuries have unfolded, we have missed out on any number of artistic masterpieces and technological innovations because the brains that could have created them were locked away in the skulls of women, slaves, and other classes of people whose talents have historically not been fostered. Even putting that aside, the perverse incentives of the “free market” channel people onto paths that fail to make the world a better place. I think it’s pretty clear that the best way for me to contribute to the world is by writing stories—when I get smeared over the pavement by a malfunctioning Tesla, the second edition of Ready, Okay! is pretty much the only thing that will make me think I haven’t completely wasted my life—but the free market argues that, on the contrary, I am best put to use helping rich kids improve their standardized test scores so they can vault over poorer kids for spots at Stanford. I thought that perhaps I could split the difference by teaching public school kids about literature. It was something I’d been thinking about for ages, but when I saw people I knew reorienting their careers to try to stave off dystopia in the wake of the disaster of 2016, I thought I should try to do my part. Over and over I’d heard both that there was a teacher shortage in general and that, in particular, it was hard to attract top prospects to the profession because of the low pay and tough working conditions. I have a pretty strong résumé; you might think that I’d be the sort of candidate the public education system would be trying to recruit. Instead, I soon found that the system seems designed to keep potential teachers out of the classroom. Here are just a few of the hurdles I’ve encountered along the way:
- accumulating 45 hours of “early field
experience” in a high school classroom, which you have to arrange
yourself; I have no idea how people do it if they don’t have
contacts (I was lucky to have some contacts at a public high school due
to my test prep work)
- passing a battery of surprisingly tough standardized tests
- getting accepted to a credentialing program, paying thousands of
dollars for it, and giving up your income while enrolled
- spending a semester as an assistant teacher while taking
six (!) classes, which are not particularly hard but which do
require you to write a short paper nearly every day for four months
- actually finding two teachers who will agree to take you on as an
apprentice, since the university assigns you to a high school but
you’re on your own once you get there
- taking a class over winter break
- spending a semester teaching (and designing the curriculum for)
two real high school classes full of real high school students while
taking four (!) university classes at the same time
- passing the huge teacher assessment, which requires you to write
about a hundred pages in education jargon and submit several videos
- earning the approval of university supervisors who observe your
classes in person
- on top of all this, monitoring job listings to try to line up a
gig for the fall
- going to high‐pressure interviews that often involve a performance component (e.g., “grade and give feedback on this essay, right here”)
And if after all this you do get through your program and land a job, you receive a preliminary credential and a temporary job. You still have to spend years “clearing” your credential (at which point it will still have a near‐future expiration date!), and you still have to go through endless rounds of evaluation with the (frequently verbalized) threat of a pink slip hanging over your head.
What Two Days, One Night highlights, and what my personal experience corroborates, is that an employment system that forces people to run through this sort of gantlet in order to secure the privilege of contributing to society is not only a bad way to allocate human capital, but is corrosive to the lives of the people caught up in it. Not only does Sandra’s quest to keep her job send her into an emotional tailspin, but virtually all her visits prompt some sort of eruption as the members of the household argue and sometimes even come to blows over the balance between empathy and their own needs—and all because of management’s bullshit mind games. The especially dispiriting thing is the extent to which society as a whole has succumbed to these mind games—imbibed the ideology that life is supposed to be a competition, specifically one in which stumbling into a job that doesn’t grind you up is the “skill” selected for, and that any suggestion that there must be a better way is just the moaning of a sore loser. But there’s a version of the world in which those who want to contribute to the common good are welcomed rather than tossed into the arena. This isn’t it.
