REPRESENTATIONS OF WORK IN TV ADS

It is hardly surprising that advertisers would omit most traces of alienated work. Yet, occasionally such hints do reappear, if only to permit advertisers to suggest that their products will permit the consumer-who-is-also-worker to transcend her or his momentarily alienated state. Frequently, beer ads will allude to the nature of alienated work, but will not show it, when they offer their beer as satisfying compensation for a work week that is now done. In addition to Michelob's "We make weekends" campaign, there is Stroh's "When the work week's over," or the more current Miller campaign entitled simply "5:01..." when the work is done. These ads routinely invite us to take satisfaction in the deep, rich relations that develop out of an occupational community built on respect, even while the off-duty workers are apparently overjoyed that they have reached the end of the workday. Of course, these are increasingly fantasies for most workers as we move historically further and further away from the age of stable occupational communities. A current Anheuser-Busch campaign unwittingly confirms the fantastic quality of these depictions when it shows hardworking fisherman slapping one another on the back and sharing ears of corn. The tagline is "It would be weird without a beer." Weirder still is sharing occupational community without a community or a job or more precisely, ever-shifting and moving employment. Unlike the Miller High Life campaigns ("The Champagne of Bottled Beers") of the 1950s and early 1960s, beer ads no longer situate themselves in the social context of bowling leagues, for as Robert Putnam has observed, though American workers are bowling more frequently, they are more often "bowling alone." In fact, we ought to be asking how much occupational community has actually survived two decades of deindustrialization, the polarization of wealth and income, and relentless corporate downsizing?

In the late 1980s a few advertisers, most notably AT&T, adopted a style known as "slice of death" advertising to chillingly depict the corporate work world as a cold and unforgiving environment. White collar employees were shown viciously sniping at one another about their performance, and their right to hold their positions. One's job was on the line with every decision about choosing a telecommunications system. Make the wrong decision and you may be out of a job; others may gloat, while you'll get the ax. Though the labor-market situation for white collar workers has worsened since then, the "slice of death" ads have not been revisited, perhaps because today outstanding job performance no longer accurately correlates with whether or not a corporate employee will hold onto their job. Though corporate downsizing has become a defining feature of the corporate landscape, it has become driven by structural matters well-beyond questions of competency in job performance.