Succeeding With an Upbringing That's Not Upper Crust

No sensible person would deny that color still matters in the workplace, but there is one color they often overlook: blue.

As in blue collar. Class differences don't play into that cherished American myth of individual freedom and economic possibility. We still freely tell little kids that anyone can be president, seemingly ignoring that the office is occupied by a man whose most obvious qualification is that his dad once held the job.

Far below the White House level, however, class matters even more, especially to those who dare leap out of the one to which they were born. Alfred Lubrano's "Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams" (John Wiley & Sons, 2003) examines the issues faced by those who carry their working-class upbringings into the middle class. Education brings these "Straddlers," as he calls them, into a larger world, giving them access to safer, more intellectually stimulating jobs, but also divides them from their parents and the people with whom they grew up.

While Lubrano's work would never be classified in the career-advice section of the bookstore, nonetheless there is a wealth of workplace guidance to be gleaned from it -- whether you're a Straddler yourself, or want to better understand your Straddler employees or colleagues. For me, as the daughter of a truck driver and a waitress, and one of the first people in my family to go to college, each chapter of this book brought at least one "aha" moment. I've had countless conversations with Straddler friends (of course, we didn't call ourselves that) about the disconnect we often feel in our office jobs, but no one ever pulled it all together as eloquently as this book does.

Lubrano, the son of a Brooklyn bricklayer and now a successful Ivy League-educated journalist and frequent NPR commentator, tackles the issue from several angles. He weaves together his personal experiences with those of 100 fellow Straddlers he interviewed, along with scholarship from the emerging field of working-class studies.

As Lubrano points out, the discomfort generally starts in school. Most working-class kids walk into classrooms at a disadvantage, especially in terms of language, he says. Their parents are concerned primarily with filling immediate needs, leaving little time for reading novels, much less talking about them with their children. Then it gets worse: "Teachers treat the working class and well-to-do differently . . . with blue-collar kids getting less attention and respect," he writes.

For those who make it out, college presents new problems. "If you're from the middle class, you do not feel out of place preparing for college," he writes. "Parents and peers help groom you, encourage you, and delight in your progress. Of course, when you get to freshman year, the adjustments can be hard on anyone, middle-class and working-class kids alike. But imagine going through freshman orientation if your parents are ambivalent -- or hostile -- about your being there, or your friends aren't clear about what you're doing."

Also, working-class kids are far more likely to have to work for money while in college, cutting down on the time they have for studying or unpaid internships, as well as for the sort of bonding activities that seem frivolous at the time, but actually serve to cement the connections that middle- and upper-class people lean on for the rest of their lives.

Things don't get any easier in the workplace, he says. "Blue-collar guys have no patience for office politics and corporate bile-swallowing." But, in the white-collar world, "everything is outwardly calm and quiet. Workers have to be reserved and unemotional, and must never show anger. It's uptight, maybe even unhealthy, and all that pent-up aggression comes out in long-knife ambushes at the 2 p.m. meeting," he writes.

Lubrano confesses that he has opened his mouth when he shouldn't have more than a few times, especially early on in his career, and it made him enemies.

Also, Straddlers often have problems with the networking that seems so crucial to getting ahead at work. It seems fake, like using people, and it's antithetical to the values with which they were raised.

Clearly, it's a completely different set of rules you must learn to play by.

"So what's an ambitious working-class kid to do?" I asked Lubrano in an interview.

"Maybe you can't learn refinement," he said, smiling, "but you can learn restraint."

Join Mary Ellen Slayter for Career Track Live, an online discussion of issues affecting young workers, at 11 a.m. tomorrow at www.washingtonpost.com. Alfred Lubrano will be her guest on tomorrow's chat.