I don’t think there is anymore. Since the mid-80s, race and class and gender play a much bigger part than they used to in determining who gets out of the mailroom (and they always played a role to a certain degree).
If there isn’t a romantic/sexual element in play, you either move from the household/family to an entry-level role in the business (effectively re-starting from the bottom), find a way to get the highest paid managerial role in the household (majordomo or the like), or leave for another place and try again.
It’s probably a combination of my personality traits and the low stakes involved in maintaining my comfortable life, but the idea of having household/personal servants of any kind makes me really uncomfortable. I will admit that living in a concierge/doorman building has eliminated some annoyances (esp. when packages arrive) but that’s a service shared and paid for collectively by all the residents.
Are you saying that working in the mail room as a summer job a couple of times before being installed in your rightful place once you finish school doesn’t count?
Could technically correct be a less-honest form of correct; even if it’s canonically the best kind of correct?
I hear you, and I feel the same way. So I probably wouldn’t really want to live that way, however appealing the idea might seem in the abstract. Even waitstaff make me feel uncomfortable. I have never actually responded to the question “Can I bring you anything to drink?” with “No, no, I can get it myself,” but sometimes it’s been a close thing.
On the other hand, ask me again at tax time, when I have to corral the million pieces of paper that have scattered themselves randomly across my life over the course of the previous year …
I hadn’t thought a lot about this until now, but aside from performative acts like you describe, how would this even work? Working in the mail room doesn’t qualify you for any other job at a big company. It’s not like, after diligently photocopying, sorting, and delivering interoffice memos for two years, they’re going to promote you to sales, finance, legal, marketing, or engineering. What is this mythical path out of the mail room that we’ve all heard so much about supposed to even be?
Aside from moonlighting at the University of American Samoa (go Land Crabs) of course.
There were once limited paths of advancement like that based on hard work and recognised skills/talent. In my career I’ve met a number of (always much older) people who literally went from the mailroom or warehouse floor to the executive suite over the course of their careers. However, those channels have been closed for decades in the U.S.
Knowing that is one of the reasons that I find the “hustle culture” being foisted on young people over social media so distasteful.
Even a go-getter like Slippin’ Jimmy had an older brother who was a respected partner in a law firm to help smooth the way.
I recall Matt Weiner saying that Peggy from Mad Men, who went from the typing pool to being a creative lead, was based on real women in the advertising industry who travelled a similar path. Even there, a powerful patron was required and the journey was still fraught with resentment from above and below.
That’s one of those things that depends on the company and the times. At a startup I worked for in the late nineties, the receptionist position was a revolving door for a while because the people in it kept getting promoted. One of them had been an English major, taught himself programming and in not-that-long worked his way into a software engineering role. Another one had been ABD in (I think) French literature and wound up in sales. I think she’s in management now.
It was the late nineties, though, and they needed people so badly they hired me.
Is the out-of-the-mailroom scenario likely? No. Is it possible? Yes. Is it going to happen often? No.
This is a good point. The dotcom bubble was an exceptional period where tech companies would often hire and promote people despite their not being from the “right” class or race or gender. It was short-lived, though, and the privileged tech bros (male, white or “model minority”) still called the shots.
I think the key component to that nowadays is startup. Startups are small; they’re a place where somebody at reception or in the mail room can be seen by management. Even if management consists of techbros.
This is a very important point. Artists REFLECT, and through reflection come up with important things to express. They do not behave in this manner because of their reflection.
I mean, Ai Wei Wei is an artist. Molly Crabapple is an artist. Tom Sachs is a dabbler.
Sure, but tech is not the only path out of the metaphorical mail room. Any business needs to do things to make money, and they often need people to do them (install the thing, manufacture the thing, make sure the thing or the people who install the thing gets where they need to be, etc.).
Sales would be the easiest path for a lot of people. I know a waitress who worked in a restaurant near a VAR. She used wait on the GM, who eventually wound up hiring her as an account manager. She prospered.
At least according to the mythical version, people working “in the mailroom” at film studios would be delivering mail to senior executives as well as writers, directors and producers who had offices on the studio lot. They would get to meet influential people, and if they were aspiring actors/writers/whatever they would have a foot in the door.
Her journey (and women like her) was also one where the career track involves a lot of loose qualifications. As in, no engineering degree or MBA required.
So in addition to the barriers imposed by gender, race, and everything else, I think the increased specialization of the work force is a big factor. In Henry Ford’s River Rouge plant, there was very little difference in education or skills between the guy shovelling sand into the glass smelter on the Model T line, and Ford himself. That’s no longer true. In that environment, advancement based solely on work ethic, familiarity with the cars, and seniority makes practical sense.
For what it’s worth, there’s at least one industry where this kind of path does kinda still exist- video games. Every video game company has lots of people who worked their way up to Producer, Designer, or higher from the “lowest” position in that industry, which is rank-and-file hourly QA. This works because there are multiple career tracks in gaming that require essentially no particular education. Anyone can be a Producer if they are organized, detail oriented, good with people, etc. Designer is more of an innate talent that isn’t really taught in school either. Some people just have good instincts for this and some don’t. Once you’re a Producer, it’s easy to move to Project Lead, Director, all sorts of management, etc. In fact engineering is the only segment of the industry that requires any special training. All the other jobs are very loosely defined and have no particular education requirements.
That’s not to say marginalized groups don’t face all kinds of glass ceilings in gaming. Hoo boy do they ever. Worse than anywhere, I bet. I hit the glass ceiling so hard and so many times that my head is flat. But at least in principle, those paths exist.
I’d add that these days, getting a degree from one of the “right” university (in the eyes of an employer) is effectively a class signifier.
While it’s definitely good that it exists, one of the downsides of is the perpetuation of notoriously bad management practises of the “this is the way we’ve always done it” variety. Also, as you imply, there’s a boy’s club culture of who gets promoted for their work.
Yah, 90s startups for sure, were a different world. I have a friend who’s an extreme example of that. It’s difficult to tell the story without revealing his identity, so I’ll be as vague as I can. He was good with computers so out of high school he got a job as the IT guy at a tiny ISP startup in the early ‘90s. A few years later, that company got bought by a bigger ISP who didn’t have an IT department so they took his department (which was just him) and enlarged it, placing him at the top of it. Then that big ISP got bought by a major TV network that wanted to “get into internet stuff”. They decided they should have a CTO like those hip tech companies do. They looked around and the closest thing they had was this friend of mine who was leading a small IT group in this ISP they just bought. They made him CTO. Now he makes tens of millions a year. He went from the guy who reboots the printers in a dial-up ISP to CTO of a multinational corporation in about five years, right out of high school.
Certain things to make clear- he’s a cishet white man, first of all. Had he been a queer Black woman, there’s no way some of those gimme promotions would have happened. Second, he was not undeserving, despite the unbelievable luck. He is very smart, incredibly hard working, and has done an incredible job of every position. So obviously that’s a factor too. If he sucked, those opportunities probably also wouldn’t have come.
If all that fails, there’s always the Fox Gambit. Moonlight in an empty office and just tell everyone you work there until they believe you.
Oh for sure. The world would be a better place if that whole industry died in a fire (not the people, of course- Yeesh… this is a monstrous metaphor).
Also, darkly amusingly, the path I just described is probably now gone because QA is all outsourced overseas now. In-house QA is very rare since I left the industry. Yay capitalism.
The path from the mail room is not great, but I’ve definitely known lots of (older) people who started on the assembly line, became line managers, and eventually either middle managers or transitioned into a technical or business role. They usually had the advantages of race and ability to get additional education while working – most people on the factory floor don’t get those promotions. And of course they mostly benefited from unions to have a lot of those opportunities.
The rise of contract labor has also severely limited even the narrow options that used to exist. It used to be that janitors, receptionists, and maintenance staff were employees and often had mostly the same vacation and benefits (again, including education benefits) as any other employee. This made it possible for at least some people to take advantage of those career paths. Now big companies outsource those jobs to vendors with much less generous compensation.
