Democratic Communique 24, 2011
Media and the Economic Crisis
*POP* Go the Workers in Dell's Advertising: Responding to the Hecessionary Moment ca. 2009
Michelle Rodino-Colocino
The latest economic crisis has stirred anxieties around the gendered division of rate media, economists, and government officials, the recession of the late 2000s appears as a crisis that disproportionately affects US male workers. In such displacement of Keynesian capitalism, more bubbles and crises await. It is important, then, for critical communication scholars to look at how cultural texts distort and how capitalism is being imagined during crisis. This paper explores how promotionaldiscourse for Dell computers constitutes an ephemeral yet important moment in capitalist crisis. These texts speak the organic crisis of neoliberal capitalism through the conjunctural crisis of the “hecessionary” moment.
The latest economic crisis has stirred anxieties around the gendered division of labor. Dubbed the "Great He-cession" and "Mancession," mainstream corporate media, economists and government officials have depicted the Great Recession as a crisis that disproportionately affects US male workers because men's unemployment has outpaced women's (Cauchon 2009; Perry 2008; Salam 2010; Thurmond 2009; Zinczenko 2009). In such discourse anxieties around men’s jobs, especially white white-collar men’s jobs, stand in for concern over the economic security of women, people of color, and new immigrants. Hecessionary discourse claims that men’s unemployment outstrips women’s, and consequently, hurts men financially and emotionally more than it does women, who are better able to negotiate hardship.Other economic indicators, however, suggest the latest downturn may hurt women more than men. For example, although men may have lost more jobs than have women, women’s share of unemployment has grown faster than men’s Mulligan 2009). Women are also more likely than men to file for bankruptcy due to medical costs (Folbre 2009.)
Given neoliberalism’s displacement of Keynesian capitalism, more bubbles, crises, and anxious discourse around white white-collar men await. The Keynesian breaks are off, and decades of deregulation, privatization, and decline in social welfare spending make our economy ever more precarious.[1] It is important, then, for critical communication scholars to look at how cultural texts “speak the crisis” of the latest recession (Hall 1988; Hall and Jacques 1983, 30). If we agree with Schudson (leaving aside his arguments about advertising’s “dubious impact”) that “advertising is capitalism’s way of saying ‘I love you’ to itself’” (Schudson 2009, 239), then marketing texts may provide insight into how capitalism is being imagined and promoted during crisis. Borrowing from Stuart Hall’s discussion of the Right, we might also examine how ads move beyond “reflecting” crises in capitalism to serve as a “response to the crisis” (Hall 1988, 42-43). Ads may be instructive for gauging deeper, “organic” crises while they self-consciously comment on contingent, “conjunctural ones." [2]
In this paper, I discuss how an ad for Dell computers constitutes an ephemeral yet important moment in capitalist crisis.This commentary is part of a larger series of investigations into how cultural texts speak the crisis of “The Great Recession.”Here I explore how one Dell ad and its making-of “paratext” (Gray 2010) speak the organic crisis of neoliberal capitalism through the conjunctural crisis of the “hecessionary” moment. I conclude by inviting critical communication scholars to put such critique into action. Only critique that informs intervention in the larger organic crisis becomes useful to those who would counter what Hall long ago called "The Great Moving Right Show"(Hall 1979).[3]
How “Treats” Treats Labor
Created by Mother New York, “Treats” promoted Dell’s brightly colored Inspiron laptops on television and the internet in June 2009, around the height of mancession discourse.[4] The 30-second spot features four men wearing hard hats and overalls in a fantastical factory watching a Rube Goldberg-like assembly line produce brightly colored laptops. The quartet lip-sync “Lollipop,” a re-recording of the bouncy hit popularized by the white female quartet, The Chordettes in 1958. A conveyor belt serves pink, blue, yellow, and green blobs to a shiny metal cylindrical robot-like contraption that swats them with tennis racket arms into exploding squares. Transparent tubes catch and drop the squares onto another belt that moves them through another round of shaping, finishing, and branding. The female voiceover conclude“Treat yourself to a Dell Inspiron laptop. With intelligent Intel processors. Dell. Yours is here.”
What is most striking about the ad is that the quartet does not produce the laptops.The men, instead, lip sync “Lollipop,” sway their bodies and exude reserved happiness as tiny robots roll and faux elephant feet stomp out product.The occasional frame shows one worker holding a clipboard, which he neither writes on nor looks at. Workers appear enamored with the process of turning out laptops, which appear in the last frame as tiny, shiny, cellophane-wrapped candies. But the men did not assemble them. In some ways, the quartet’s racial composition of two men of color (one Asian and one African-American) and two white men (one blonde, one brunette) also connote a rainbow of colors.The quartet functions, therefore, like the bright lollipop-colored laptop shells, as accessories to a productive tool and process, aimed at color-conscious “consumers.” A female voice narrates the story.
By foregrounding nonproductive male labor and pointing to productive female labor (the voiceover) imagined to serve women (color-conscious consumers), “Treats’” responds to hecessionary anxieties. Dell had, after all, significantly scaled down its workforce. By January 2009 Dell had closed its Austin assembly plant and laid off 9,300 workers, exceeding its 2007 plan to cut 8,800 workers (“Dell to Close 2008”; Ellis 2007; Shaddock, 2009). Dell was also embroiled in a class-action lawsuit that alleged the company underpaid 5,000 call center workers (Gaudin 2008; Winget 2010).[5] An ad that imagined no productive labor, in this context, seemed only partly fictive.
Like hecessionary discourse, however, “Treats” registers no reaction to the economic hardships of women, despite Dell’s apparent contributions.Female employees brought three gender-discrimination cases against Dell between October 2008 and January 2011.In the first four human resource executives filed a class action lawsuit against Dell for discriminating against women and workers over 40 in downsizing, promotions, and pay. A second complainant joined the first suit, and in July 2009 Dell settled both for $9.1 million. The third gender discrimination case is still pending (Cainan 2011; Gross 2008; Shah 2009).
The affirming gaze of “Treats’” assembly-line quartet stands in relief to earlier ads that at least partly represent the labor of PC production. Dell’s “Purely You” ads of 2006 depict workers’ assembling computers, directed by customers through call center workers.[6]