do not control their own hiring practices helps explain why so many of the people Ehrenreich describes hold down more than one job just to make their rent (170). Ehrenreich also cites the powerlessness of employees vis-a-vis employers in her account of the Wal-Mart job: "You're handed the application form and, a few days later, you're being handed the uniform. . . . There's no intermediate point in the process in which you confront the potential employer as a free agent" (149).
However, Weber's idea that "noneconomic institutions are also important in determining where one fits in the social hierarchy" (Phillips 277) is also in evidence in Ehrenreich. The supervisors and petty entrepreneurs Ehrenreich encountered in her various jobs were not elites. A
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