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Home - Books
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Transient Affluence
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New book highlights job relocation angst
by Rob McLean
Globetrotting on the company dime is costly. Big businesses like Coca-Cola, UPS and Procter & Gamble will spend big money to move its workforce and to pay huge salaries. But there are personal costs for the executives who follow those marching orders.
Peter Kilborn’s Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America’s New Rootless Professional Class details the nomadic corporate life and its effect on American families.
Kilborn paints that life as grim. The modern nuclear family — or “relo” family, as in relocate — is tragic. The husband brings home the bacon, but is rarely home. Wives end their careers to become stay-at-home moms and split time among home management, volunteering and tennis. The children either adapt to new environments or become “hooligans.” The guiding force for all this is money. The people Kilborn profile live by the old “cash is king” axiom. They’ll follow the money anywhere in the world, and earn a magnificent, but troubled, living.
Take Phil Cottrell, whose family is profiled in the book. He moved to Pittsburgh to earn an MBA at Carnegie Mellon University while working full-time as a retail measurement service consultant at ACNielsen. He earned around $100,000 annually.
This was the family’s fourth move. They came by way of Valparasio, Ind., to Sussex, N.J.; off to Alpharetta, Ga., and finally to Pittsburgh, Pa. Cotrell lost custody of his two teenage daughters, his second wife left with their toddler daughter, and he had to pay child support to two ex-wives. ACNeilson pink-slipped him, and his Pittsburgh home didn’t sell quickly.
While not all Kiborn’s profiles are this grim, they each have a little sadness — like the Silva family: a left-leaning clan who immigrated to Milton, Ga. after Kevin Silva was transferred from Seattle, Wash. to a UPS office in Georgia.
His wife Patti fell in love with Milton and refused to leave after Kevin’s UPS departure for Germany-based Schenker AG. The new job would let Kevin and his family live anywhere, and after investigating other cities, the family would remain in Milton.
The book culminates with three University of Nebraska-Lincoln students who are up-and-coming relo-workers. They went from school at UNL to careers at Union Pacific, Stryker Corporation and Cerner Corporation, respectively.
Kilborn shows each Nebraska graduate as ambitious and ready to relocate, but he can’t determine if this is a healthy lifestyle.
“The illusions might be all that remain of the Rockwellian depictions of home,” Kilborn writes. “Among this class of serial movers, I met people who were as clearly defined as the oak in the courthouse square. Yet they, and in particular their children, had little notion of geographic origin of a starting place. I think that’s sad, but can’t conclude that it’s bad.”
Others seem to share that opinion. For instance, the Reverend Russ Kane, a Presbyterian pastor for the New Hope Presbyterian Church in the relo-community of Castle Rock, Colo., told Kilborn that people were sad because they had no friends and thought of home as somewhere else — a place where they spent vacations.
Next Stop, Reloville is a reality check for budding executives. Huge paychecks and stock options accompany an existence that’s nomadic and risky.
The author’s relo-family portraits are among the book’s best qualities. Each family member is fleshed out enough for the reader to empathize with them. We understand the husband’s ambition to get ahead in the company, but we have compassion for the much-frustrated wife.
But Kilborn makes some large assumptions without any way to back them up. For instance, he says, “No one can say how many suburban kids who get into trouble with vandalism and drugs are relos or how many relo kids are troublemakers.” Yet in the same paragraph he says teens who use drugs and commit vandalism are from “affluent suburbs with global employers nearby.”
Kilborn uses the same construction a few pages later to describe relo-grandparents who follow their children from place to place. “It is impossible to determine just how many people become collateral relos, but no doubt they make up tens of thousands of the more than 300,000 people aged 60 to 75 who move out of their home states each year.”
These assumptions aren’t necessary, because giving examples of each, which he does, makes his point that these are problems in relo-communities. ,
Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America’s New Rootless Professional Class by Peter T. Kilborn, 2009, Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, $26.
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