Bait and Switch
The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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4.1 • 9 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times bestselling investigation into white-collar unemployment from "our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism"—The New York Times Book Review
The critically-acclaimed author of Nickel and Dimed goes back undercover to offer similarly unflinching insight, this time setting her sights on America's ailing middle class.
Americans' working lives are growing more precarious every day. Corporations slash employees by the thousands, and the benefits and pensions once guaranteed by "middle-class" jobs are a thing of the past.
In Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich goes back undercover to explore another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with the plausible résumé of a professional "in transition," she attempts to land a "middle-class" job. She submits to career coaching, personality testing, and EST-like boot camps, and attends job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and—again and again—rejected.
Bait and Switch highlights the people who have done everything right—gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés—yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster. There are few social supports for these newly disposable workers, Ehrenreich discovers, and little security even for those who have jobs. Worst of all, there is no honest reckoning with the inevitable consequences of the harsh new economy; rather, the jobless are persuaded that they have only themselves to blame.
Alternately hilarious and tragic, Bait and Switch, like the classic Nickel and Dimed, is a searing exposé of the cruel new reality in which we all now live.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A wild bestseller in the field of poverty writing, Ehrenreich's 2001 expos of working-class hardship, Nickel and Dimed, sold over a million copies in hardcover and paper. If even half that number of people buy this follow-up, which purports "to do for America's ailing middle class what did for the working poor," it too will shoot up the bestseller lists. But PW suspects that many of those buyers will be disappointed. Ehrenreich can't deliver the promised story because she never managed to get employed in the "midlevel corporate world" she wanted to analyze. Instead, the book mixes detailed descriptions of her job search with indignant asides about the "relentlessly cheerful" attitude favored by white-collar managers. The tone throughout is classic Ehrenreich: passionate, sarcastic, self-righteous and funny. Everywhere she goes she plots a revolution. A swift read, the book does contain many trenchant observations about the parasitic "transition industry," which aims to separate the recently fired from their few remaining dollars. And her chapter on faith-based networking is revelatory and disturbing. But Ehrenreich's central story fails to generate much sympathy is it really so terrible that a dabbling journalist can't fake her way into an industry where she has no previous experience? and the profiles of her fellow searchers are too insubstantial to fill the gap. Ehrenreich rightly points out how corporate culture's focus on "the power of the individual will" deters its employees from organizing against the market trends that are disenfranchising them, but her presentation of such arguments would have been a lot more convincing if she could have spent some time in a cubicle herself.
Customer Reviews
Another Excellent Book By This Author
Like in her book, "Nickel and Dimed," this author poses as an unemployed worker trying to find a job and shows us how difficult it is to find one. We're shown how the unemployed have to maneuver through connections, employment agencies, online job sites, and support groups, and dubious job-seeker mentors (all of which seem to exist more to enrich them, rather than the unemployed) to find a job. She also exposes how workers who don't conform to certain age groups or societal, religious, or racial norms can be being frozen out of the job market. Anyone who has been -- or thinks they ever might be laid off or fired in the future -- should read this book.