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Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

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The bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed goes back undercover to do for America's ailing middle class what she did for the working poor

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible résumé of a professional "in transition," she attempts to land a middle-class job—undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover, works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and—again and again—rejected.

Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right—gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés—yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today's ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their "surplus" employees—plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable workers—and little security even for those who have jobs.

Like the now classic Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch is alternately hilarious and tragic, a searing exposé of economic cruelty where we least expect it.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 25, 2006
ISBN9781429915700
Author

Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-2022) was a bestselling author and political activist, whose more than a dozen books included Nickel and Dimed, which the New York Times described as "a classic in social justice literature", Bait and Switch, Bright-sided, This Land Is Their Land, Dancing In the Streets, and Blood Rites. An award-winning journalist, she frequently contributed to Harper's, The Nation, The New York Times, and TIME magazine. Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, when it was still a bustling mining town. She studied physics at Reed College, and earned a Ph.D. in cell biology from Rockefeller University. Rather than going into laboratory work, she got involved in activism, and soon devoted herself to writing her innovative journalism.

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Reviews for Bait and Switch

Rating: 3.376558541147132 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The book is really interesting although at times it was a little bit boring and repetitive... although perhaps more for those of us from the corporate world who have already been through this so-called 'transition phases'...
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I thought her premise that she could fake her way into a high-paying job while not knowing much about it -- and thinking that this would be relatively easy -- was a bit haughty.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A seminal book about the shrinking middle class in which laid-off employees struggle to make ends meet through unemployment benefits, multilevel marketing schemes, contract work, and commission-only sales, none of which offers the stability and reliability of a regular paycheck, paid vacations, health and dental benefits, and a retirement plan.

    Ehrenreich's one year journey to find an executive level job led her to four states, dozens of networking events, three career coaches, a personal makeover complete with makeup, and $4,000.00 in job-search related expenses but resulted in only two job offers: one from AFLAC as a commission-only sales representative and one from Mary Kay as an independent sales representative. Neither "job" offered the typical employment package she was seeking: salaried work with benefits.

    Both disheartening and enlightening, Bait and Switch exemplifies Ehrenreich's ability to balance straight forward reporting with firsthand experience. A must read for anyone trying to understand the success and failings of corporate culture in the post dot-com United States.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I enjoyed this book and recommend it but there were some serious gaps. Yes the author was showing the difficulties of job hunting for middle age folks but the book really focused on support groups and networking groups available to certain types of job hunters. Admittedly, the author could not have faked being a software developer or other skilled computer person but the experience of the techie expert is, apparently, quite different than the "softer" side of the IT industry, i.e. marketing, project admin, managers. I didn't know it was different before reading this book but now it's quite clear there is a huge difference. Also, the author did not really go into the resume submission experience that much - she discusses group after group and contact after contact but then, just as a byline, says things like "by this time I had sent out 200 resumes". Well, what about those resumes?!?!So, yes, overall I think it's a good book but very definitely describes just one piece of the middle American nightmare that is job hunting as an over 40 person.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nothing new or radical here for anyone who's ever looked for an office job. But it is, as one of the job seekers Ehrenreich encountered in her search said, nice to know that you're not alone in the frustrations and bullshit experienced during a job search.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A tad more sarcasm and cynicism on display, and a little less compassion than in Nickel and Dimed, but, hey, this chronicles the struggle for a job in the corporate world...there is much to be cynical about. And still, compassion does shine through and those age old questions of the muckraking journalist: How have we allowed things to become the way they are? What do we do now?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Barbara Ehrenreich is one of my favorite nonfiction authors. I love her writing style. She accurately captures the human condition in an approachable style. This is a book that will make you think and question what's wrong with the US and its disappearing middle class.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Not as good as Nickeled and Dimed, this is about the grinding misery of the job search instead of, as Ehrenreich intended, the grinding misery of white collar corporate employment. Perhaps my discomfort is telling. The grinding misery of white collar corporate employment could have left me feeling smugly superior, from my position in the white collar academic world. But since I am academic staff, rather than faculty, my distance from job search misery is not sufficiently reassuring - and my awareness that the job market has worsened rather than improved since Ehrenreich wrote this book adds to its weight.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not as brilliant as NICKEL AND DIMED; I get the feeling Ehrenreich can't bring herself to feel as sympathetic to unemployed white-collar corporate workers as she did to minimum-wage workers. However, it's still compulsively readable. Ehrenreich re-named herself Barbara Alexander (legally returning to her maiden name) and entered the job market, intending to get herself a corporate job and work for a few months. She never did get a job; her only offers were from AFLAC and Mary Kay Cosmetics, in both cases basically to work as an independent contractor. Along the way, she experienced job fairs, corporate counselors, employment seminars, resumé counseling, and all the other ways in which the white-collar unemployed are further fleeced. The thing that stands out most to me is that many of the people preying on the people looking for jobs are themselves people who can't find jobs.

    After reading it, I found myself grateful I decided to become a private school teacher and not a PR person, systems analyst, or event planner. But I also feel a little less secure all around. Ehrenreich specializes in letting all the air out of the various fictions of a capitalist economy.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Enlightening. And oh so very depressing.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I thought I would have a really great review when I was through with this book. Sadly, there just wasn't enough meat here. I definitely empathized with Ehrenreich's struggle, but perhaps it was too above my own status to be able to relate to. Or perhaps it was just too unrealistic. She handles the overwhelming uncertainty and life-questioning that being unemployed or underemployed leaves you feeling psychologically, but she does not ever get put into a corner at which she is unable to function or dole out another unemployed chunk of money at career coaches. So what you are left with is a book about a woman without a job but also without any problems that another worker might have; rent, food, bills, etc.
    I don't think that this book is as problematic for me as "Nickel and Dimed" in that I don't think it was as much of a stretch for her to undergo the premise for this work. Searching for job ads online seems a little closer to the real-life Ehrenreich's profession than cleaning houses and waitressing does. It feels less like she, as an outsider and someone "above" the work she was doing was looking down in disapproval. That said, both books seem really weird to me. Who the fuck is she writing for, anyhow? Someone who was never unemployed and needs to be told that this is how it is? Overall, Ehrenreich makes me feel bitchy and forces me to realize that the only edge she has is that she is not a member of the groups that she studies. She needs these undercover exposes to show how the little people live. She may not mean to have this perspective be there, but the fundamental flaw of her books is that it is all-too present for me. I am offended by someone of a high class coming on down to mine and then trying to describe it to me. It just makes me angry and supports the whole need-money-to-get-money catch-22, the Marxist flaw that the only people that can start the revolution are those that are not working their lives away (thus not workers, thus not a marxist revolution...) sigh, sigh, work, work.
    I wish I was not unemployed and disgusted and thus had more energy to devote to why this book is wrong, but I am just too overwhelmed by everything described here and a powerful awareness of class and futility.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In an attempt to investigate the cutthroat nature of the corporate world, the Ms. Enrenreich, an acclaimed journalist, masquerades as a PR person in search of work. Her plan is to take all the advice available, getting a coach, a makeover, resume help, and attending all manner of networking events and job fairs. She will then take whatever job is offered her, work it a few months and learn what the increasingly competitive corporate workplace is like.All these plans come to naught however when she finds herself jobless after nearly seven months. It's a bleak sort of book, and I think it actually caused me a lot of anxiety as I remembered my own desperate job searching. However the author's wit and prose kept me entertained and grimly laughing through it all.Bottom line, there's some good advice to be gleaned for job seekers as well as a scathing indictment of the current hiring practices and declining stability of white-collar jobs.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I can't honestly give this a very high rating, and probably the thing that Fiona said while passing this on to me ("pass it on to someone else when you've finished, I don't need it back") should have given me a clue that this was likely.

    The main part of this book is golly-gosh, isn't corporate America full of utter utter utter bullshit - CV doctoring, spurious personality tests, and books that tell you to imagine what you want and a real physical force of attraction will bring it closer to you. Well, yeah, duh. None of this is surprising or enlightening, though you may enjoy reading some of the anecdotes of jaw-dropping stupidity that she puts in.

    She starts off by saying that in researching the world of white-collar work, she was unable to find very much written on the subject, even in recent fiction. But this book was published in 2005, by which time many people had been writing blogs for some time, including about their worklife. I don't have specific examples to cite, but surely she should have been able to dig some personal writing on the subject by real white collar workers either current or unemployed?

    The wrap-up chapter at the end was by far the best bit and should have been left as a stand-alone piece, I think. In that piece, she clarifies the single biggest flaw with this project; namely the unrealistic launching-into-the-void of trying to find a job with no usage of real-life contacts at all (because she's doing it undercover). I guess she thought it would be easy enough to get a corporate job despite that handicap but that really just shows how entirely out of touch she was with the corporate world - unlike most of her readers, who would be just wondering what the hell she thought she was even trying to do.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nothing new or radical here for anyone who's ever looked for an office job. But it is, as one of the job seekers Ehrenreich encountered in her search said, nice to know that you're not alone in the frustrations and bullshit experienced during a job search.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I didn't like this book as much as Nickel and Dimed. I felt as if Ehrenreich made some strange choices in trying to replicate a white collar job search. At times she seemed to keep doing the same things over and over, even though they were ineffective. Her conclusions were insightful and valuable.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I'd heard so many good things about journalist, political activist and author Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed - an undercover foray into the Catch-22 of our nation's working poor - that I didn't think twice about picking up Bait and Switch. As someone who's spent most of her career working with or for Corporate America, I thought this tell-all about the underbelly of white-collar employment may enlighten me, or least be a truthful expression of my personal experience.Unfortunately, her half-baked plan (conducted about four years prior to the Great Recession) to land a corporate PR job and then show the evils of it was doomed from the start. She certainly found an underbelly, but not of any corporate slave driving. Rather, she parleyed with a strange band of characters, from half-baked career coaches to dead-end job training leaders. Add to that her thick, never-ending veneer of sarcasm and you end up with a book that requires determination to finish. In fact, the finish (a.k.a. her conclusion) is the only part that is truly worth reading. There, Ehrenreich acknowledges the reasons for her failed efforts while bringing to bear some useful insights.My recommendation: skip to the end, or skip it altogether.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I thought that it couldn't get any more real or depressing than Nickel and Dimed, but in this book, Ehrenreich takes on the myths of the white-collar world and finds one where inaction masquerades as self-improvement and where people are so afraid of pointing out what is wrong with the system that they spend their lives blaming themselves. Especially pertinent and prophetic in the wake (or in the throes, depending on your point of view) of The Great Recession, this book exposes the white collar ideology of self-help and self-blame for what it is: wishful thinking. I know too many people whose situations mirror or are even worse than the ones described in the book; it should be required reading for all incoming college freshmen.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I thought that it couldn't get any more real or depressing than Nickel and Dimed, but in this book, Ehrenreich takes on the myths of the white-collar world and finds one where inaction masquerades as self-improvement and where people are so afraid of pointing out what is wrong with the system that they spend their lives blaming themselves. Especially pertinent and prophetic in the wake (or in the throes, depending on your point of view) of The Great Recession, this book exposes the white collar ideology of self-help and self-blame for what it is: wishful thinking. I know too many people whose situations mirror or are even worse than the ones described in the book; it should be required reading for all incoming college freshmen.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a follow up to Nickel and Dimed. It's pretty good--her writing style is certainly engaging; however, it seems to me that a white collar job seeker would know better than to hire career coaches and pay to attend networking events. I wished she would have spent more time on the job search and working than meeting with sham career counselors. I do like her.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    why did i keep reading?because we both have breast cancer?because i had chucked the previous audio book?because i could follow this even though it was boring and stupid and way too long--a magazine article maybe?who were these people who gave it 5 stars? zombies?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Labeled as the white collar follow-up to Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich's books title only refers to her own switched topic. In Nickel and Dimed, she entered the rock-bottom world of the labor market as an undercover observer, dabbling a few weeks in different jobs. What makes that book interesting, are not Ehrenreich's own observations but those of the people she meets.In this book, she not only fails in her primary mission to get a mid-level white collar job. She also fails to interview mid-level white collar employees (she mainly talks to the long-term unemployed). Instead, she turns the book into an account of her travails with the snake-oil self-help and coaching industry and the strange and stigmatized world of job-hunting and unemployment. Some of her observations are pertinent and the US health care and unemployment benefits system is certainly flawed. Her experiment, however, must flounder from the start as the PR job she is seeking is both a figment and unsuitable to the profile of qualification she presents. What is a PR person worth without a solid network? Offering PR advice to companies with bad reputations is a flawed and crazy approach. Those companies know about their bad reputations, caused by the underlying bad business practices. Ehrenreich's cosmetic fix will not help at all. Ehrenreich's time would have been better spent interviewing her laid-off colleagues at the New York Times. Her sheltered existence allows her to pontificate about things she doesn't quite understand (similar to the Moustache of Understanding interviewing taxi drivers)..
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Although I own Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich and have heard good things about the book, I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. But when I saw this book marked down to $3 at a used bookstore, I decided to buy it and read it first.Ehrenreich has a great narrative style that really sucks the reader into the story. I found myself unable to put the book down, which may or may not have been a good thing. This is definitely not a book to read while you're unemployed (or "in transition") and searching for a job; it's discouraging and depressing - and this was written when the economy, though in a downturn, was still a lot better than it is today (2010).That said, I really don't know how much can be extrapolated from this book. The author may have not been able to find a job during this search, but was it because the job search was really that difficult or was it because her resume was mostly faked? Did potential employers toss her resume because of high volume, or did they look through it and have a sense that something was amiss with her qualifications? It's impossible to say.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    What a let down! I eagerly purchased "Bait and Switch" because I'd been such a fan of Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed". The premise certainly sounds intriguing - a behind-the-scenes look at the struggle of finding and keeping a job that pays a middle-class wage. But this book was disappointing on several levels - lazy reporting, simple-minded conclusions, and insulting assessments of the people she met along the way. The investigative reporting in particular was lacking, and the author did not recreate a job search that bears any resemblance to a search that I, or anyone I know, has done. It's hard to believe that this was the same person who wrote the excellently researched "Nickel and Dimed" - until I got to the last chapters. Here, the Ehrenreich style, wit, and passion shines through and she provides the incisive analysis she's so good at. But this is not worth the price of admission - overall, I think Ehrenreich phoned this one in.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It's odd, that when we want to understand a particular section of the human experience, we often ask an outsider. Surely, somewhere out there, there are white collar workers who want to share their experiences with unemployment. Still, there is something to be said for the outsider's perspective. It can create interesting narrative possibilities. Sadly, that's not really evident in Bait and Switch. Ehrenreich never really cracks into the corporate world, never quite looses her academic perspective on her subjects. If she had been willing to dedicate another year to the experiment, she might have had something great-but I can't fault her too much for cutting the experiment short and writing with what she had. A bit shallow, a bit slow, but her characteristic humour shines through.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There was a lot of buzz about Barbara Ehrenreich's earlier book, Nickel and Dimed, in which she tried to survive on minimum wage. In the case of that book, the 'fun experiment' aspect of it turned me off, and I never picked it up. Bait and Switch called to me from a friend's bookshelf one lazy morning in a guest room, though, and I finished it by that night. If nothing else, Ehrenreich has narrative flair. In Bait and Switch, Ehrenreich spends several months attempting to find a white collar job with some responsibility paying more than $50,000 per year. A professor and journalist by trade, she limits herself to careers with only a tangential connection to her real-life experience, so that she won't be recognized. Thus, she ends up with a mostly fictional, slightly sparse PR resume. As an older woman, the contrived aspects of her experiment definitely affect her job search negatively, and this reality troubles the book from beginning to end.However, the book has some plus sides. It reads like fiction and completely sucked me in. Not to say that some parts didn't drag - in fact, very little actually happens in this book - but it has the same allure as some (well-done) reality TV. As the reader, I felt like I was watching Ehrenreich try and fail to be me. She's exposing the white collar world to, well, white collar readers. What reader of this book hasn't searched for a job on the internet, exposed themselves to recruiters or attempted to network? In this way, it felt a little like a personal pity party - "Thanks, Barbara. I know! It's tough out there! You're telling me!" At the same time, it does expose some of the ironies of the middle income professional - the lack of representation for white collar workers, for example, in a world of gargantuan corporate entities. All in all, a worthwhile read, although perhaps not one of the great feats of exposee journalism.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The "experiment" in this one isn't as well designed as Nickel and Dimed, and the implications not as chilling, but Ehrenreich's clear and engaging writing is just as strong. There is something about the way that she expresses herself that allies the reader and makes you want to keep following her story. Sadly, I think the formula of creating a charade to get the inside scoop on ways of life fell a bit short here. Still, it is worth reading to get Ehrenreich's perspectives and to understand a little more how hard it is to break into business.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I read this book when I was going through my phase of searching and settling. It gave me confidence knowing I was not alone in my suffering, but it was also a bit depressing and disheartening to read about a whole year she spent without it getting any better. However, just like another reviewer here said, it's in the settling that you find the real opportunities. While I enjoyed reading about her experiences with networkers and coaches, I would have liked to see an actual struggle from the inside of corporate America. This was supposed to be an expose of corporate life, but it read like she was just on the outside looking in. She didn't spend a single day in a cube-farm, she didn't have to suck up to a mean, under-qualified, insecure boss and she didn't have to attend a single company meeting or watch a round of layoffs. She tried to step in at the top rather than climbing the ladder like the rest of us - and no wonder she failed! If it was so easy to come in on top, wouldn't we all be there?The premise of this book ensured that it was destined for failure. Nickel and Dimed worked because it doesn't take long to obtain and work at a minimum wage job and realize that it both sucks and won't pay the bills. But infiltrating corporate America is almost as difficult as infiltrating the Mafia. It takes years of dedication and soul-selling to get that view from the top. Years which she cannot afford to spend on a project that would produce only one book.That said, if she'd settled for an entry-level position I imagine she would have had a lot more to write about.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There's only so much one can write about upper middle class people throwing away their money while looking for a job. It really felt like Ms. Ehrenreich was stretching an chapter's worth of information into a book.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    You can only say so much about executive-level job hunting. Kind of a disappointing follow-up to her last book; hope the next is more compelling.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The author's undercover pursuits offer some valuable insights, chronicling the challenges that face millions of displaced white collar workers. There are a few truly hilarious anecdotes, sprinkled with some practical advice for folks who find themselves on a job-hunting safari. Unfortunately, Ehrenreich's work becomes almost as tedious as an excruciatingly long job search. She spends far too much time making the same points about the perils of "networking" and career coaches. As an expanded essay or a three-part magazine feature, "Bait and Switch" would be a great resource. But it just doesn't seem to have enough material to justify its book-length girth.

Book preview

Bait and Switch - Barbara Ehrenreich

Praise for Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich

Ehrenreich is a keen observer of American culture.

Fortune

"Bait and Switch . . . resembles a novel by Evelyn Waugh, in which a middle-aged social critic with supersonic verbal skills, a Voltaire pretending to be a Candide, disappears into a zombie zone of career counselors, résumé writers, networking and job fairs."

Harper’s

Insightful . . . her experiences are perversely fascinating, and Ehrenreich conveys them with humor and aplomb.

Business Week

Wry, eloquent, hilarious.

Entertainment Weekly

Acerbic and astute.

Mother Jones

Illuminating . . . fall’s smartest read.

Glamour

Vivid and compelling.

Dissent

The humorous and the melancholy are tightly entwined throughout the book.

Newsday

Ehrenreich uncovers outposts . . . that most journalists would have trouble learning about. . . . What Ehrenreich has found is something that can’t be gleaned from reams of data about levels of middle-class income and unemployment.

Columbia Journalism Review

Engaging.

The Seattle Times

Skillfully dissects how job gurus deploy the language of self-actualization and magic thinking to cow their clients.

—Elle

Sharply observed and, perhaps more surprising, funny.

Common Wealth

Laugh-out-loud funny.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch

Being unemployed is devastating, and Ehrenreich does a sound job reminding us of the emotional toll.

Fast Company Magazine

Ehrenreich’s description of the dull-eyed anomie of the white middle class is spot on.

The American Conservative

Ehrenreich’s acerbic critiques are devastating. . . . She does a superb job of focusing the spotlight on a nether world of those without jobs or those profoundly shaken by their inability to find economic security.

The Charlotte Observer

ALSO BY BARBARA EHRENREICH

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War

The Snarling Citizen

Kipper’s Game

The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed

Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class

The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment

Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy

(with Arlie Russell Hochschild)

Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex

(with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs)

For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women

(with Deirdre English)

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

(with Deirdre English)

Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness

(with Deirdre English)

Bait and Switch

Bait and Switch

The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

Barbara Ehrenreich

Owl Books

Henry Holt and Company, LLC

Publishers since 1866

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New York, New York 10010

www.henryholt.com

An Owl Book® and ® are registered trademarks of

Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Copyright © 2005 by Barbara Ehrenreich

All rights reserved.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ehrenreich, Barbara.

Bait and switch: the (futile) pursuit of the American dream / Barbara Ehrenreich.—1st ed.

      p. cm.

ISBN-10: 0-8050-8124-0

    ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8124-4

   1. Displaced workers—United States. 2. White collar workers—United States. 3. Job hunting—United States. 4. Downward mobility (Social sciences)—United States. I. Title.

HD5708.55.U6E47 2005

    654.14′086′22—dc22

2005047916

Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and

premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

Originally published in hardcover in 2005

by Metropolitan Books

First Owl Books Edition 2006

Designed by Kelly Too

Printed in the United States of America

1   3   5   7   9   10   8   6   4   2

contents

Introduction

one         Finding a Coach in the Land of Oz

two         Stepping Out into the World of Networking

three      Surviving Boot Camp

four        The Transformation

five         Networking with the Lord

six          Aiming Higher

seven     In Which I Am Offered a Job

eight      Downward Mobility

Conclusion

Afterword

Acknowledgments

author’s note

Most names in this book have been changed in the interest of privacy. The exceptions, in the majority of cases, are public speakers who were introduced by name and people I interviewed who agreed to have their full names used.

Bait and Switch

Introduction

Because I’ve written a lot about poverty, I’m used to hearing from people in scary circumstances. An eviction notice has arrived. A child has been diagnosed with a serious illness and the health insurance has run out. The car has broken down and there’s no way to get to work. These are the routine emergencies that plague the chronically poor. But it struck me, starting in about 2002, that many such tales of hardship were coming from people who were once members in good standing of the middle class—college graduates and former occupants of midlevel white-collar positions. One such writer upbraided me for what she saw as my neglect of hardworking, virtuous people like herself.

Try investigating people like me who didn’t have babies in high school, who made good grades, who work hard and don’t kiss a lot of ass and instead of getting promoted or paid fairly must regress to working for $7/hr., having their student loans in perpetual deferment, living at home with their parents, and generally exist in debt which they feel they may never get out of.

Stories of white-collar downward mobility cannot be brushed off as easily as accounts of blue-collar economic woes, which the hard-hearted traditionally blame on bad choices: failing to get a college degree, for example, failing to postpone child-bearing until acquiring a nest egg, or failing to choose affluent parents in the first place. But distressed white-collar people cannot be accused of fecklessness of any kind; they are the ones who did everything right. They earned higher degrees, often setting aside their youthful passion for philosophy or music to suffer through dull practical majors like management or finance. In some cases, they were high achievers who ran into trouble precisely because they had risen far enough in the company for their salaries to look like a tempting cost cut. They were the losers, in other words, in a classic game of bait and switch. And while blue-collar poverty has become numbingly routine, white-collar unemployment—and the poverty that often results—remains a rude finger in the face of the American dream.

I realized that I knew very little about the mid- to upper levels of the corporate world, having so far encountered this world almost entirely through its low-wage, entry-level representatives. I was one of them—a server in a national chain restaurant, a cleaning person, and a Wal-Mart associate—in the course of researching an earlier book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Like everyone else, I’ve also encountered the corporate world as a consumer, dealing with people quite far down in the occupational hierarchy—retail clerks, customer service representatives, telemarketers. Of the levels where decisions are made—where the vice presidents, account executives, and regional managers dwell—my experience has been limited to seeing these sorts of people on airplanes, where they study books on leadership, fiddle with spreadsheets on their laptops, or fall asleep over biographies of the founding fathers.¹ I’m better acquainted with the corporate functionaries of the future, many of whom I’ve met on my visits to college campuses, where business remains the most popular major, if only because it is believed to be the safest and most lucrative.²

But there have been growing signs of trouble—if not outright misery—within the white-collar corporate workforce. First, starting with the economic downturn of 2001, there has been a rise in unemployment among highly credentialed and experienced people. In late 2003, when I started this project, unemployment was running at about 5.9 percent, but in contrast to earlier economic downturns, a sizable portion—almost 20 percent, or about 1.6 million—of the unemployed were white-collar professionals.³ Previous downturns had disproportionately hit blue-collar people; this time it was the relative elite of professional, technical, and managerial employees who were being singled out for media sympathy. In April 2003, for example, the New York Times Magazine offered a much-discussed cover story about a former $300,000-a-year computer industry executive reduced, after two years of unemployment, to working as a sales associate at the Gap.⁴ Throughout the first four years of the 2000s, there were similar stories of the mighty or the mere midlevel brought low, ejected from their office suites and forced to serve behind the counter at Starbucks.

Today, white-collar job insecurity is no longer a function of the business cycle—rising as the stock market falls and declining again when the numbers improve.⁵ Nor is it confined to a few volatile sectors like telecommunications or technology, or a few regions of the country like the rust belt or Silicon Valley. The economy may be looking up, the company may be raking in cash, and still the layoffs continue, like a perverse form of natural selection, weeding out the talented and successful as well as the mediocre. Since the midnineties, this perpetual winnowing process has been institutionalized under various euphemisms such as downsizing, right-sizing, smart-sizing, restructuring, and de-layering—to which we can now add the outsourcing of white-collar functions to cheaper labor markets overseas.

In the metaphor of the best-selling business book of the first few years of the twenty-first century, the cheese—meaning a stable, rewarding, job—has indeed been moved. A 2004 survey of executives found 95 percent expecting to move on, voluntarily or otherwise, from their current jobs, and 68 percent concerned about unexpected firings and layoffs.⁶ You don’t, in other words, have to lose a job to feel the anxiety and despair of the unemployed.

A second sign of trouble could be called overemployment. I knew, from my reading, that mid- and high-level corporate executives and professionals today often face the same punishing demands on their time as low-paid wage earners who must work two jobs in order to make ends meet. Economist Juliet Schor, who wrote The Overworked American, and business journalist Jill Andresky Fraser, author of White Collar Sweatshop, describe stressed-out white-collar employees who put in ten- to twelve-hour-long days at the office, continue to work on their laptops in the evening at home, and remain tethered to the office by cell phone even on vacations and holidays. On Wall Street, for example, Fraser reports, it is common for a supervisor to instruct new hires to keep a spare set of clothes and toothbrush in the office for all those late night episodes when it just won’t make sense to head home for a quick snooze.⁷ She quotes an Intel employee:

If you make the choice to have a home life, you will be ranked and rated at the bottom. I was willing to work the endless hours, come in on weekends, travel to the ends of the earth. I had no hobbies, no outside interests. If I wasn’t involved with the company, I wasn’t anything.

Something, evidently, is going seriously wrong within a socioeconomic group I had indeed neglected as too comfortable and too powerful to merit my concern. Where I had imagined comfort, there is now growing distress, and I determined to investigate. I chose the same strategy I had employed in Nickel and Dimed: to enter this new world myself, as an undercover reporter, and see what I could learn about the problems first-hand. Were people being driven out of their corporate jobs? What did it take to find a new one? And, if things were as bad as some reports suggested, why was there so little protest?

The plan was straightforward enough: to find a job, a good job, which I defined minimally as a white-collar position that would provide health insurance and an income of about $50,000 a year, enough to land me solidly in the middle class. The job itself would give me a rare firsthand glimpse into the midlevel corporate world, and the effort to find it would of course place me among the most hard-pressed white-collar corporate workers—the ones who don’t have jobs.

Since I wanted to do this as anonymously as possible, certain areas of endeavor had to be excluded, such as higher education, publishing (magazines, newspapers, and books), and nonprofit liberal organizations. In any of these, I would have run the risk of being recognized and perhaps treated differently—more favorably, one hopes—than the average job seeker. But these restrictions did not significantly narrow the field, since of course most white-collar professionals work in other sectors of the for-profit, corporate world—from banking to business services, pharmaceuticals to finance.

The decision to enter corporate life—and an unfamiliar sector of it, at that—required that I abandon, or at least set aside, deeply embedded attitudes and views, including my longstanding critique of American corporations and the people who lead them. I had cut my teeth, as a fledgling investigative journalist in the seventies, on the corporations that were coming to dominate the health-care system: pharmaceutical companies, hospital chains, insurance companies. Then, sometime in the eighties, I shifted my attention to the treatment of blue-and pink-collar employees, blaming America’s intractable level of poverty—12.5 percent by the federal government’s official count, 25 percent by more up-to-date measures—on the chronically low wages offered to nonprofessional workers. In the last few years, I seized on the wave of financial scandals—from Enron through, at the time of this writing, HealthSouth and Hollingers International—as evidence of growing corruption within the corporate world, a pattern of internal looting without regard for employees, consumers, or even, in some cases, stockholders.

But for the purposes of this project, these criticisms and reservations had to be set aside or shoved as far back in my mind as possible. Like it or not, the corporation is the dominant unit of the global economy and the form of enterprise that our lives depend on in a day-to-day sense. I write this on an IBM laptop while sipping Lipton tea and wearing clothes from the Gap—all major firms or elements thereof. It’s corporations that make the planes run (though not necessarily on time), bring us (and increasingly grow) our food, and generally make it happen. I’d been on the outside of the corporate world, often complaining bitterly, and now I wanted in.

THIS WOULD NOT, I knew, be an altogether fair test of the job market, if only because I had some built-in disadvantages as a job seeker. For one thing, I am well into middle age, and since age discrimination is a recognized problem in the corporate world even at the tender age of forty, I was certainly vulnerable to it myself. This defect, however, is by no means unique to me. Many people—from displaced homemakers to downsized executives—now find themselves searching for jobs at an age that was once associated with a restful retirement.

Furthermore, I had the disadvantage of never having held a white-collar job with a corporation. My one professional-level office job, which lasted for about seven months, was in the public sector, at the New York City Bureau of the Budget. It had involved such typical white-collar activities as attending meetings, digesting reports, and writing memos; but that was a long time ago, before cell phones, PowerPoint, and e-mail. In the corporate world I now sought to enter, everything would be new to me: the standards of performance, the methods of evaluation, the lines and even the modes of communication. But I’m a quick study, as you have to be in journalism, and counted on this to get me by.

The first step was to acquire a new identity and personal history to go with it, meaning, in this case, a résumé. It is easier to change your identity than you might think. Go to Alavarado and Seventh Street in Los Angeles, for example, and you will be approached by men whispering, ID, ID. I, however, took the legal route, because I wanted my documents to be entirely in order when the job offers started coming in. My fear, perhaps exaggerated, was that my current name might be recognized, or would at least turn up an embarrassing abundance of Google entries. So in November 2003 I legally changed back to my maiden name, Barbara Alexander, and acquired a Social Security card to go with it.

As for the résumé: although it had to be faked, I wanted it as much as possible to represent my actual skills, which, I firmly believed, would enrich whatever company I went to work for. I am a writer—author of thousands of published articles and about twelve nonfiction books, counting the coauthored ones—and I know that writing translates, in the corporate world, into public relations or communications generally. Many journalism schools teach PR too, which may be fitting, since PR is really journalism’s evil twin. Whereas a journalist seeks the truth, a PR person may be called upon to disguise it or even to advance an untruth. If your employer, a pharmaceutical company, claims its new drug cures both cancer and erectile dysfunction, your job is to promote it, not to investigate the grounds for these claims.

I could do this, on a temporary basis anyway, and have even done many of the things PR people routinely do: I’ve written press releases, pitched stories to editors and reporters, prepared press packets, and helped arrange press conferences. As an author, I have also worked closely with my publisher’s PR people and have always found them to be intelligent and in every way congenial.

I have also been an activist in a variety of causes over the years, and this experience too must translate into something valuable to any firm willing to hire me. I have planned meetings and chaired them; I have worked in dozens of diverse groups and often played a leadership role in them; I am at ease as a public speaker, whether giving a lengthy speech or a brief presentation on a panel—all of which amounts to the leadership skills that should be an asset to any company. At the very least, I could claim to be an event planner, capable of dividing gatherings into plenaries and break-out sessions, arranging the press coverage, and planning the follow-up events.

Even as a rough draft, the résumé took days of preparation. I had to line up people willing to lie for me, should they be called by a potential employer, and attest to the fine work I had done for them. Fortunately, I have friends who were willing to do this, some of them located at recognizable companies. Although I did not dare claim actual employment at these firms, since a call to their Human Resources departments would immediately expose the lie, I felt I could safely pretend to have consulted to them over the years. Suffice it to say that I gave Barbara Alexander an exemplary history in public relations, sometimes with a little event planning thrown in, and that the dissimulation involved in crafting my new résumé was further preparation for any morally challenging projects I should be called upon to undertake as a PR person.

I did not, however, embellish my new identity with an affect or mannerisms different from my own. I am not an actor and would not have been able to do this even if I had wanted to. Barbara Alexander was only a cover for Barbara Ehrenreich; her behavior would, for better or worse, always be my own. In fact, in a practical sense I was simply changing my occupational status from self-employed/writer to unemployed—a distinction that might be imperceptible to the casual observer. I would still stay home most days at my computer, only now, instead of researching and writing articles, I would be researching and contacting companies that might employ me. The new name and fake résumé were only my ticket into the ranks of the unemployed white-collar Americans who spend their days searching for a decent-paying job.

The project required some minimal structure; since I was stepping into the unknown, I needed to devise some guidelines for myself. My first rule was that I would do everything possible to land a job, which meant being open to every form of help that presented itself: utilizing whatever books, web sites, and businesses, for example, that I could find offering guidance to job seekers. I would endeavor to behave as I was expected to, insofar as I could decipher the expectations. I did not know exactly what forms of effort would be required of successful job seekers, only that I would, as humbly and diligently as possible, give it my best try.

Second, I would be prepared to go anywhere for a job or even an interview, and would advertise this geographic flexibility in my contacts with potential employers. I was based in Charlottesville, Virginia, throughout this project, but I was prepared to travel anywhere in the United States to get a job and then live there for several months if I found one. Nor would I shun any industry—other than those where I might be recognized—as unglamorous or morally repugnant. My third rule was that I would have to take the first job I was offered that met my requirements as to income and benefits.

I knew that the project would take a considerable investment of time and money, so I set aside ten months⁹ and the

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