Bait and Switch

The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

By: Barbara Ehrenreich

Narrated by: Anne Twomey

Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

The best-selling 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 world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible resume of a professional "in transition", Ehrenreich attempts to land a middle class job undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then begins trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search "ministries". She gets an image makeover to prepare her for the corporate world and works hard to project the winning attitude recommended for a successful job search. She 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 resumes, 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 the new disposable workers, and little security even for those who have jobs.

©2005 Barbara Ehrenreich (P)2005 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC

Critic reviews

"Jarring, full of riveting grit....This book is already unforgettable." (Newsweek)

A terrible book - princess Barbara goes undercover

A terrible read. This book might as well have been written by someone who had lived in a cave for the last 30 years and decided to go seek an executive job and complained about how hard it was. The book does a terrible disservice to the white collar unemployed, since many of these folks do face extreme hardships, often through no fault of their own (whereas the book definitely makes it obvious to me that I would never hire the author in a million years, so she should stop whining). The author's prior book, Nickeled and Dimed, was at least a more enjoyable read, but now I'm beginning to wonder if that too wasn't completely overdramatized by this princess of an author. A few highlights of the book:

1) The author decides to seek an executive job, but has absolutely no prior relevant experience. When seeking a sales job for example, she says she wants to be the sales manager, though she has no sales experience. Is it no surprise she doesn't get a job?
2) The author seeks out a strange group of coaches (which I have to wonder if she has misrepresented these poor folks as well, given the rest of the book). The coaches ask her to take several personality tests. She fabricates random answers to these tests. The tests, given the random answers, point her in many different directions. Author's conclusion: the tests are worthless (they may be, but making up random answers wouldn't be my way of proving it)

3) The author obtains further advice. She is 'surprised' that corporate hiring managers would like to hire people that are likable and that can dress appropriately for an interview. Granted, this may be strange and foreign to those that have never held a job before, but for a mid-age worker seeking an executive position, you would think that this wouldn't be a surprise.

4) The author find some independent rep sales positons. She is 'surprised' that she is not given an office'

5) The author calls for the unemployed white collar to unite.

Huge Disappointment

After getting a very interesting, entertaining and elucidating look at the world of low-wage workers in Nickel & Dimed, I looked forward to something similar from Bait & Switch.

Unfortunately, this book failed to live up to even it's back-cover synopsis. All I got was an uninspired look at a bumbling job search. No insight on the risks and hardships of working in corporate america.

Failing to provide any first-hand insight (or even very much 2nd-hand insight) on the issue, the author also fails to offer any research-based insight into the issues of lack of medical care, job security, etc.

Very naive!

I suggest that she has inflated ideas of what work is like. She was very naive about many things.

Naive at most

If you really want a job, don't beat around the bush or aim for executive positions when you have 0 corporate work experience. "Activist" is not a job. Recruiters can tell when you're making things up on your resume and you were screened out along with 200 other people that were doing the same thing.