The bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed goes back undercover to do for Americas ailing middle class what she did for the working poor
Barbara Ehrenreichs 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 rsum of a professional in transition, she attempts to land a middle-class jobundergoing 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, andagain and againrejected.
Bait and Switch highlights the people whove done everything rightgotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive rsumsyet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Todays ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their surplus employeesplunging 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 workersand 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 expos of economic cruelty where we least expect it.
Barbara Ehrenreichs 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 rsum of a professional in transition, she attempts to land a middle-class jobundergoing 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, andagain and againrejected.
Bait and Switch highlights the people whove done everything rightgotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive rsumsyet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Todays ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their surplus employeesplunging 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 workersand 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 expos of economic cruelty where we least expect it.
