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

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Barbara Ehrenreich's latest work of social commentary, "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream," is an indictment of the "magisterial indifference of the corporate world." Posing as an unemployed white-collar worker, Ehrenreich adopts an alias and markets herself as a public relations person and event planner. Her goal is to obtain a corporate job that pays approximately fifty thousand a year with health benefits. She plans to keep the job for three or four months, write about her experiences, and then quit. The author sets aside five thousand dollars for travel and other expenses connected with her job search.

During her odyssey, Ehrenreich pays for career coaching, attends a job fair, posts her resume on Internet sites, enrolls in a boot camp for job seekers, and networks extensively. She learns to sell herself, treat job searching as a full-time job, always maintain a winning attitude, put her faith in God, and dress for success. Much to her surprise, Ehrenreich's efforts do not land her a suitable job. She asks herself: Do I lack charisma? Am I too old? Is it unrealistic in today's market to look for a decent job with health benefits?

The author acknowledges that any or all of the above may have been factors in her failure to find work. However, she wrote the book because she believes that there is a bigger problem holding job-seekers back--corporate America's indifference to the needs of its workers. Ehrenreich maintains that human resources departments rarely even acknowledge receiving a resume anymore. Even worse, when an applicant sends in a bid for a job, he is often the victim of "bait and switch" tactics. Instead of offering the advertised job, the company rep tries to convince the job seeker to settle for a lesser job with no benefits or job security. In desperation, some white-collar workers take "survival jobs" such as housecleaning, cab driving, and retail sales in order to put food on the table. When the income from these jobs does not cover the bills, these stressed-out individuals max out their credit cards, seek help from relatives, and downsize their lifestyles as much as possible. Without health insurance, workers are terrified of becoming become ill because they have no money to pay for medical care and prescription drugs.

Ehrenreich is a savvy writer who throws herself wholeheartedly into whatever project she undertakes. She skillfully depicts the humiliation and frustration of her futile job search. However, this book will probably not resonate with readers in the same way that Ehrenreich's bestseller "Nickel and Dimed" did. First, the author's experiences while she looks for work lack bite; they are not very dramatic or gripping. Furthermore, Ehrenreich's indictment of corporate America breaks no new ground. Anyone who reads a newspaper knows about downsizing, outsourcing, and greedy and corrupt CEOs who make big bucks while their lower level employees lose their retirement funds.

So why read this book? "Bait and Switch" is worth a look because of the author's self-deprecating humor, effortless writing style, and compassion for the victims of heartless companies. Ehrenreich exhorts middle class job seekers to become activists, urging them to protest the fact that people who "do everything right" and "play by the rules" often end up in ruins. The problem is that even if such individuals find the courage to mount some sort of protest, who would listen? "Bait and Switch" gets high marks for the author's lively presentation and style but lower marks for her exploration of an already well-publicized problem without offering a viable solution.

Ehrenreich might as well be telling my story from 2002 to the present. Years of top grades, honors programs, a top 10 MBA, 'investment' in student loans, a good professional start--ending in long term unemployment followed by underemployment when the industry I was working in crashed in 2001-2002.

Unlike Ehrenreich, I've had more time to consider why a good education can be so meaningless if something bad happens during your career. Anyone, REALLY ANYONE, can go from being the best and the brightest to essentially unemployable in their field within 6 months--irrespective of their confidence that they are the type of person with hard won skills that will always be able to get a good job. People who have not experienced this for themselves will not believe it, because it is too unconfortable to believe. But this is how markets really work. Customers in a grocery will buy perfect vegetables and skip over the ones with visible bruises until they are sold at a deep discount. Hiring managers do the same thing. Candidates must be unblemished by any concern or question, including hiring gaps or rapid job moves, or unusual industry changes.

So for many, the system is broken at many levels. Education does not meet the needs of the future employed. It is too costly and of too poor a direct relevance to compete with educational systems and hiring criteria overseas. The process of hiring people remains superficial and flawed (Peter F. Drucker has some very good data to verify this to be true) but it is what it is and probably will not change any time soon.

Most managers hire on the basis of positive inside references, directly related previous work experience, and enthusiasm and good interpersonal rapport during an interview--if you are lucky enough to get an interview. For all the emphasis in our culture placed on achievement through education, lets be realistic. It is at most a footnote on a resume. Even if it did cost you years of work and tens of thousands of dollars.

What is to be done? Avoid educational debt, if it is not too late. Cultivate interdependence with friends and family--they will more often than not provide the leads for your next job if you lose your current one. And for god sakes do not be another one of the millions of a-holes out there who say, if they don't have a job its because they should have worked harder on their education or career earlier. Ehrenreich is pointing out something very painful and real that people choose not to look at unless it directly confronts them, which is a bad time to get the message.

It's commonly assumed in the United States that if you go to college, get a job and work hard, you will be successful. You will own a house and a couple of cars, you will be able to afford medical care, and you will be able to educate your children to a level where they're guaranteed even more success than you've achieved. If this was ever true, it isn't anymore, and Barbara Ehrenreich shows us the results.

In her first book, NICKEL AND DIMED, Ehrenreich went undercover as an unskilled worker to learn how the lowest level of workers supports themselves. They don't, she learned, because the system doesn't work, and her second book shows that the system doesn't work for the business classes either. Here, Ehrenreich poses as an out-of-work PR executive and details her job search.

Franz Kafka joined forces with Charles Darwin to create the brutal, surreal corporate world the author discovers. People are downsized, laid off, forced into early retirement, and just plain fired as a matter of course in this brave new world of ours, for reasons as pointed as ageism and sexism, as arbitrary as a profitable company wanting to show more of a profit, or for no reason at all. Of course, even knowing the fragile task of holding a job in this environment, the human resources departments hold the job-seeker responsible for every unemployed minute. Working time lost to illness is unemployment, working time lost to child or elder care is unemployment, working as a consultant is unemployment. Unemployment is unemployment, and the longer such periods last, the blacker the mark against the prospective employee.

You're lucky to be working, even if you're doing more work for less money over longer hours than you ever expected, even if you get no benefits, even if you survived the last round of layoffs and have no idea what will happen the next time. For if you're not working, you become one of the lost souls Ehrenreich meets. They max out their credit cards on image consultants and career coaches, each one contradicting what the last one said, on networking forums that turn out to be loosely disguised prayer meetings, on advice books, and on inspirational videos. They spend months and even years surfing the Internet and sending resumés to companies that rarely bother to respond at all. Oh, it's depressing.

But it's not depressing! How could it be depressing? Jobseekers are instructed to leave behind any negative thoughts --- anger, depression or mounting panic, for instance --- in order to present a positive image in their next interview. They are warned that revealing any negativity will count against them, as will age, gender, overeducation, having children, or any interests at all beyond devoting themselves entirely to their prospective employers. Smile!

In the book's conclusion, the author urges the unemployed to band together and lobby for more worker protections. I hope they make it happen, I really do.

--- Reviewed by Colleen Quinn [...]

The title and premise of this book are quite misleading. I expected the book to be about how "white collar" employees were laid off, or how they struggle to make ends meet despite their comfortable salaries. The book rather describes how author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the challenge to get hired into corporate America and experience "white collar" work for herself.

The majority of the book is about her experiences working with different "career coaches" and "networking groups" and other assorted entrepreneurs who work to help laid off middle managers get re-employed. As she works to craft the right resume, pretending to be a PR executive, she describes what it was like to work with others who were also trying to find work.

I did find the descriptions of the various personality tests, and the cheesy coaching tactics she engaged to help her to be fascinating. In the end the book is as much about the whole sub industry that has developed to try and get middle managers re-employed after being downsized or laid off from their companies as it is about any sort of "American Dream". The tactics and descriptions certainly do not put these "coaches" in a very positive light. Throughout she makes overgeneralizations, and makes fun of people with religious beliefs and values, which detracts from her point considerably.

The overall effect though is indeed chilling. What she described about those people looking for work for sometimes months on end was more than just depressing; it was a hopelessness bordering on desperation. This aspect of the book is quite powerful. The depression, loss of confidence and sheer volume of silence that greeted her in her "job search" illuminates the human psychological casualties brought on by what is described throughout; corporations being faceless, cold entities discarding people at will.

While there are holes in this book and the premise itself big enough to drive trucks through, Barbara really nails it when she gets to understand the emotional toll she feels as she faces rejection over and over.

The book is written exceptionally well, is quite funny, and despite her rather obvious political biases which undermine her subject matter credibility at every turn, it is well worth reading. In fact I think every corporate executive who has a role in determining the fate of middle managers should read this book if for no other reason than getting a first hand glimpse at the impact of their decisions.

This is in no way a light book, it is dark, depressing and ultimately offers no solutions to the problems it outlines. Despite that and despite my misgivings about the flaws and the biases of the author, I do recommend this book highly. It will change the way you look at resumes and the people you interview.

This is a well written book, but it reads like a description of a particularly vicious battle, as related by an observer comfortably hidden away on a distant, grassy knoll.

The author gave herself a nice nest egg of a few thousand dollars and then went out to find a job in Corporate America. Her plan was to spend six months finding a job, and then spend a few months working at it before she quit and wrote up the scandals. She spent her nest egg and then gave up in about 9 months, and then she went back to her comfortable life style. She even gave herself the luxury of sneaking back into the "real world" for a few breaks to rest up while doing the research. Those of us who live the nightmare do not have that option. We are stuck in it.

She did not even *get* to the ugly part, where you finally do find that job (after years, not months, of searching) to find that the corporation pays you only for the first 40 hours of work each week, and then the next 40 hours of work is OT (your Own Time).... and then they find a way to "downsize" you after only a few months.

Since she never found a job, the entire book relates her encounters with scummy con-artists posing as career coaches, the people that real job hunters know to avoid. She missed out on the longer and longer commutes and the ever-decreasing annual salary and the loss of benefits and the loss of vacation seniority and all of the other nasty rules that are now considered Corporate Standard Behavior.

The book has no credibility because the writer did not really experience the horrors of Corporate America any more than she would have experienced the horrors of war by watching "Saving Private Ryan".

I think that the author was honest in what she did write, but the work is so incomplete that it carries no weight.

Having experienced white collar unemployment during BOTH the 1989-1990 recession and "jobless recovery" as well as the 2000-2005 tech job bust, I can certainly testify that the phenomenon of long-term unemployment Ehrenreich describes can and does occur.

However, such experiences do not necessarily result in ultimate downward mobility. I graduated from college in 1990 and did not find a suitable white-collar job until 1997. This was an extremely demoralizing experience and radically changed my views about the value of college, downward mobility, the decline of the middle class, etc.

However, the job market ultimately heated up again in the mid 1990's, and between 1997 to 2001 I was able to triple my salary through skillful job-jumping in the "hot" market ([dis]loyalty works both ways). This upward ride ended after 2000, and I was ultimately unemployed for 6 months in 2002, but beginning this year (2005) the tech market rebounded and I'm back at it again - and I've kited my income up 20%. You have to go where proven job opportunities are and strategically plan your move up the career ladder.

Two of the problems I have with Ehrenreich's "experiment" are (1) she chose corporate public relations as a target field and (2) went about this in the middle of a nasty downturn in the job market.

It is widely known that PR is a very difficult field to break into. She would definitely not have had the same experience had she been posing as an accountant or computer network administrator or even a computer programmer, but given her background in journalism it's obvious that PR would be an easier job role to emulate than any of these.

Also, like the 1990 recession, the 2000 recession produced one of the longest running job downturns since the 1930's. She might not have had the same experience at all had she made the effort several years earlier (or later) when the job market was on a more normal footing.

I also found no instances where potential employers tried to "whittle me down" on salary or benefits - the bait and switch Ehrenreich spoke of. As for the commission-only sales scams, these have been around forever.

Finally, I turned to a career counselor for help with a career change and foudn the Myers-Briggs test to be very helpful in finding out what I really wanted to do. But these services can't actually FIND you a job and they're not intended to.

Final thoughts - it helps to have something to fall-back on such as a skilled trade even if you're a white collar professional. I bought and sold used cars. An unemployed friend got a CDL and drove a truck during the downturn. This may sound low-rent, but his $15 an hour sure beat minimum wage at Walmart, and he had some interesting experiences during his travels.

Sorry, Barbara, but I just can't agree with the conclusions you present in this book.

Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Bait and Switch: The (futile) Pursuit of the AMERICAN DREAM, is the second in what hopefully doesn't become a streak of otherwise good books with awful titles and even more unfortunate subtitles (the other being Freakonomics). Here the author of Nickel and Dimed turns her focus away from blue- and pink-collar workers and instead looks at the purgatory of mid-level corporate functionaries. The book is at times moving, poignant, funny, bombastic, and overwrought. In the end, she reaches beyond the the limits of the data she's gathered, which makes it harder to appreciate the truly precarious position of the American middle class.

In B&S, Ehrenreich attempts to reproduce in the corporate world what she achieved in the service economy: find and take take a job as if she were actually living the life of those that "normally" fill such positions. She constructs a parallel corporate persona complete with resume and friends willing to lie if called upon as references while she looks for work in PR. Only in this case, she fails to actually secure any jobs. This wouldn't be so bad if she confined her attention to the tribulations of white-collar professionals "in transition", i.e., unemployed. Indeed the best parts of the book are typically incisive observations about the bunkum sold in the growing "job search" industry, the especially difficult time older workers (especially women) have in the job market, and the amazing emotional and (il)logical contortions these job searchers force themselves into as they attempt to maintain a veneer of energetic positivity and affluence amidst rejection, depression, and mounting debt. As a refugee from management consulting, I identified with her visceral reaction to business-speak and frustration with the never-ending powerpoint presentation. Had she focussed more on the people and stories she encountered among the longer-term unemployed, she would have succeeded in personalizing the plight of those who find themselves living in that netherworld between the business and household unemployment surveys.

In the end, however, Eherenreich resorts to a tortured metaphor of Corporate America as some walled city with the requisite peasants, hangers on, etc. She makes statements about the (dis)ability of workers to find jobs that are not supportable based on her experience for one key reason: she was unable to rely on her network of friends and colleagues to help her find a job (for obvious reasons). Though she acknowledges this handicap she under-appreciates its importance. She spends at least two chapters discussing her experiences "networking" but fails to realize that once unemployed it's your "network" that gets you employed again. This is particularly curious since she presumably has a literary agent whom she pays precisely because the agent has a pre-existing set of contacts. "Networking" while unemployed will, virtually by definition, yield nothing other than a bunch of unemployed "contacts". While this is further indictment of the useless advice career coaches hawk, it also belies some of Eherenreich's more extreme statements, including the subtitle of the book. I, for one, was rooting for her to get a corporate job so as to read her internal monologue when the VP calls her into a meeting at 7:30pm on a Friday. Maybe next time.

The "bait" described by Barbara Ehrenreich in her follow-up to the blue-collar "Nickel and Dimed", is the promise of a "white-collar" job -- high salary, great benefits, clean office, doing important things. The "switch" is that such jobs really don't exist anymore. Fewer and fewer companies offer pensions. They prefer to revolve temporary workers in and out rather than offer health care coverage to long-term full-time employees. Loyal workers devote increasing amounts of energy and their own personal time, only to get laid off when the company's profit margin needs growing.

"Bait and Switch" is reported with a detached tone of shock and disgust, and a healthy dose of cynicism. I'm not sure where Ehrenreich has been the last ten years -- films from the dramatic ("American Beauty") to the hilarious ("Office Space") have already covered this ground and made these discoveries.

Most interesting and revelatory, then, is how Ehrenreich's undercover mission itself gets baited and switched. Ehrenreich gives the impression that she thought a white-collar job would be a paid vacation. Instead, most of her job search time is consumed and subverted by a very specific shadow industry of "career coaching".

I am fortunate to be in the legal profession, which is not the target of "Bait and Switch". I work for a mid-sized firm which is refreshingly free of the insane management culture portrayed by Barbara Ehrenreich. I have never been asked to take a personality test and in over 3 years I have never heard someone use terms such as "self-actualization" or "interpersonal growth".

However, I spent my own periods of pre-bar exam underemployment dodging that shadow industry. I once ran screaming from a "sales" job at a really tiny dot.com startup. Later, an agency promising "direct connections" to "federal jobs" saturated New York City newspapers with advertisements. The interviews, conducted after a $20 access fee, led to a request for $1000 for a course of seminars. It turns out they were not selling jobs; they were selling buzzwords and imagery. Last I heard, the head of that outfit wound up in prison. Ehrenreich too spends several thousand dollars on such services, in exchange for play-dates with "Wizard of Oz" dolls and the sub-rubber-chicken circuit at the Hampton Inn.

Ehrenreich's tone is one of extreme detachment and sarcasm. The several career coaches who took Ehrenreich's time and patience, and never delivered her even an inch closer to the type of white collar executive job she sought, are verbally lacerated. One chapter in depth targets Christian job search networks. While there is a lot of worthwhile material, my concern is that, as with "Nickel and Dimed", Ehrenreich's at times gonzo tone is going to alienate a lot of the people who would benefit most from reading her. Her contempt for the Christian network, while certainly merited based on the facts revealed in this book (such as the warm-up jokes delivered by various network guest speakers), is not going to sit well with a good portion of the target audience.

"Bait and Switch" provides an absorbing mix of job-search anecdotes, and revealing statistics. The proposed solution, however, is going to vanish without a trace under the current administration. Maybe just highlighting the trends themselves, and asking the uderemployed to gather en masse by the ballot box, is the best solution. I just hope that readers don't mistake her tone for one of "limousine liberal" contempt and put the book down long before they get to the end.

For me, reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch is like reminiscing about getting a job out of grad school. Ehrenreich often points out that her age was a problem in getting employment, but I was in my twenties and had the same experiences. Essentially, she is a writer who disguises herself as a person with PR experience who wants a job in the corporate world. She goes to numerous coaching sessions and resume building sessions, which are costly. She goes to networking events, including religious-based ones. It is quite sad and tragic to follow her on her job search; however, I felt like I was reliving my own experiences. In the end, she doesn't even find a job but just gets offers to be a salesperson with no benefits, health insurance or workplace. For anyone seeking a job, this is a great read if you need some empathy; however, it is a depressing read as it is too close to home. The countless hours spent job searching on the internet, tailoring your resume to each job, changing and updating your resume. Ugh. She definitely conveys the futile feeling of never finding work. Luckily for her, she is a writer and could go back to her real job where she had a salary--unlike the people she met along the way. I became a fan of Ehrenreich's after reading Nickel and Dimed. Just like in that book, she shows us what it is truly like to be in the position of someone looking for job survival. However, her solution for what's wrong with corporate America is a bit unrealistic. She proposes that the unemployed unite and lobby for their rights because they have the time. But what she is leaving out is that though they have time, they are not meeting their bills to survive and their job search is not a "farce" like hers was. If anything, it is people who know what's going on and who have the time and MONEY who should be lobbying for them. I recommend this book to people in senior positions in corporate America and people who work in legislature to see what they can do to make the situation better for the average corporate worker.--Dina Di Maio

Before anything else, I should mention that I'm looking for a job, and that I'm also an over-educated, middle-aged white woman with a "Gap" in my résumé. So I found it hard to get through this book not because it's a bad book (I'd call it mediocre), but because I've reached overload on job-hunting jargon.

The title & format of this book suggest that it's a parallel study to "Nickel and Dimed," but this book is much less compelling. Why? The main difference is that this time, Ehrenreich doesn't involve herself in the real-world consequences of her situation as she did in her earlier book. For instance, reading "Bait and Switch," I was surprised at how little she discussed the amount of money she spent on coaches, consultants, &c.; as a similarly-situated job seeker, I found myself constantly toting up her costs, not just for seminars & motels, but for phone calls, gas, clothing, & all those other things that suddenly pop into one's awareness when there's no money coming in [I'd suggest that you read B. S. Kimerer's astute review, above].

Some of the power (& a good deal of the integrity) of "Nickel and Dimed" came from her realization that she couldn't truly relate to her fellow workers as a peer if she could let herself call home for money whenever she came up short. I can't imagine shelling out $200 an hour for a coach without consulting my list of next month's anticipated bills, & then taking, at very least, a quick inventory of the fridge & freezer.