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

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen books, including Dancing in the Streets and The New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent contributor to Harpers and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine. A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year 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 resume 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 whove 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. Todays 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. A worthy companion to Nickel and Dimed . . . The new book provides a victims-eye view of the world of unemployed white-collar workers--people struggling, mostly in vain, to recoup the high wages and prestige they lost after being dismissed from the not-so-secure confines of corporate America . . . Like the now classic Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch is alternately hilarious and tragic, a searing expose of economic cruelty where we least expect it.--The Washington Post Book World Ehrenreichs acerbic critiques are devastating . . . She does a superb job of focusing the spotlight on a nether world of those without jobs o