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

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 [...]

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