Books: Bait and Switch

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


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
For fans of Barbara Ehrenreich, this book is essentially a continuation of what she did in Nickel and Dimed. This time, instead of investigating the lower rungs of the minimum wage worker, she explores the world of the middle-class white- collar unemployed. As it turns out, the educated middle-class is increasingly being pushed downward to “survival jobs,” as outlined in Nickel and Dimed. People were “baited” into the idea that if you went to college you’d get a good job: you’re “set.” The “switch” comes into play when you are downsized and you realize that it was all for naught.
Ehrenreich takes the same tactic she took in that earlier book--developing an alter-ego of sorts, and she attempts to get a job in Corporate America, where she soon finds the difficulty in getting a job when there are “gaps” in your resume, creating the catch-22 of how do you get a job when the fact that you don’t already have a job works against you? She employs all the weapons in the arsenal for the middle aged middle class job-seeker: seminars, job boards, career coaches, positive thinking, a “winning attitude,” and finds them all quite lacking in their ability to help her (or anyone else, for that matter) land a job.
Corporate America is a beast. It demands an adherence to the bottom line which often means laying off employees to increase that bottom line. This is not news. But the shocking part of this investigation is the apparent reliance it has on unscientific and irrational notions of “likability” and “positivity” in hiring decisions, often without regard for actual skills.
No question, this is a depressing topic. People who are driven to tears by their feelings of uselessness after a layoff are the casualties in an increasingly cold-blooded and cold-hearted economy. It is also short-sighted to adhere so strictly to the profit-based bottom line, effectively making it so that no one can afford to buy or use whatever service the company may be offering. Henry Ford knew that he had to pay his people a good wage or else they wouldn’t be able to buy his product. It’s a lesson that would seem to have been forgotten amongst the culture of layoffs.
This is a well-done book about a topic that deserves to be addressed, and like Ehrenreich’s other books, it is funny.
I had more to say about my general antipathy toward capitalism, but I’m going to leave it at that. Read Nickel and Dimed, and then read Bait and Switch as both can say more than I ever could about it.

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