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Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Audiobook6 hours

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

Written by Barbara Ehrenreich

Narrated by Anne Twomey

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

The bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed goes back undercover to do for America's ailing middle class what she did for the working poor.

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in BAIT AND SWITCH, she enters another hidden realm of the economy—the world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible resume of a professional "in transition," attempts to land a "middle class job" undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then begins trawling a series of EST-like "boot camps," job fairs, "networking events," and evangelical job-search "ministries." She gets an "image makeover" to prepare her for the corporate world and works hard to project the "winning attitude" recommended for a successful job search. She is proselytized, scammed, lectured and, again and again, rejected.

BAIT AND SWITCH highlights the people who've 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. Today's 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 the new disposable workers—and 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 expose of economic cruelty where we least expect it.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 7, 2005
ISBN9781593977313
Author

Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-2022) was a bestselling author and political activist, whose more than a dozen books included Nickel and Dimed, which the New York Times described as "a classic in social justice literature", Bait and Switch, Bright-sided, This Land Is Their Land, Dancing In the Streets, and Blood Rites. An award-winning journalist, she frequently contributed to Harper's, The Nation, The New York Times, and TIME magazine. Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, when it was still a bustling mining town. She studied physics at Reed College, and earned a Ph.D. in cell biology from Rockefeller University. Rather than going into laboratory work, she got involved in activism, and soon devoted herself to writing her innovative journalism.

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Reviews for Bait and Switch

Rating: 3.378446052631579 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In an attempt to investigate the cutthroat nature of the corporate world, the Ms. Enrenreich, an acclaimed journalist, masquerades as a PR person in search of work. Her plan is to take all the advice available, getting a coach, a makeover, resume help, and attending all manner of networking events and job fairs. She will then take whatever job is offered her, work it a few months and learn what the increasingly competitive corporate workplace is like.All these plans come to naught however when she finds herself jobless after nearly seven months. It's a bleak sort of book, and I think it actually caused me a lot of anxiety as I remembered my own desperate job searching. However the author's wit and prose kept me entertained and grimly laughing through it all.Bottom line, there's some good advice to be gleaned for job seekers as well as a scathing indictment of the current hiring practices and declining stability of white-collar jobs.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was a big fan of Nickel and Dimed, so I was looking forward to reading Bait and Switch as well. I love Ehrenreich's writing style and found the story fascinating. However, I felt unfulfilled by the conclusion. I felt that she did not budget a reasonable amount of time for the project, and, thus, gave up too quickly. I was hoping that she would either find a job in the end, or, alternatively, take the "job" she was offered and continue her search to give a more typical account of a job search. The book wasn't bad by any means, but I don't have a desire to read it again, as I did for Nickel and Dimed.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A tad more sarcasm and cynicism on display, and a little less compassion than in Nickel and Dimed, but, hey, this chronicles the struggle for a job in the corporate world...there is much to be cynical about. And still, compassion does shine through and those age old questions of the muckraking journalist: How have we allowed things to become the way they are? What do we do now?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I thought her premise that she could fake her way into a high-paying job while not knowing much about it -- and thinking that this would be relatively easy -- was a bit haughty.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I thought that it couldn't get any more real or depressing than Nickel and Dimed, but in this book, Ehrenreich takes on the myths of the white-collar world and finds one where inaction masquerades as self-improvement and where people are so afraid of pointing out what is wrong with the system that they spend their lives blaming themselves. Especially pertinent and prophetic in the wake (or in the throes, depending on your point of view) of The Great Recession, this book exposes the white collar ideology of self-help and self-blame for what it is: wishful thinking. I know too many people whose situations mirror or are even worse than the ones described in the book; it should be required reading for all incoming college freshmen.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A seminal book about the shrinking middle class in which laid-off employees struggle to make ends meet through unemployment benefits, multilevel marketing schemes, contract work, and commission-only sales, none of which offers the stability and reliability of a regular paycheck, paid vacations, health and dental benefits, and a retirement plan.

    Ehrenreich's one year journey to find an executive level job led her to four states, dozens of networking events, three career coaches, a personal makeover complete with makeup, and $4,000.00 in job-search related expenses but resulted in only two job offers: one from AFLAC as a commission-only sales representative and one from Mary Kay as an independent sales representative. Neither "job" offered the typical employment package she was seeking: salaried work with benefits.

    Both disheartening and enlightening, Bait and Switch exemplifies Ehrenreich's ability to balance straight forward reporting with firsthand experience. A must read for anyone trying to understand the success and failings of corporate culture in the post dot-com United States.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Nothing new or radical here for anyone who's ever looked for an office job. But it is, as one of the job seekers Ehrenreich encountered in her search said, nice to know that you're not alone in the frustrations and bullshit experienced during a job search.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Not as good as Nickeled and Dimed, this is about the grinding misery of the job search instead of, as Ehrenreich intended, the grinding misery of white collar corporate employment. Perhaps my discomfort is telling. The grinding misery of white collar corporate employment could have left me feeling smugly superior, from my position in the white collar academic world. But since I am academic staff, rather than faculty, my distance from job search misery is not sufficiently reassuring - and my awareness that the job market has worsened rather than improved since Ehrenreich wrote this book adds to its weight.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not as brilliant as NICKEL AND DIMED; I get the feeling Ehrenreich can't bring herself to feel as sympathetic to unemployed white-collar corporate workers as she did to minimum-wage workers. However, it's still compulsively readable. Ehrenreich re-named herself Barbara Alexander (legally returning to her maiden name) and entered the job market, intending to get herself a corporate job and work for a few months. She never did get a job; her only offers were from AFLAC and Mary Kay Cosmetics, in both cases basically to work as an independent contractor. Along the way, she experienced job fairs, corporate counselors, employment seminars, resumé counseling, and all the other ways in which the white-collar unemployed are further fleeced. The thing that stands out most to me is that many of the people preying on the people looking for jobs are themselves people who can't find jobs.

    After reading it, I found myself grateful I decided to become a private school teacher and not a PR person, systems analyst, or event planner. But I also feel a little less secure all around. Ehrenreich specializes in letting all the air out of the various fictions of a capitalist economy.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I enjoyed this book and recommend it but there were some serious gaps. Yes the author was showing the difficulties of job hunting for middle age folks but the book really focused on support groups and networking groups available to certain types of job hunters. Admittedly, the author could not have faked being a software developer or other skilled computer person but the experience of the techie expert is, apparently, quite different than the "softer" side of the IT industry, i.e. marketing, project admin, managers. I didn't know it was different before reading this book but now it's quite clear there is a huge difference. Also, the author did not really go into the resume submission experience that much - she discusses group after group and contact after contact but then, just as a byline, says things like "by this time I had sent out 200 resumes". Well, what about those resumes?!?!So, yes, overall I think it's a good book but very definitely describes just one piece of the middle American nightmare that is job hunting as an over 40 person.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The book is really interesting although at times it was a little bit boring and repetitive... although perhaps more for those of us from the corporate world who have already been through this so-called 'transition phases'...
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Barbara Ehrenreich is one of my favorite nonfiction authors. I love her writing style. She accurately captures the human condition in an approachable style. This is a book that will make you think and question what's wrong with the US and its disappearing middle class.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Enlightening. And oh so very depressing.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I can't honestly give this a very high rating, and probably the thing that Fiona said while passing this on to me ("pass it on to someone else when you've finished, I don't need it back") should have given me a clue that this was likely.

    The main part of this book is golly-gosh, isn't corporate America full of utter utter utter bullshit - CV doctoring, spurious personality tests, and books that tell you to imagine what you want and a real physical force of attraction will bring it closer to you. Well, yeah, duh. None of this is surprising or enlightening, though you may enjoy reading some of the anecdotes of jaw-dropping stupidity that she puts in.

    She starts off by saying that in researching the world of white-collar work, she was unable to find very much written on the subject, even in recent fiction. But this book was published in 2005, by which time many people had been writing blogs for some time, including about their worklife. I don't have specific examples to cite, but surely she should have been able to dig some personal writing on the subject by real white collar workers either current or unemployed?

    The wrap-up chapter at the end was by far the best bit and should have been left as a stand-alone piece, I think. In that piece, she clarifies the single biggest flaw with this project; namely the unrealistic launching-into-the-void of trying to find a job with no usage of real-life contacts at all (because she's doing it undercover). I guess she thought it would be easy enough to get a corporate job despite that handicap but that really just shows how entirely out of touch she was with the corporate world - unlike most of her readers, who would be just wondering what the hell she thought she was even trying to do.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I thought I would have a really great review when I was through with this book. Sadly, there just wasn't enough meat here. I definitely empathized with Ehrenreich's struggle, but perhaps it was too above my own status to be able to relate to. Or perhaps it was just too unrealistic. She handles the overwhelming uncertainty and life-questioning that being unemployed or underemployed leaves you feeling psychologically, but she does not ever get put into a corner at which she is unable to function or dole out another unemployed chunk of money at career coaches. So what you are left with is a book about a woman without a job but also without any problems that another worker might have; rent, food, bills, etc.
    I don't think that this book is as problematic for me as "Nickel and Dimed" in that I don't think it was as much of a stretch for her to undergo the premise for this work. Searching for job ads online seems a little closer to the real-life Ehrenreich's profession than cleaning houses and waitressing does. It feels less like she, as an outsider and someone "above" the work she was doing was looking down in disapproval. That said, both books seem really weird to me. Who the fuck is she writing for, anyhow? Someone who was never unemployed and needs to be told that this is how it is? Overall, Ehrenreich makes me feel bitchy and forces me to realize that the only edge she has is that she is not a member of the groups that she studies. She needs these undercover exposes to show how the little people live. She may not mean to have this perspective be there, but the fundamental flaw of her books is that it is all-too present for me. I am offended by someone of a high class coming on down to mine and then trying to describe it to me. It just makes me angry and supports the whole need-money-to-get-money catch-22, the Marxist flaw that the only people that can start the revolution are those that are not working their lives away (thus not workers, thus not a marxist revolution...) sigh, sigh, work, work.
    I wish I was not unemployed and disgusted and thus had more energy to devote to why this book is wrong, but I am just too overwhelmed by everything described here and a powerful awareness of class and futility.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I didn't like this book as much as Nickel and Dimed. I felt as if Ehrenreich made some strange choices in trying to replicate a white collar job search. At times she seemed to keep doing the same things over and over, even though they were ineffective. Her conclusions were insightful and valuable.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I'd heard so many good things about journalist, political activist and author Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed - an undercover foray into the Catch-22 of our nation's working poor - that I didn't think twice about picking up Bait and Switch. As someone who's spent most of her career working with or for Corporate America, I thought this tell-all about the underbelly of white-collar employment may enlighten me, or least be a truthful expression of my personal experience.Unfortunately, her half-baked plan (conducted about four years prior to the Great Recession) to land a corporate PR job and then show the evils of it was doomed from the start. She certainly found an underbelly, but not of any corporate slave driving. Rather, she parleyed with a strange band of characters, from half-baked career coaches to dead-end job training leaders. Add to that her thick, never-ending veneer of sarcasm and you end up with a book that requires determination to finish. In fact, the finish (a.k.a. her conclusion) is the only part that is truly worth reading. There, Ehrenreich acknowledges the reasons for her failed efforts while bringing to bear some useful insights.My recommendation: skip to the end, or skip it altogether.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I thought that it couldn't get any more real or depressing than Nickel and Dimed, but in this book, Ehrenreich takes on the myths of the white-collar world and finds one where inaction masquerades as self-improvement and where people are so afraid of pointing out what is wrong with the system that they spend their lives blaming themselves. Especially pertinent and prophetic in the wake (or in the throes, depending on your point of view) of The Great Recession, this book exposes the white collar ideology of self-help and self-blame for what it is: wishful thinking. I know too many people whose situations mirror or are even worse than the ones described in the book; it should be required reading for all incoming college freshmen.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a follow up to Nickel and Dimed. It's pretty good--her writing style is certainly engaging; however, it seems to me that a white collar job seeker would know better than to hire career coaches and pay to attend networking events. I wished she would have spent more time on the job search and working than meeting with sham career counselors. I do like her.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    why did i keep reading?because we both have breast cancer?because i had chucked the previous audio book?because i could follow this even though it was boring and stupid and way too long--a magazine article maybe?who were these people who gave it 5 stars? zombies?
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Labeled as the white collar follow-up to Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich's books title only refers to her own switched topic. In Nickel and Dimed, she entered the rock-bottom world of the labor market as an undercover observer, dabbling a few weeks in different jobs. What makes that book interesting, are not Ehrenreich's own observations but those of the people she meets.In this book, she not only fails in her primary mission to get a mid-level white collar job. She also fails to interview mid-level white collar employees (she mainly talks to the long-term unemployed). Instead, she turns the book into an account of her travails with the snake-oil self-help and coaching industry and the strange and stigmatized world of job-hunting and unemployment. Some of her observations are pertinent and the US health care and unemployment benefits system is certainly flawed. Her experiment, however, must flounder from the start as the PR job she is seeking is both a figment and unsuitable to the profile of qualification she presents. What is a PR person worth without a solid network? Offering PR advice to companies with bad reputations is a flawed and crazy approach. Those companies know about their bad reputations, caused by the underlying bad business practices. Ehrenreich's cosmetic fix will not help at all. Ehrenreich's time would have been better spent interviewing her laid-off colleagues at the New York Times. Her sheltered existence allows her to pontificate about things she doesn't quite understand (similar to the Moustache of Understanding interviewing taxi drivers)..
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Although I own Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich and have heard good things about the book, I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. But when I saw this book marked down to $3 at a used bookstore, I decided to buy it and read it first.Ehrenreich has a great narrative style that really sucks the reader into the story. I found myself unable to put the book down, which may or may not have been a good thing. This is definitely not a book to read while you're unemployed (or "in transition") and searching for a job; it's discouraging and depressing - and this was written when the economy, though in a downturn, was still a lot better than it is today (2010).That said, I really don't know how much can be extrapolated from this book. The author may have not been able to find a job during this search, but was it because the job search was really that difficult or was it because her resume was mostly faked? Did potential employers toss her resume because of high volume, or did they look through it and have a sense that something was amiss with her qualifications? It's impossible to say.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    What a let down! I eagerly purchased "Bait and Switch" because I'd been such a fan of Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed". The premise certainly sounds intriguing - a behind-the-scenes look at the struggle of finding and keeping a job that pays a middle-class wage. But this book was disappointing on several levels - lazy reporting, simple-minded conclusions, and insulting assessments of the people she met along the way. The investigative reporting in particular was lacking, and the author did not recreate a job search that bears any resemblance to a search that I, or anyone I know, has done. It's hard to believe that this was the same person who wrote the excellently researched "Nickel and Dimed" - until I got to the last chapters. Here, the Ehrenreich style, wit, and passion shines through and she provides the incisive analysis she's so good at. But this is not worth the price of admission - overall, I think Ehrenreich phoned this one in.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It's odd, that when we want to understand a particular section of the human experience, we often ask an outsider. Surely, somewhere out there, there are white collar workers who want to share their experiences with unemployment. Still, there is something to be said for the outsider's perspective. It can create interesting narrative possibilities. Sadly, that's not really evident in Bait and Switch. Ehrenreich never really cracks into the corporate world, never quite looses her academic perspective on her subjects. If she had been willing to dedicate another year to the experiment, she might have had something great-but I can't fault her too much for cutting the experiment short and writing with what she had. A bit shallow, a bit slow, but her characteristic humour shines through.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There was a lot of buzz about Barbara Ehrenreich's earlier book, Nickel and Dimed, in which she tried to survive on minimum wage. In the case of that book, the 'fun experiment' aspect of it turned me off, and I never picked it up. Bait and Switch called to me from a friend's bookshelf one lazy morning in a guest room, though, and I finished it by that night. If nothing else, Ehrenreich has narrative flair. In Bait and Switch, Ehrenreich spends several months attempting to find a white collar job with some responsibility paying more than $50,000 per year. A professor and journalist by trade, she limits herself to careers with only a tangential connection to her real-life experience, so that she won't be recognized. Thus, she ends up with a mostly fictional, slightly sparse PR resume. As an older woman, the contrived aspects of her experiment definitely affect her job search negatively, and this reality troubles the book from beginning to end.However, the book has some plus sides. It reads like fiction and completely sucked me in. Not to say that some parts didn't drag - in fact, very little actually happens in this book - but it has the same allure as some (well-done) reality TV. As the reader, I felt like I was watching Ehrenreich try and fail to be me. She's exposing the white collar world to, well, white collar readers. What reader of this book hasn't searched for a job on the internet, exposed themselves to recruiters or attempted to network? In this way, it felt a little like a personal pity party - "Thanks, Barbara. I know! It's tough out there! You're telling me!" At the same time, it does expose some of the ironies of the middle income professional - the lack of representation for white collar workers, for example, in a world of gargantuan corporate entities. All in all, a worthwhile read, although perhaps not one of the great feats of exposee journalism.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The "experiment" in this one isn't as well designed as Nickel and Dimed, and the implications not as chilling, but Ehrenreich's clear and engaging writing is just as strong. There is something about the way that she expresses herself that allies the reader and makes you want to keep following her story. Sadly, I think the formula of creating a charade to get the inside scoop on ways of life fell a bit short here. Still, it is worth reading to get Ehrenreich's perspectives and to understand a little more how hard it is to break into business.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I read this book when I was going through my phase of searching and settling. It gave me confidence knowing I was not alone in my suffering, but it was also a bit depressing and disheartening to read about a whole year she spent without it getting any better. However, just like another reviewer here said, it's in the settling that you find the real opportunities. While I enjoyed reading about her experiences with networkers and coaches, I would have liked to see an actual struggle from the inside of corporate America. This was supposed to be an expose of corporate life, but it read like she was just on the outside looking in. She didn't spend a single day in a cube-farm, she didn't have to suck up to a mean, under-qualified, insecure boss and she didn't have to attend a single company meeting or watch a round of layoffs. She tried to step in at the top rather than climbing the ladder like the rest of us - and no wonder she failed! If it was so easy to come in on top, wouldn't we all be there?The premise of this book ensured that it was destined for failure. Nickel and Dimed worked because it doesn't take long to obtain and work at a minimum wage job and realize that it both sucks and won't pay the bills. But infiltrating corporate America is almost as difficult as infiltrating the Mafia. It takes years of dedication and soul-selling to get that view from the top. Years which she cannot afford to spend on a project that would produce only one book.That said, if she'd settled for an entry-level position I imagine she would have had a lot more to write about.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There's only so much one can write about upper middle class people throwing away their money while looking for a job. It really felt like Ms. Ehrenreich was stretching an chapter's worth of information into a book.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    You can only say so much about executive-level job hunting. Kind of a disappointing follow-up to her last book; hope the next is more compelling.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The author's undercover pursuits offer some valuable insights, chronicling the challenges that face millions of displaced white collar workers. There are a few truly hilarious anecdotes, sprinkled with some practical advice for folks who find themselves on a job-hunting safari. Unfortunately, Ehrenreich's work becomes almost as tedious as an excruciatingly long job search. She spends far too much time making the same points about the perils of "networking" and career coaches. As an expanded essay or a three-part magazine feature, "Bait and Switch" would be a great resource. But it just doesn't seem to have enough material to justify its book-length girth.