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Bait and Switch: Futile Pursuit of American Dream
Barbara Ehrenreich
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
Metropolitan Books
September 2005
256 pages
ISBN: 0805076069
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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 shadowy world of
the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible résumé
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 who’ve done
everything right—gotten college degrees, developed
marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés—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 these newly 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 exposé of
economic cruelty where we least expect it.
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