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BAIT AND SWITCH: FUTILE PURSUIT OF AMERICAN DREAM
By: 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 Ehrenreichβs 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 rΓ©sumΓ© of a professional βin transition,β she attempts to land a middle-class jobβundergoing 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, andβagain and againβrejected. Bait and Switch highlights the people whoβve done everything rightβgotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive rΓ©sumΓ©sβyet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Todayβs ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their βsurplusβ employeesβplunging 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 workersβand 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 exposΓ© of economic cruelty where we least expect it.
 Media BuzzFresh Air - NPR - October 24, 2005
All Things Considered - September 8, 2005
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