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Bait and Switch

The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

By Barbara Ehrenreich

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| Others | 9780805076066

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Book Description

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 rsum of a professional in transition, she attempts to land a middle-class joContinue

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 rsum 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 whove done everything right -- gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive rsums -- yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Todays 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 expos of economic cruelty where we least expect it.

Critics

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

    Urged on by pleas from middle-class readers of her best-selling book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich launched a new book project that she hoped would do for white-collar work what Nickel and Dimed had done for low-wage work. In Nickel and Dimed, ... (read full critics)

    bookpage published on Wed, 15 Sep 2010

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

    Review-a-Day Saturday, September 17th, 2005 Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich A review by Gerry Donaghy Back in 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich published a book examining the plight of America's lowest wage ea ... (read full critics)

    powells published on Mon, 6 Sep 2010

2 Reviews

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  • 2 people find this helpful

    Though the grim view of the economic donward movement for white-collar cooprate workers is scary enought, given I might count as one of them, the too much too often contradictory sarcasm, especially in the quote un-quote style, reduces the book to merely a sophisticately written parody than an awake ... (continue)

    Though the grim view of the economic donward movement for white-collar cooprate workers is scary enought, given I might count as one of them, the too much too often contradictory sarcasm, especially in the quote un-quote style, reduces the book to merely a sophisticately written parody than an awakening call.

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    meowmeow said on Feb 20, 2007 | Add your feedback

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