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Frayed white-collar workers. Sep 6, 2005 (170 of 198 found this helpful)
Barbara Ehrenreich's latest work of social commentary, "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream," is an indictment of the "magisterial indifference of the corporate world." Posing as an unemployed white-collar worker, Ehrenreich adopts an alias and markets herself as a public relations person and event planner. Her goal is to obtain a corporate job that pays approximately fifty thousand a year with health benefits. She plans to keep the job for three or four months, write about her experiences, and then quit. The author sets aside five thousand dollars for travel and other expenses connected with her job search.
During her odyssey, Ehrenreich pays for career coaching, attends a job fair, posts her resume on Internet sites, enrolls in a boot camp for job seekers, and networks extensively. She learns to sell herself, treat job searching as a full-time job, always maintain a winning attitude, put her faith in God, and dress for success. Much to her surprise, Ehrenreich's efforts do not land her a suitable job. She asks herself: Do I lack charisma? Am I too old? Is it unrealistic in today's market to look for a decent job with health benefits?
The author acknowledges that any or all of the above may have been factors in her failure to find work. However, she wrote the book because she believes that there is a bigger problem holding job-seekers back--corporate America's indifference to the needs of its workers. Ehrenreich maintains that human resources departments rarely even acknowledge receiving a resume anymore. Even worse, when an applicant sends in a bid for a job, he is often the victim of "bait and switch" tactics. Instead of offering the advertised job, the company rep tries to convince the job seeker to settle for a lesser job with no benefits or job security. In desperation, some white-collar workers take "survival jobs" such as housecleaning, cab driving, and retail sales in order to put food on the table. When the income from these jobs does not cover the bills, these stressed-out individuals max out their credit cards, seek help from relatives, and downsize their lifestyles as much as possible. Without health insurance, workers are terrified of becoming become ill because they have no money to pay for medical care and prescription drugs.
Ehrenreich is a savvy writer who throws herself wholeheartedly into whatever project she undertakes. She skillfully depicts the humiliation and frustration of her futile job search. However, this book will probably not resonate with readers in the same way that Ehrenreich's bestseller "Nickel and Dimed" did. First, the author's experiences while she looks for work lack bite; they are not very dramatic or gripping. Furthermore, Ehrenreich's indictment of corporate America breaks no new ground. Anyone who reads a newspaper knows about downsizing, outsourcing, and greedy and corrupt CEOs who make big bucks while their lower level employees lose their retirement funds.
So why read this book? "Bait and Switch" is worth a look because of the author's self-deprecating humor, effortless writing style, and compassion for the victims of heartless companies. Ehrenreich exhorts middle class job seekers to become activists, urging them to protest the fact that people who "do everything right" and "play by the rules" often end up in ruins. The problem is that even if such individuals find the courage to mount some sort of protest, who would listen? "Bait and Switch" gets high marks for the author's lively presentation and style but lower marks for her exploration of an already well-publicized problem without offering a viable solution.
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The bait is formal education. The switch is the market reality. Sep 11, 2005 (29 of 32 found this helpful)
Ehrenreich might as well be telling my story from 2002 to the present. Years of top grades, honors programs, a top 10 MBA, 'investment' in student loans, a good professional start--ending in long term unemployment followed by underemployment when the industry I was working in crashed in 2001-2002.
Unlike Ehrenreich, I've had more time to consider why a good education can be so meaningless if something bad happens during your career. Anyone, REALLY ANYONE, can go from being the best and the brightest to essentially unemployable in their field within 6 months--irrespective of their confidence that they are the type of person with hard won skills that will always be able to get a good job. People who have not experienced this for themselves will not believe it, because it is too unconfortable to believe. But this is how markets really work. Customers in a grocery will buy perfect vegetables and skip over the ones with visible bruises until they are sold at a deep discount. Hiring managers do the same thing. Candidates must be unblemished by any concern or question, including hiring gaps or rapid job moves, or unusual industry changes.
So for many, the system is broken at many levels. Education does not meet the needs of the future employed. It is too costly and of too poor a direct relevance to compete with educational systems and hiring criteria overseas. The process of hiring people remains superficial and flawed (Peter F. Drucker has some very good data to verify this to be true) but it is what it is and probably will not change any time soon.
Most managers hire on the basis of positive inside references, directly related previous work experience, and enthusiasm and good interpersonal rapport during an interview--if you are lucky enough to get an interview. For all the emphasis in our culture placed on achievement through education, lets be realistic. It is at most a footnote on a resume. Even if it did cost you years of work and tens of thousands of dollars.
What is to be done? Avoid educational debt, if it is not too late. Cultivate interdependence with friends and family--they will more often than not provide the leads for your next job if you lose your current one. And for god sakes do not be another one of the millions of a-holes out there who say, if they don't have a job its because they should have worked harder on their education or career earlier. Ehrenreich is pointing out something very painful and real that people choose not to look at unless it directly confronts them, which is a bad time to get the message.
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A frightening look at unemployment in the business classes Sep 27, 2005 (24 of 26 found this helpful)
It's commonly assumed in the United States that if you go to college, get a job and work hard, you will be successful. You will own a house and a couple of cars, you will be able to afford medical care, and you will be able to educate your children to a level where they're guaranteed even more success than you've achieved. If this was ever true, it isn't anymore, and Barbara Ehrenreich shows us the results.
In her first book, NICKEL AND DIMED, Ehrenreich went undercover as an unskilled worker to learn how the lowest level of workers supports themselves. They don't, she learned, because the system doesn't work, and her second book shows that the system doesn't work for the business classes either. Here, Ehrenreich poses as an out-of-work PR executive and details her job search.
Franz Kafka joined forces with Charles Darwin to create the brutal, surreal corporate world the author discovers. People are downsized, laid off, forced into early retirement, and just plain fired as a matter of course in this brave new world of ours, for reasons as pointed as ageism and sexism, as arbitrary as a profitable company wanting to show more of a profit, or for no reason at all. Of course, even knowing the fragile task of holding a job in this environment, the human resources departments hold the job-seeker responsible for every unemployed minute. Working time lost to illness is unemployment, working time lost to child or elder care is unemployment, working as a consultant is unemployment. Unemployment is unemployment, and the longer such periods last, the blacker the mark against the prospective employee.
You're lucky to be working, even if you're doing more work for less money over longer hours than you ever expected, even if you get no benefits, even if you survived the last round of layoffs and have no idea what will happen the next time. For if you're not working, you become one of the lost souls Ehrenreich meets. They max out their credit cards on image consultants and career coaches, each one contradicting what the last one said, on networking forums that turn out to be loosely disguised prayer meetings, on advice books, and on inspirational videos. They spend months and even years surfing the Internet and sending resumés to companies that rarely bother to respond at all. Oh, it's depressing.
But it's not depressing! How could it be depressing? Jobseekers are instructed to leave behind any negative thoughts --- anger, depression or mounting panic, for instance --- in order to present a positive image in their next interview. They are warned that revealing any negativity will count against them, as will age, gender, overeducation, having children, or any interests at all beyond devoting themselves entirely to their prospective employers. Smile!
In the book's conclusion, the author urges the unemployed to band together and lobby for more worker protections. I hope they make it happen, I really do.
--- Reviewed by Colleen Quinn [...]
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Some powerful insights, but not about "bait and switch" Sep 7, 2005 (124 of 159 found this helpful)
The title and premise of this book are quite misleading. I expected the book to be about how "white collar" employees were laid off, or how they struggle to make ends meet despite their comfortable salaries. The book rather describes how author Barbara Ehrenreich takes on the challenge to get hired into corporate America and experience "white collar" work for herself.
The majority of the book is about her experiences working with different "career coaches" and "networking groups" and other assorted entrepreneurs who work to help laid off middle managers get re-employed. As she works to craft the right resume, pretending to be a PR executive, she describes what it was like to work with others who were also trying to find work.
I did find the descriptions of the various personality tests, and the cheesy coaching tactics she engaged to help her to be fascinating. In the end the book is as much about the whole sub industry that has developed to try and get middle managers re-employed after being downsized or laid off from their companies as it is about any sort of "American Dream". The tactics and descriptions certainly do not put these "coaches" in a very positive light. Throughout she makes overgeneralizations, and makes fun of people with religious beliefs and values, which detracts from her point considerably.
The overall effect though is indeed chilling. What she described about those people looking for work for sometimes months on end was more than just depressing; it was a hopelessness bordering on desperation. This aspect of the book is quite powerful. The depression, loss of confidence and sheer volume of silence that greeted her in her "job search" illuminates the human psychological casualties brought on by what is described throughout; corporations being faceless, cold entities discarding people at will.
While there are holes in this book and the premise itself big enough to drive trucks through, Barbara really nails it when she gets to understand the emotional toll she feels as she faces rejection over and over.
The book is written exceptionally well, is quite funny, and despite her rather obvious political biases which undermine her subject matter credibility at every turn, it is well worth reading. In fact I think every corporate executive who has a role in determining the fate of middle managers should read this book if for no other reason than getting a first hand glimpse at the impact of their decisions.
This is in no way a light book, it is dark, depressing and ultimately offers no solutions to the problems it outlines. Despite that and despite my misgivings about the flaws and the biases of the author, I do recommend this book highly. It will change the way you look at resumes and the people you interview.
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She Didn't Even Get To the Ugly Part Jun 8, 2006 (19 of 22 found this helpful)
This is a well written book, but it reads like a description of a particularly vicious battle, as related by an observer comfortably hidden away on a distant, grassy knoll.
The author gave herself a nice nest egg of a few thousand dollars and then went out to find a job in Corporate America. Her plan was to spend six months finding a job, and then spend a few months working at it before she quit and wrote up the scandals. She spent her nest egg and then gave up in about 9 months, and then she went back to her comfortable life style. She even gave herself the luxury of sneaking back into the "real world" for a few breaks to rest up while doing the research. Those of us who live the nightmare do not have that option. We are stuck in it.
She did not even *get* to the ugly part, where you finally do find that job (after years, not months, of searching) to find that the corporation pays you only for the first 40 hours of work each week, and then the next 40 hours of work is OT (your Own Time).... and then they find a way to "downsize" you after only a few months.
Since she never found a job, the entire book relates her encounters with scummy con-artists posing as career coaches, the people that real job hunters know to avoid. She missed out on the longer and longer commutes and the ever-decreasing annual salary and the loss of benefits and the loss of vacation seniority and all of the other nasty rules that are now considered Corporate Standard Behavior.
The book has no credibility because the writer did not really experience the horrors of Corporate America any more than she would have experienced the horrors of war by watching "Saving Private Ryan".
I think that the author was honest in what she did write, but the work is so incomplete that it carries no weight.