Summer Reading: 'Bait and Switch'

Corporate Bait & Switch..??

Bait and Switch: The futile pursuit of the ‘American Dream’                     By Barbara Ehrenreich (Henry Holt & Co., 2005)

Barbara Ehrenreich, the bestselling author of ‘Nickel and Dimed,’ goes back undercover — this time in a white collar Corporate gig — to expose to America’s ailing middle and upper-class the ephemeral realities and often predatory nature of achieving the ‘American Dream.’  As Ehrenreich uncovers through her qualitative as well as quantitative research, America’s middle class is now the most vulnerable and in-crisis sector of the U.S. economy. The problem with this is that this group has historically been the engine — the economic driver — of the American economy.  And with the advent of the current financial and global economic crises, the vulnerability of this foundation of, and centrality to, the economy is crumbling. . . And the damage is accelerating. Bait and Switch is ultimately about the crumbling of the ‘American Dream’ where the promise and pursuit of upward socio-economic mobility and financial security has given way to the harsh, violent reality  of unchecked competition and capitalism with little social support for newly disposable workers — and their families — and no assurances about the future for those who are fortunate enough to still have a ‘good paying’ corporate career.

The book highlights the people who’ve done everything “right” — college degrees, often ivy-educated, developed marketable skills, with impressive track-records — yet, they’ve become repeatedly vulnerable to the seemingly never-ending string of Wall Street scandals, economic  “crises,” eviscerating mergers & acquisitions, and your basic business cycle. Further, today’s globally competitive corporations take pride in shedding their “surplus” employees (i.e., downsizing) or by increasing corporate profit margins by shipping technology and call center jobs overseas into lower labor cost markets like India or the Philippines where they don’t have to pay for healthcare,  retirement or vacation benefits for workers.  Inevitably, this plunges white collar employees into months or even years at a stretch into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment where a job search itself becomes a full-time occupation.

In her earlier book, a New York Times bestseller, Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich explored the lives of the working poor and other low-waged workers.  Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the American labor market: the shadowy world of America’s white-collar unemployed.  Armed with a new identity and a plausible curriculum vitae of a professional in transition, she attempts to land a good paying middle-class gig.  In the process she undergoes “outplacement” counseling, executive career coaching and personality testing — measures all too common in the upper echelon of corporate job placement process — then trawling a series of “career fairs,” corporate boot camps, networking events and evangelical job-search ministries — popular with the large established churches in / around Wall Street and in the midtown business district  She gets an image makeover to prepare for the corporate world and works to project the winning attitude recommended for a successful job search.  She is proselytized, scammed by executive “head hunters,” lectured, but rejected over and over.