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The Scotsman
‘Ehrenrich is once again a smart, mordant observer… makes great, acerbic company for the reader and tells her story knowingly’
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"'Barbara Ehrenreich is our premier reporter of the underside of Capitalism' New York Times"
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
39 of 39 people found the following review helpful
Barbara Ehrenreich has a dry wit. When she decides to go undercover as a white collar professional (first seeking and then fulfilling a job within America's corporate citadel), she finds herself in a world so desperate and surreal that she need only report with her admirable clarity to render it, quite often, funny.
But humour is not her intention, for the most part. Her subject is essentially suffering; the immense human cost of the way American business, especially big business, now approaches staffing at all levels, and the almost totally meaningless responses with which individuals try adapt to it.
Being a white-collar jobseeker is these days proclaimed to be a job in itself. It is also a position in which people are prey to a whole industry of pundits, coaches, purveyors of tips, networking opportunities, boot camps, prayer meetings and therapy groups. Ehrenreich spent over $6,000 during some seven to nine months of intensive searching. All her work, and investment, never yielded so much as an acknowledgement from most of the potential employers she approached.
This is a highly instructive piece of reporting from a world which otherwise really doesn't get represented. The reason is, practically everything else dealing with these realities is determined to ignore their human and social (and, one would think, organisational) costs and simply to provide a programme or set of indicators to people facing the difficulties of what is euphemistically called 'transition.' No-one wants to admit that what is really going on, as with the broader drive of neo-liberal economics (see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-liberalism) is effectively class war. What is both comic _and_ tragic is that the American middle class seems completely unable to perceive the reality of what is being done to it. Educated to think they don't actually have a class-based society, they are naturally perfect victims for a war they literally cannot imagine (but can be sacrificed to).
For a remarkable feat of contemporary anthropology, documenting the rituals and belief systems of a clearly delusional subculture in the mainstream of American society, Ehrenreich deserves major kudos. As a warning of what will almost certainly engulf middle class professionals everywhere sooner or later, she also deserves the gratitude of anyone attempting to understand the world today. It would be unfair to criticize the book for what it doesn't do (and doesn't set out to) - critique and analyse the policies and dogmas with which the attack on middle-class employment is rationalised, or the underlying motives. This is a missing part of the picture here, one which has yet to be documented to my knowledge (except in the general terms presented by Harvey in the work cited above). Bait and Switch is nevertheless a valuable document and ought to be read as a fierce indictment of the indefensible destruction of a way of life and the demoralization of an entire society.
But humour is not her intention, for the most part. Her subject is essentially suffering; the immense human cost of the way American business, especially big business, now approaches staffing at all levels, and the almost totally meaningless responses with which individuals try adapt to it.
Being a white-collar jobseeker is these days proclaimed to be a job in itself. It is also a position in which people are prey to a whole industry of pundits, coaches, purveyors of tips, networking opportunities, boot camps, prayer meetings and therapy groups. Ehrenreich spent over $6,000 during some seven to nine months of intensive searching. All her work, and investment, never yielded so much as an acknowledgement from most of the potential employers she approached.
This is a highly instructive piece of reporting from a world which otherwise really doesn't get represented. The reason is, practically everything else dealing with these realities is determined to ignore their human and social (and, one would think, organisational) costs and simply to provide a programme or set of indicators to people facing the difficulties of what is euphemistically called 'transition.' No-one wants to admit that what is really going on, as with the broader drive of neo-liberal economics (see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-liberalism) is effectively class war. What is both comic _and_ tragic is that the American middle class seems completely unable to perceive the reality of what is being done to it. Educated to think they don't actually have a class-based society, they are naturally perfect victims for a war they literally cannot imagine (but can be sacrificed to).
For a remarkable feat of contemporary anthropology, documenting the rituals and belief systems of a clearly delusional subculture in the mainstream of American society, Ehrenreich deserves major kudos. As a warning of what will almost certainly engulf middle class professionals everywhere sooner or later, she also deserves the gratitude of anyone attempting to understand the world today. It would be unfair to criticize the book for what it doesn't do (and doesn't set out to) - critique and analyse the policies and dogmas with which the attack on middle-class employment is rationalised, or the underlying motives. This is a missing part of the picture here, one which has yet to be documented to my knowledge (except in the general terms presented by Harvey in the work cited above). Bait and Switch is nevertheless a valuable document and ought to be read as a fierce indictment of the indefensible destruction of a way of life and the demoralization of an entire society.
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful
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I spent many years unhappy in jobs before I became self-employed. Since being self-employed I have visited the networking clubs and come into contact with the world of life-coaches, I even had to return to employment briefly which was just as horrible as Barbara Ehrenreich describes. This may be a book about America, but almost all of it is relevant in the UK.
Ehrenreich pinpoints the distorted ideas about how people should behave when seeking jobs. The expectation that people need to be flexible team players, unrelentingly upbeat and amenable. And leave your morals and principles at home please.
I remember once listening to an accountant from a top law firm saying that anyone who wanted to join his firm had to have a 2.1 or above. But when it came to him, he didn't even have a degree. However, things were different now, he maintained. Ehrenreich reveals the stupid ideas about not having gaps in your CV. Having children, taking stock, doing something unconventional - none of these are seen as being quite right for corporations.
My conclusion is you can't fight against it, you have to find people who share your values. For those of us lucky to be out of it, thank the lord.
Ehrenreich pinpoints the distorted ideas about how people should behave when seeking jobs. The expectation that people need to be flexible team players, unrelentingly upbeat and amenable. And leave your morals and principles at home please.
I remember once listening to an accountant from a top law firm saying that anyone who wanted to join his firm had to have a 2.1 or above. But when it came to him, he didn't even have a degree. However, things were different now, he maintained. Ehrenreich reveals the stupid ideas about not having gaps in your CV. Having children, taking stock, doing something unconventional - none of these are seen as being quite right for corporations.
My conclusion is you can't fight against it, you have to find people who share your values. For those of us lucky to be out of it, thank the lord.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
I only just started reading Ehrenreich's "sequal" to her exploration of blue-collar poverty in USA (Nickel and Dimed), and by chapter 2 I'm already laughing out loud - partly because Ehrenreich's dry and witty humour, even when dealing with not at all funny issues, partly out of despair; as a recent graduate and a seeker of my first professional job, the bizarre world of career coaching, networking events, and personality testing rings a bit too true. Recommended for anyone either pursuing or holding a white-collar corporate job!
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Good but not quite as advertised
Barbara Ehrenreich's dark and unquestionably depressing book exposes us to a world in which the human soul is repressed to a level that the great twentieth century monocrats could... Read more
Published 5 months ago by M. Roberts
Excellent book on white collar unemployment
Barbara Ehrenreich did an excellent job of explaining and of enabling people not acquainted with the topic to understand the situation faced by millions of white collar workers,... Read more
Published 6 months ago by AK
Brilliant book and painfully true
This is a terrific book that I read from start to finish (which is rare for me). She has just the right balance between reporting her hard-won personal experiences and explaining... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Matthew Leitch
"Success and failure seem to have little to do with one's...
The above quote, from Robert Jackall, is included by Ehrenreich in her "Conclusion" section, and is a fitting summation of one of her themes. Read more
Published 16 months ago by John P. Jones III
Well written but unsatisfying
As a Britisher who was lucky enough to spend most of my adult life working uneventfully for a single multinational corporation, I found "Bait and Switch" very uncomfortable... Read more
Published on 29 April 2010 by T. D. Welsh
I thought it was a statement of the obvious but the reviews on the...
Bait and Switch talks primarily the world of being "in transition" between middle class, middle management jobs, but for me the cold bubbliness it talks about in the "job... Read more
Published on 4 Mar 2010 by Miss Sophia A. Marsden
An unexpected pleasure
I have to admit that I tried to read this book a few months ago and did not manage to get past the first chapter. Read more
Published on 10 Dec 2006 by S. Tattersfield
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