Job Flair

All Barbara Ehrenreich wanted was a white-collar job at 50K a year plus bennies. (Don’t we all?) In Bait and Switch this veteran social critic uses the same undercover tactics as in her best-selling Nickel and Dimed to explore life in Dilbert Country. Her goal is simple: Land a cubicle and report from within.

To this end, she employs a team of job coaches who, for a mere $200 an hour, offer useless assignments (describe your fantasy job!), resumé advice, and personality tests galore. But after a year on the trail, the best she’s able to muster are spots pimping the respective fruits of AFLAC and Mary Kay. Given this failure, Bait and Switch is less an exposé of corporate America than it is a politicized job-seekers diary.

“It was very different in Nickel and Dimed,” Ehrenreich explains from her home in southern Virginia. “I easily got a job and it was: ‘You gotta do this, you gotta do that.’ You can’t pretend to be a waitress; the food gets to the table or it doesn’t. Now in Bait and Switch, there was a level of deception that was way beyond that. I had to have a fake resumé. I even had a different name to prevent recognition.”

For Ehrenreich the systemic rise in white-collar unemployment, coupled with lashings of downsizing, amounts to nothing less than the shattering of a social contract understood by generations. “The idea of the corporation is a number of people coming together and acting as one body. You were loyal to the company and it was loyal to you.”

As Ehrenreich puts it, the corporate world still requires abject sacrifice but without the one thing worth selling your soul for. “It’s the same demand for total loyalty but with no security. It’s no longer good enough to do a good job; you have to be passionate about your work — yet it’s unrequited love.”