Bait And Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit Of The American Dream (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
Part of the reason why I’m a somewhat less than trustworthy reviewer is that writers really do get extra points from me for being able to write well and for being nice people. I mean, if I have enjoyed spending time with a writer over the couple of days it has taken me to read their book, well, that goes a long way towards me thinking that their book was wonderful and worthwhile. This book was wonderful and worthwhile and it was written by someone who can both write and be nice at the same time. In corporate speak she ‘ticks all the boxes’.Over the last couple of decades I have been either employed in a corporation, a government corporation, a local government authority or a trade union reacting to the corporate nonsense that is so beautifully discussed in this book. One of the things that amuses me most about corporate capitalism is how incredibly seriously it takes itself. I’ve always seen workplaces as more or less dysfunctional families. There are members of all families that seem to have been born with a disproportionate sense of entitlement. Others never seem to get the rewards they deserve according to the contribution they make in keeping the peace or the trouble they prevent happening to everyone around them. There are the crazy uncles who seem to have an aversion to using soap and the sister who does virtually nothing but is still everyone’s favourite, even if no one can quite say why. The last eight years of my life were spent representing people faced with the really yucky side of the corporate world – the part where the people I was representing were being disciplined or threatened with the sack. It has been a journey into the hideous side of human nature, a place where people show their worst sides - some more gleefully than others.The premise of this book is related to the only other of Barbara Ehrenreich’s books I’ve read – Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. In that book Barbara joined the ranks of minimum wage earners and showed how hard they were expected to work and how little rewarded they were. But white collar people then told Barbara she should write a book about their experience – after all, they had done all the right things: finished their education, not gotten pregnant in their teens and sold their soul to the corporation – and yet they still ended up feeling decidedly ripped off. Barbara decides to try to get a job in the corporate world – she tries for a year. What this book really is, is a book about the scary world of white collar unemployment and recruitment. There are proselytising Christians who think that unemployment is as good a time to become converted to Jesus as any other. There are would be gurus on how to become employed whose sole advice seems to be that you should network and dream big. I thought the best piece of advice came from Barbara herself, that when doing a web search for work you should avoid the word ‘job’ as this will lead to millions of sites that linked that word with with the words ‘hand’ and ‘head’. If you ever needed proof the internet was designed by boys...The big lesson in her excursion into attempting to be employed in the corporate world is how insecure everyone is – and not just the poor bastards who end up out of a job, but also those anticipating a restructure or a downsizing event or right sizing or an exercise in focusing on a corporations key competencies or core business or whatever the latest phrase for sacking people is. That is - everybody!Marx says in Wage-Labor and Capitalthat the alienation of labour is due to capitalism reducing all skills down so that every job becomes unskilled. White collar workers are facing that experience today too, I think. One of the things I was involved with in my endless years as a trade union ratbag was reviewing position descriptions and job classification structures. These are written so as to ‘broad band’ jobs, but the jobs themselves can be broad banded because the skills being bought are much the same over a range of positions. When I worked at the City of Melbourne it was part of my role to go to every branch in the organisation and to listen to the ‘mission statements’ they had prepared. It soon became clear that these were virtually identical to each other and more or less interchangeable. So much so that from reading the mission statement alone you couldn’t tell if the branch was involved in Strategic Research or issuing parking fines. They always said something bland about customer service (despite local governments not really being in anything that could reasonably be called ‘customer service’ - any reasonable definition of which would include the fact that customer service requires the provision of different service leaves depending on the ability to pay). They always said something about excellence and something about commitment. Their mission statement might as well have said, “We’re not terribly sure what we do, but we will do it really well and in the best interests of those we do it for according to how we define their interests.” This was only surpassed by the ‘mission statement’ presented to us by management at the union – coming in at a mere two A4 pages of dot points it included just about everything the union was ever likely to do – proving yet again that morons aren’t limited to corporate bureaucracies.She sums up my experience with the corporate world beautifully. “Think what characterises the really intelligent person. They can think for themselves. They love abstract ideas. They can look dispassionately at the facts. Humbug is their enemy. Dissent come easily to them, as does complexity. These are traits that are not only6 unnecessary for most business jobs, they are actually a handicap when it comes to raising through the ranks of large companies.” (Quoted from Lucy Kellaway ‘Companies Don’t Need Brainy People’)She also has got me to buy a book called The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves– which I’m hoping comes before I start uni as I really would like to read it sooner rather than later.This is a fascinating book – one I enjoyed very much. There is something very sick about our society and the best way to see where the deeply sick and troubling parts of our society are is to watch where the victim is being blamed the most. As soon as you hear that it is your fault you are not employable, or have lost a limb in an OHS incident, or are simply too female to earn equal pay, or need to be stomped on as part of a war on drugs, or can’t marry who you want because a sky god really might get really upset – then perhaps what really needs to change isn’t the victim, but whatever is causing a victim to exist in the first place.
Barbara Ehrenreich is one of those rare journalists who knows how to listen, observe, and really dive deep into the subject she's studying. This time around, it's the unemployed white collar worker that she's focusing on, and in this book, she reports and analyzes her experience of being a corporate job-seeker. On a personal note, it seemed like no coincidence that I read this during the same week that I'm leaving a job that, in the last year, turned very disappointingly corporate. So much of what she observed about corporate values -- the devaluation of the worker, the high turnover of employees, the lack of job security, the expectation that workers should devote their entire lives to the company without much investment in their own well-being in return -- rings true to what I've observed in the few corporate environments that I have found myself in.I also really enjoyed her sharp analysis of the convergence of capitalism and right-wing Christianity. Why do these two go hand in hand so well? I think she sums it up perfectly: "What we want from a career is some moral thrust, some meaningful story we can... tell our children. The old narrative was 'I worked hard and therefore succeeded' or sometimes 'I screwed up and therefore failed.' But a life of only intermittently rewarded effort -- working hard only to be laid off, and then repeating the process until aging forecloses decent job offers -- requires more strenuous forms of explanation. Either you look for the institutional forces shaping your life, or you attribute the unpredictable ups and downs of your career to an infinitely powerful, endlessly detail-oriented God" (p. 142).Throughout the book, as Ehrenreich described the passive despair of many of her fellow job seekers and the strong reliance on pop-psychology in career coaching seminars, I was reminded of the general mindset of pyramid schemes and cults. In the end, both emphasize powerlessness and submission to authority. I thought specifically about the Landmark seminars and Quickstar (the new and not-so-improved Amway pyramid scheme). The people that I knew who participated in these were full of self-blame, and they bought into the belief that if they could only be better themselves, then they would DO better... i.e. sell more, achieve their goals, be rich, whatever. As Ehrenreich so aptly points out, this self-blame is essential to a capitalist system where the worker is not protected and is only a cog in the corporate wheel that can be easily replaced or completely discarded. She stresses the need for the corporate cast-offs to drop the self-blame and to instead scrutinize the system that keeps spitting them out so cruelly. In her conclusion, she looks at the problems of the buzz word of the 21st century -- passion -- and the psychological and emotional damage that is caused by the demand for passion: "It is the insecurity of white-collar employment that makes the demand for passion so cruel and perverse. You may be able to stimulate passion, or even feel it, for one job, but what about the next, and the next? ... Picking up after a firing and regrouping in a mode of passionate engagement, and doing so time after time -- this is a job for a professional actor or for a person who has lost the capacity for spontaneous feeling" (p. 232). This explains why the majority of people who do succeed in the corporate world and rise to the top of it tend to be sociopaths and psychopaths. I also really resonated with what she says about how companies expect their employees to invest heavily in the company even though the company doesn't show the same kind of investment in return: "What sets the white-collar corporate workers apart and leaves them so vulnerable is the requirement that they identify, absolutely and unreservedly, with their employers. While the physician or scientist identifies with his or her profession, rather than with the hospital or laboratory that currently employs them, the white-collar functionary is expected to express total fealty to the current occupants of the 'C-suites.'... Unfortunately, as the large numbers of laid-off white-collar workers show, this loyalty is not reliably reciprocated" (p. 235).Finally, the other point that I really appreciated was how outdated the linking of healthcare to employment is. In an economy where people will hold multiple jobs throughout the course of their careers, it doesn't make sense to tie healthcare to employment. Furthermore, the fact that being unemployed means being without healthcare only heightens the anxiety that job seekers feel and results in a stunting or complete annihilation of any creativity that could benefit the society in its innovation. The worker is turned into a beaten sheep who cowers and seeks only to please, only to please be let back into the barn where at least it is warm before the slaughter. This cycle is not productive, and, on the scale of society as a whole, it is a failure to not take care of its citizens. Money is not the issue. The distribution of it is as are the values that decide its distribution and allocation.As you can see, I really liked this book, and I felt like it helped to articulate many of the issues that I was observing in my own experience.
What do You think about Bait And Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit Of The American Dream (2006)?
I didn't actually finish this book... i feel like i was bait and switched. I really liked nickel and dimed and now i understand why the back of the book is filled with praise for nickel and dimed. Sorry barbara, but i was almost halfway through and kept asking myself if this was going anywhere. The book seemed to only relay a message about the exploitive hacks, who themselves were barely not unemployed, that fill a niche market praying on desperately unemployed (and unconfident) people's hopes. I was completely turned off and closed the book for good when on page 88 while attending a "networking event" she relays her thoughts about the group leaders comment of sending a customized resume to each job applied for. She naively wonders what "customizing a resume" refers to and how much it borders on fraud ultimately giving her readers the impression this process is completely new to her and possibly created solely for her own benefit. Obviously, she didn't do her homework on this project and I think this book was a little out of her element.
—Jonathan
I've read Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch a few times, and have had different reactions to it each time I finish it.This time around I found Ehrenreich to be excessively negative, shrill, and smug as she details her account of searching for a white-collar job amid the snake oil salesmen of professional coaches, resume-tweakers, image specialists and others who prey upon those who are unemployed or seeking better employment.When I read it back in 2006, I'd just come off a year of unemployment and underemployment, working in the survival jobs she derides in her book and feeling much of the same emotion of which she writes. Then, I found her fairly true to life.Why the difference?Point of view, partially. Proximity to the pain. Distance from 2006 makes me wonder, however, if she focuses on the excessively negative experiences -- which we certainly have. She dismisses faith/luck/what have you and instead insists that organization and unionization are the key to stopping the hopelessness of the unemployed and underemployed. I've seen enough union folks lose their jobs over the past few years that I find these typically liberal homilies to sound hollow. She could have chosen to take positive looks at entrepreneurship, individuals seeking alternative education and even finding the positive in survival jobs -- we may all have to have them from time to time -- and thus balance the sense of crushing hopelessness she conveys in her book. But check in with me again if I lose my current job. I may change my mind again.
—MisterFweem
Ehrenreich wrote one of the best books on economic insecurity—Fear of Falling—and then the book that single-handedly revived the genre of engaged experimental journalism Nickel and Dimed. Both were excellent works, as are her essays and op-eds. This follow-up to Nickel isn’t as strong, though it has some useful bits (on Christian networking events!) and her conclusions are wise, insightful and worth reading. She goes undercover as an unemployed white-collar worker experiencing the New Agey “Career Coach”, clinical seminars on networking, useless personality tests, and endless advice on resume tweaking. Her dismissing the importance of networking betrays a naiveté that I didn’t expect. The paucity of her highly selective encounters here leaves much to be skeptical about; I doubt the desperate hordes are representative of the unemployed upper middle-class. Her snark on the up-beat culture of self-presentation—and douchebag corporate types—gets old, even if I am inclined to snigger along.
—Elliot Ratzman
