Bait and Switch
Authors: Barbara Ehrenreich
Tags: #Political Economy, #White collar workers, #Communism & Socialism, #Labor & Industrial Relations, #Government, #Displaced workers, #Labor, #United States, #Job Hunting, #Economic Conditions, #Business & Economics, #Political Science, #General, #Free Enterprise, #Political Ideologies, #Careers
Praise for Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich
“Ehrenreich is a keen observer of American culture.”
-Fortune
“Bait and Switch . . . resembles a novel by Evelyn Waugh, in which a middle-aged social critic with supersonic verbal skills, a Voltaire pretending to be a Candide, disappears into a zombie zone of career couselors, resume writers, networking and job fairs.”
-Harper’s
“Insightful . . . her experiences are perversely fascinating, and Ehrenreich conveys them with humor and aplomb.”
-BusinessWeek
“Wry, eloquent, hilarious.”
-Entertainment Weekly
“Acerbic and astute.”
-Mother Jones
“Illuminating . . . fall’s smartest read.”
-Glamour
“Vivid and compelling.”
-Dissent
“The humorous and the melancholy are tightly entwined throughout the book.”
-Newsday
“Ehrenreich discovers outposts . . . that most journalists would have trouble learning about. . . . What Ehrenreich has found is something that can’t be gleaned from reams of data about levels of middle-class income and employment.”
-Columbia Journalism Review
“Engaging.”
-The Seattle Times
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
“Skillfully dissects how job gurus deploy the language of self-Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War actualization and magic thinking to cow their clients.”
-Elle
T h e S n a r l i n g C i t i z e n
K i p p e r ’ s G a m e
“Sharply observed and, perhaps more surprisingly, funny”
-Common Wealth
The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class
“Laugh-out-loud funny”
-The Richmond Times-Dispatch
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy
“Being unemployed is devastating, and Ehrenreich does a sound job reminding us of the emotional toll.”
(with Arlie Russell Hochschild)
-Fast Company Magazine
Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex
“Ehrenreich’s description of the dull-eyed anomie of the white
(with Elisabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs)
middle class is spot on.”
For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women
-The American Conservative
(with Dierdre English)
“Ehrenreich’s acerbic critiques are devastating…She does a superb Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers job of focusing the spotlight on nether world of those without jobs
(with Dierdre English)
or those profoundly shaken by their inability to find economic security.”
Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness
-The Charlotte Observer
(with Dierdre English)
B a i t a n d S w i t c h
Bait and
Switch
The (Futile) Pursuit of the
American Dream
Barbara Ehrenreich
Henry Holt and Company ■ New York
c o n t e n t s
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Finding a Coach in the Land of Oz
Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Copyright © 2005 by Barbara Ehrenreich
Stepping Out into the World of Networking
A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d .
Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ehrenreich, Barbara.
Bait and switch : the (futile) pursuit of the American dream / Barbara Ehrenreich.
1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-10: 0-8050-8124-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8124-4
1. Displaced workers—United States. 2. White collar workers—United
States. 3. Job hunting—United States. 4. Downward mobility (Social sciences)—
United States. I. Title.
HD5708.55.U6E47 2005
654.14'086'22—dc22
2005047916
Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and
seven In Which I Am Offered a “Job”
premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.
Originally published in hardcover in 2005
by Metropolitan Books
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author’s note
Most names in this book have been changed in the interest of privacy. The exceptions, in the majority of cases, are public speakers who were introduced by name and people I interviewed who agreed to have their full names used.
B a i t a n d S w i t c h
Because I've written a lot about poverty, I’m used to hearing from people in scary circumstances. An eviction notice has arrived. A child has been diagnosed with a serious illness and the health insurance has run out. The car has broken down and there's no way to get to work. These are the routine emergencies that plague the chronically poor. But it struck me, starting in about 2002, that many such tales of hardship were coming from people who were once members in good standing of the middle class—college graduates and former occupants of midlevel white-collar positions. One such writer upbraided me for what she saw as my neglect of hardworking, tempting cost cut. They were the losers, in other words, in a classic virtuous people like herself.
game of bait and switch. And while blue-collar poverty has become numbingly routine, white-collar unemployment—and the poverty that Try investigating people like me who didn't have babies in high school, often results—remains a rude finger in the face of the American who made good grades, who work hard and don't kiss a lot of ass and dream.
instead of getting promoted or paid fairly must regress to working for I realized that I knew very little about the mid- to upper levels $7/hr., having their student loans in perpetual deferment, living at home with their parents, and generally exist in debt which they feel they may of the corporate world, having so far encountered this world almost never get out of.
entirely through its low-wage, entry-level representatives. I was one of them—a server in a national chain restaurant, a cleaning person, and a Stories of white-collar downward mobility cannot be Wal-Mart "associate"—in the course of researching an earlier book, brushed off as easily as accounts of blue-collar economic woes,
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
. Like everyone else, which the hard-hearted traditionally blame on "bad choices": failing I've also encountered the corporate world as a consumer, dealing with to get a college degree, for example, failing to postpone childbearing people quite far down in the occupational hierarchy—retail clerks, until acquiring a nest egg, or failing to choose affluent parents in the customer service representatives, telemarketers. Of the levels where first place. But distressed white-collar people cannot be accused of decisions are made—where the vice presidents, account executives, fecklessness of any kind; they are the ones who "did everything and regional managers dwell—my experience has been limited to right." They earned higher degrees, often setting aside their seeing these sorts of people on airplanes, where they study books on youthful passion for philosophy or music to suffer through dull
"leadership," fiddle with spreadsheets on their laptops, or fall asleep practical majors like management or finance. In some cases, they over biographies of the founding fathers.
1
I'm better acquainted with were high achievers who ran into trouble precisely because they had risen far enough in the company for their salaries to look like a 1 Even fiction—my favorite source of insight into cultures and times remote from my own—was no help. While the fifties and sixties had produced absorbing novels about white-collar corporate life, including Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road and Sloan the corporate functionaries of the future, many of whom I've met on $300,000-a-year computer industry executive reduced, after two years my visits to college campuses, where "business" remains the most of unemployment, to working as a sales associate at the Gap.
4
popular major, if only because it is believed to be the safest and most Throughout the first four years of the 2000s, there were similar stories lucrative.
2
of the mighty or the mere midlevel brought low, ejected from their But there have been growing signs of trouble—if not office suites and forced to serve behind the counter at Star-bucks.
outright misery—within the white-collar corporate workforce. First, Today, white-collar job insecurity is no longer a function of starting with the economic downturn of 2001, there has been a rise the business cycle—rising as the stock market falls and declining again in unemployment among highly credentialed and experienced when the numbers improve.
5
Nor is it confined to a few volatile people. In late 2003, when I started this project, unemployment was sectors like telecommunications or technology, or a few regions of the running at about 5.9 percent, but in contrast to earlier economic country like the rust belt or Silicon Valley. The economy may be downturns, a sizable portion—almost 20 percent, or about 1.6
looking up, the company may be raking in cash, and still the layoffs million—of the unemployed were white-collar professionals.
3
continue, like a perverse form of natural selection, weeding out the Previous downturns had disproportionately hit blue-collar people; talented and successful as well as the mediocre. Since the midnineties, this time it was the relative elite of professional, technical, and this perpetual winnowing process has been institutionalized under managerial employees who were being singled out for media various euphemisms such as "downsizing," "right-sizing," "smart-sympathy. In April 2003, for example, the New York Times sizing," ((restructuring," and "de-layering"—to which we can now add Magazine offered a much-discussed cover story about a former the outsourcing of white-collar functions to cheaper labor markets overseas. In the metaphor of the hest-selling business book of the Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, more recent novels and films tend to ignore the white-collar corporate work world except as a backdrop to sexual intrigue.