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The bestselling author of Nickel
and Dimed goes back undercover to do for America’s ailing
middle class what she did for the working poor
Barbara Ehrenreich’s
Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers.
Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden
realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar
unemployed. Armed with a plausible résumé of a professional
“in transition,” she attempts to land a middle-class job—undergoing
career coaching and personality testing, then trawling a series
of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and
evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover,
works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized,
scammed, lectured, and—again and again—rejected.
Bait and Switch highlights the people
who’ve done everything right—gotten college degrees,
developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés—yet
have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and
not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today’s
ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their “surplus”
employees—plunging them, for months or years at a stretch,
into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where
job searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich
discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable
workers—and little security even for those who have
jobs.
Like the now classic Nickel and Dimed,
Bait and Switch is alternately hilarious and tragic,
a searing exposé of economic cruelty where we least expect
it.
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author
of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller
Nickel and Dimed (0-8050-6389-7). A frequent contributor
to Harper’s and The Nation, she has been a columnist
at The New York Times and Time magazine. She
lives in Virginia.
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