Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

She barely looked for a job!

Halfway through the book, a career coach tells Barbara 'Alexander' that she seems . . 'angry.' She takes umbrage at the comment. In reality, the career coach's accusation may be the understatement of the century for readers of this lethargic study of a journalist hoping to land an executive-level job. She never does take a job--though she was offered two--but instead spends most of the book meeting with career coaches and slithering in and out of job fairs and support groups for fellow job seekers. Is she angry? I would say so, but it's hard to tell who is angrier--Barbara 'Alexander' the fictional job seeker, or Barbara Ehrenreich, the author. She doesn't find an 'acceptable' job for a long list of reasons. First of all, she is much, much older than the average job seeker. Enhrenreich doesn't reveal her exact age, but do the math: this is a woman who got her doctoral degree in the late 1960s. That makes her 60+ at the time she was researching and writing this book. [n.b. the woman on the cover of this book, a pretty, young blonde woman in her 20s, is definitely not Barbara Ehrenreich. the woman is a model]Second, she has very little experience to offer by way of her fabricated resume. She was looking for an 'executive-level' job despite presenting a career that consisted mostly of consulting. Third, she is so contemptuous of the corporate workplace, career coaches, and many of the people she encounters throughout her journey. I think a lot of the people she met thought she was angry, old, unmotivated, poorly dressed, officious, unqualified, or all of the above. On a final note, I don't think she tried very hard to look for a job. She seemed all too eager to post her 'resume' on job boards, and all too resistent to applying for 'real' jobs or networking with actual employers.

2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Read This, But With Caution

While my experiences in corporate America have been extremely dissimilar to what the author describes, the book was an easy read and somewhat interesting. Keep in mind that this is the 'experience' of one person spending only a matter of months in a job search, in her admission seeking a higher level position, and not really truly even wanting the position as a job, but to provide writing material. Her experiences are interesting in that one can get a feel for what some (not all) people go through when searching for a new job in mid-life. But her efforts seemed to be simply a continuation of anecdotes, commiserating with other unemployed people. On a side-note, I strongly disagree with her feeling that the AFLAC duck is an annoying symbol. Personally, I like the duck and think it's a great way to remind people of AFLAC's business. I also didn't care for the way that the end of the book suddenly became a quasi-political platform, including her opinions on universal health-care and social security reform. Those things would seem to have nothing to do with finding a job. Read it, but read with a grain of salt.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Depressing and negative

This is one the most negative books on the job search I have ever read. The author sets herself up for failure--and guess what? She fails. First things first. She is an aging journalist who sets out on a mission to prove that an older, relatively unqualifed woman can't find a job. She appears to be desperate, seeking the help of various career counselors, begging them for advice, anything, anything to help give her an edge. She spends page after page describing her encounters with career coaches. For heaven's sake, don't you know how to write a resume? She applies for and then rejects jobs without benefits because she claims they are not 'real' jobs. So why did she apply for them in the first place? She goes to a job fair and is surprised when she is 'button-holed' by someone who urges her to enter a drawing for a 'makeover'--just what you need when you are looking for job. She just doesn't get it. Age keeps coming up in this book. I wish she were not so self-conscious--about her age. In the end, I wanted her to take one of the jobs she was offered, just to see what it would be like to work for a living. I think that's her problem. She doesn't want to work. She strikes me as a journalist, not a worker type who goes to an office everyday and reports to a boss. The authoress also seems very angry. Like she's ready to explode. Why is she is so angry? Chill out. The job search isn't so bad. If she could turn back the clock ten years or twenty years, maybe she would find a job. I gave this book three stars because I think it is of value for someone wanting advice on how not to look for a job. Don't be negative. To me that's the message of this book.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Reality, and those who are motivated to deny it.

I am a Computer Programmer who could find a job in a month back in the early nineties. Recently it took twenty two months. Yet we are told that there is a shortage. The book is right on the mark.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

I can't believe people do all this to get a job.

In the beginning I did not know what to expect. The title told you pretty much nothing of what the book was about. Once reading the back I realized Barbara was going to try to get a corporate job. I didn't know how she was going to get a job. I knew nothing of career coaches, of networking, or of boot camps. This book taught me a lot about what is all out there to help you try to get a job, and how hard it is to actually get a job. I thought that resumes were needed for getting a job, but I learned that employers don't even look at them most of the time! I thought that this book was really boring personally, but if you know nothing about the corporate world then you may learn a lot. You will learn that most of the things corporate people do to get a job isn't worth their time, and apparently they waste thousands of dollars for nothing. I find some of the things in this book hard to believe, but its non-fiction so I guess you can believe it. I wouldn't really recommend anybody to read this unless they needed to learn how jobless people try to find jobs.

1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Her experiment fails, but it makes for an interesting story.

Bait and Switch is a companion to Barbara Ehrenreich¿s first novel, Nickel and Dimed, in which she chronicled the life of a blue-collar worker. As an investigative writer and journalist, Bait and Switch is the second time she has gone ¿undercover¿ to explore the working world, donning a new personality and beginning the job search from scratch, using today¿s typical methods. In her research, Ehrenreich attempts to convey to the general public the modern life of an employee of the white-collar world, and the astounding rate of unemployment for those who supposedly made all the right choices in life. Unfortunately, Ehrenreich¿s experiment was doomed from the beginning. She had only held one corporate job, and she was unwilling to fudge her resume in the fear of being found out. She was also unwilling to completely immerse herself in the life of an unemployed worker. Because she was not truly a part of the world she was researching, she could afford to be condescending towards the people trying to help her, because they were not her last hope. Her experiment could be completely invalidated because of one footnote on page 192: ¿Most of July was spent on Ehrenreich business,¿ implying that she took an entire month off from her job search because she has other things to do in her ¿real life.¿ Unemployed people cannot do this unemployment is every facet of their personality until they find a new way to support themselves and their families. Bait and Switch was an excellent representation of the average unemployed white collar worker, but that was not what it set out to do. Through stories directly from unemployed workers, the reader is certainly left with a sense of white-collar unemployment in the United States. However, her initial experiment fails because she does not execute it realistically, which is addressed in her conclusion. Her stated purpose was to gain first-hand knowledge of the problems in the white-collar work force why unemployment is so high, what it takes to find a new job, and why people were letting the impossible demands of the white-collar work place continue. Perhaps there aren¿t specific answers or solutions to these problems, because Bait and Switch only provides more hypotheses and further inquiries about the impenetrable land of Corporate America, from Ehrenreich and all the people she encounters in her journey. While Ehrenreich did not achieve her original goal, her story still makes for an interesting peek into the lives of the unemployed white-collar worker.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Dull and Self-Serving Look at Job Hunting

This angry diatribe chronicles one woman's journey through the employment process. It is a slow, painful albeit well written read, interspersed with the author's ugly commentary: she seems to have something against numerous categories of people, in particular: Christians, fat people, and career coaches. She reserves special contempt for fat people. She is almost anorexically obsessed with weight, frequently noting her healthy dorito-free diet and need to exercise. Ehrenreich spends more time criticizing career coaches than actual job hunting. She was offered two jobs, one at Mary Kay, the other at Aflac. She turned them down because they were not good enough. (NO commission-based jobs for Barbara E. ). She was looking for an upper-level job despite having little demonstrable experience.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

Barbara¿s Little Blue Highway

Truly disappointing. I first skimmed the book in a store while waiting for a friend and thought it was dynamite. The introduction is the best part of this book, full of promise. However, after purchasing and getting all the way to the last page, I put it down with a shake of the head. The book in its entirety can be summarized, even predicted, by paragraph one of the first chapter. ¿But is the resume eye-catching enough? Or would it be better to attempt face-to-face encounters¿¿ Ehrenreich somehow manages to postulate that every mid-level job seeker is going to be seduced by the lure of career consultants. She, of course, was doing this as book research, and she had plenty of cash reserves in which to indulge her investigative appetites. But I think most of us job candidates are more sensible than she gives us credit for. The people she meets at the seminars and networking sessions are merely a small fraction of many others who go about their job search in a mundane, undramatic, but oddly effective way. We post our resumes, make a few calls, answer ads and use temp agencies. The pressure for an image makeover is grossly exaggerated here. I¿ve been in the unemployment line numerous times and it never took any amount of emotional contortion or compromise of principles to land a gig. Ehrenreich¿s elitism is glaringly on display here, as when she describes a participant in a Christian fellowship telling of a colleague who is doing mission work in Czechoslovakia, ¿a country, I cannot help but note, that hasn¿t existed since 1993.¿ Well, no, not by that exact name, but it is the Czech Republic, and very few individuals old enough to be looking for a job would scratch their head and wonder what part of the world is being referenced. Her aim here is to paint evangelical Christians as yokels. Everyone else is portrayed as mentally unbalanced to some degree, or morally bankrupt. We have caricatures galore here. Not just the aforementioned ignorant Southerner, but the perky blonde, the back-slapping salesman in the ghastly plaid jacket, the gay cosmetologist, the EST reject¿you can get a couple of chuckles from this book, but sadly little insight into real issues that plague the reader who is in between jobs. I can't fathom any true job seeker being impressed by this book. It's so obviously inauthentic. Not looking for a job? Then enjoy. Just don¿t let the shelf location fool you. This is not ¿current affairs,¿ ¿politics¿ or ¿social commentary.¿ It¿s lame humor and storytelling ¿ William Least Heat Moon did a far better job.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

More Negativity Masking as Compassion

Were her agenda not already established, her bonafides not already cemented, the author's so called experiences, might yield some positive recommendations to help those who have found themselves outsized or downsized. But Barbara has an axe to grind. It is clear from the opening pages and from her interviews (I heard the one with Michael Medved) and her rather imperiously sarcastic attitude. She is a rank and file member of the 'it all sucks' club. What she and those of her ilk in politics on the left fail to realize, is that America is a country built on optimism, sometimes blind, but more often than not is equipped with a now-clichéd 'can do' attitude. The world and the country have changed mightily in the past 40 years. I grew up in an entirely different place than I find myself in now. I was interested in her book, because I was forced to change careers after 25 years in an industry that was consolidated and subsequently downsized.......I was a middle management, and indeed executive cog in the Supermarket wheel, and at 47, found myself unemployed and too old to rock and roll and too young to die. If I read Barbara's book before tackling the problem, I might have been encouraged to shoot myself. Except, her so called plight has little to do with how real Americans confront adversity. There are times when you need to go with the flow, and adapt and fit in, and like it or not, 'corporate' culture has and always will favor the institution over the individual....so it has always been and always will be. But America is an entrepeneurial wonderland, and there are times when you apply your attitude, energy and will, and you do not whisper the word Failure. Ever. You do not become a victim. Ever. You do what you have to do to take care of your family. But you don't waste precious time whining or languishing in the notion that government owes you something. 26 weeks unemployment was a humbling experience for me, it was not 60% of my income, as she incorrectly quotes, it was about 15% of mine. Enough to buy gas and essentials, but not designed for me to be comfortable... just a bit of help when I needed it most. Which I paid taxes on, by the way, when I started generating income again. Change is a scary thing. But it is also important for growth. I am stronger and more vital today having been 'removed' from the comfort of my corporate security blanket....less dependent and more interactive. Perhaps clinging to institutional dependence is more the problem. I would have welcomed a treatise on individual responsibility, rather than a blame game on 'who did this to me and why won't they fix it'.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

At last! Someone speaks the truth about the white collar job market!

I thought this book was fantastic and right on the money! I have been through the depressing farce of white collar layoffs and job hunts several times since 2002 (well before the 2009 financial meltdown) and so have MANY of my former coworkers, neighbors, and friends. And it continues and only worsens today. I particularly liked the part about how employers expect you to be "passionate" about your job (you know, the one where you're doing the work of five people, because they laid off so many). And while I've known for a long time what many don't about official unemployment figures: namely that they measure ONLY people currently receiving unemployment pay--not those whose unemployment pay has run out or those who never qualified for it in the first place because they were hired as a temp or contract worker. I didn't know until this book that the official government definition of "underemployment" refers only to someone who is working part-time but would prefer to work full-time. It does NOT include former white collar workers who have taken what Ehrenreich terms "desperation" jobs, namely, anything they can get, at any pay, and likely without benefits. And the information about the stigma of ANY time gaps in one's resume, which Ehrenreich writes about, is sadly true. HR personnel have not internalized the "new reality" that workers have all been told to embrace, namely that they will have multiple jobs and multiple job transitions in their lives. But to HR personnel, a time gap reflects something bad, nasty smelling, and evil. While the book is at times so true it's depressing, it was refreshing and reassuring to hear the truth spoken aloud.

Interesting Book

It was a very informative book and taught met a lot about trying to find a job and all the things it entails. It is not an easy process at all. In the book, she goes undercover to try to find a good-paying white collar job. She must go through all different things. She meets with many different career coaches who try to get her started. She attends all sorts of "boot camps" and different kinds of networking events to try to get her name out there. As the time goes on, you can sense her optimism slowly falling.
In general, it was very informative. She gives a lot of detail, which can be a good and bad thing. Sometimes it can take away from the real point she was trying to make, and other times it adds the other all affect she was trying to get across. She is also not afraid to let her opinion out on many situations which I think can be very distracting, but to others it may help them understand what she is going through and give them insight on her side of things.
I would recommend this book to those who are curious about the effect this down-turning economy is having on job seekers. The extensive work she had to do is kind of mind-blowing. She spent so much time and money to try to find a job. She says that job seeking is like a job of its own, because it requires so much work, sacrifice, and research.

Bait and Switch

In this book Ehrenreich goes undercover to find out just how hard it is to get a job in today's economy. She tries many different methods and approaches but realizes thath getting a job is not just a cake walk. As she goes longer and longer without finding a job her expectations and optimism begin to drop.

The book was very informative and has alot of facts and figures. You really begin to understand the struggles that unemployed people are facing in today's world. Ehrenreich gives a detailed explanation of everything that is going on as well as her feeling about what is happening. This is a good and a bad thing because the book does get a little bit long winded. You can really begin to see how she loses confidence as the job search continues to be unsuccessful.

What I understand from the book is that the job search is very difficult and frustrating. People who are qualified for nice jobs are taking jobs way beneath them because that is all that is available to them. The economy is in a bad spot right now and it is talking its toll on the working class even the high middle class people.

I did learn alot from the book. I understand the effort that needs to be put into the job search and different methods to do so. One of the things that I did disagree with Ehrenreich on was the amount of money that she spend trying to get a job. I think that part was unrealistic. If you lost your job would you really want to spend a ton of money trying to get another one. I think you would try to save some of it. Other than that the book was good.

An interesting book.

Normally, I don't subscribe too much to the far left, where Barbara Ehrenreich definitely resides, however, there is so much truth in this book from my own experiecnes that to write it off as exaggeration or falsehood in any way would be folly.

This book is engaging, I had trouble putting it down. The amount of stupidity and deception in the race to stay afloat engaged in by businesses, charlatans and people in the unemployment business is horrifying. And now, with the economy being as it is, these people will capitalize on all who are un/under-employed.

Read, learn. Think, and watch your own job hunt to see how scary and accurate, this book is.

Everyone should read this book

Like many of Ehrenreich's other books, this one is a commentary about a recent negative trend in the workplace, specifically, the obstructions placed in the way of those trying to re-enter it. She expresses her disdain for the workplace (which it deserves) through sarcasm, for example, regarding a beauty consultant's opinion of her cheekbones, "They are 'wonderful'; I can keep them." She loathes personality tests such as Meyers-Briggs, dismissing them as "meaningless" and having "zero predictive value," but I can tell you from personal experience that introverted thinkers usually make better computer programmers than extroverted feelers. That having been said, however, she makes an excellent point when she says, "If I am a public relations person by training and experience, what good will it do me to discover that my personality is better suited to a career as an embalmer?" Of course, this question would not apply to someone trying to enter the workforce for the first time; such a person would likely be better served by trying to enter a line of work better suited to his or her personality. Bottom line: her sarcasm and contempt are sometimes a bit much, but, as her conclusion points out, the trends she identifies are actually getting worse! Therefore, I recommend this book, especially now that such widespread unemployment is rampaging across the country.

Nothing we didn't already know

This book was on the struggle white-collar workers go through to get a job. The book does a good job of showing how hard it is to get that perfect job you want in America. Ehrenreich goes through many different job fairs, career coaches, and networking groups to try and obtain a job and in six months still doesn't get one that fits her standards. She talks a lot about how companies try to make it sound like their companies are what you want to work for and then right when you want to get the job they tell you your real salary and how you aren¿t getting very good benefits. But by just listening to the news we also know this is going on. We all know about how some CEO's can get greedy and can keep making big money while they just lower their employees salaries and benefits. Also in the news we hear about all the downsizing and offshoring that is going on in America and this book just shows the readers more examples of this.
So overall I think the book does a good job of showing us examples of how hard it is for white-collar employees to get their perfect jobs and keep them but you don't necessarily need to read this book to figure this out.

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

I think she set the bar too high for herself with "Nickel and Dimed."

For me, the worst part of this book was having read it after reading "Nickel and Dimed." "Nickel and Dimed" was one of my favorite books of the year, and I loved her writing style and the interesting and different perspective she brought to her topics.

I felt that this book was ultimately lacking in a great deal of that interesting writing and viewpoint. As someone struggling to get a job just out of college, I can certainly understand where she's coming from, and she is right in her basic assertion that finding a job in America isn't always an objective or fair process. I just wish she had made this book a little more interesting.

A compelling critique of capitalism, in layman¿s terms.

I am somewhat surprised at the contempt expressed by some of the other reviewers toward this author and the book, especially as it appears that their reading was ether incomplete or superficial. A common complaint seems to be that her experiences do not actually represent the condition within the corporate world. It is important to remember that it was never her intention to do a comprehensive study of corporate working conditions and its culture, as an entire body of sociological and economic scholarship is already devoted to that. She merely brings the same kind of firsthand investigation and direct interaction to depict the stories of ¿real people¿ as she did in Nickel and Dimmed. In this sense her contribution to the study of the corporation might not be original, but it is based on sound academic research 'look at the citations before you question the soundness of her claims' and is indeed factual. For those interested in a very accessible critique and social commentary directed toward the capitalist economic structure and its founding element the corporation, than this is indeed the book for you. In Barbara¿s book the working conditions and ideology of the corporation are depicted as a paradigm for the socio-economic arrangement of America, and thus the corporation is studied as a micro-chasm of a capitalistically oriented society. By illustrating the emerging and escalating crisis, exemplified by the formation of a new unemployment or ¿transition¿ market, Barbara critiques not only the corporation, but also the entire economic system that is founded upon them. As a side note, despite the previous reviewers remarks, none of her analysis is devoted to discrimination against ¿fat¿ people or Christians¿which leads me to believe that certain individuals who have reviewed this book how not read it at all.

Five-page article sold as a book

If you are looking to pass time with an author who is gifted in communicating strong emotions, you found your book. If you are hoping to learn about corporate bait and switch or getting a job, this book is void of that. The book jacket and introduction tells readers the author sets out to get a job, work in corporate America and then write a book about her presumed struggles. Barbara Ehrenreich admits she lied (p.9) to employers about her job history and got friends, with similar values, to substantiate her lies. It didn't work. She never got a job and wrote a book about it anyway. The content basically is a five-page article that Barbara Ehrenreich sold as a 237 page book that is slow paced. Monotonous details are ubiquitous (e.g. itemizing the food in buffet lines and what strangers put on their lunch plates). If you are discouraged about your job search, don't get this book. It will not lift you up, it will not help you get a job and it has serious potential to put you in a depressing downward spiral. Barbara Ehrenreich is unbalanced against capitalism and corporate America. While it is well known they are not perfect, Barbara Ehrenreich never mentions the positive aspects of capitalism and corporate America. Nor does she give comparative statistics on the amount of people who live well in capitalist economies verses other economies. The book is a constant flow of vocational pessimism. Although the author uses the first half of the book to set herself up as a well-reasoned, balanced and unprejudiced person, one does sense there is some bias to her writing. Not until page 139 does Barbara Ehrenreich reveal she is an atheist. Thus, one would think she would avoid churches. Yet she unashamedly goes to churches hoping to secure a job while lying about her background. She then grumbles that she wasted her time there. She mercilessly mocks common church-going people and those who don't accept her anticapitalist views. It is hard to conclude Ehrenreich walked into the church meetings and wrote about them without prejudice. While it is true that bait and switch is going on in numerous HR departments, this book has nothing about that.

Troubles in America

If you are currently an unemployed white-collared worker, I would suggest reading this book to boost your confidence in knowing you are not alone. Ehrenreich places herself into this growing statistic in hopes of finding some answers but only discovers that she is not wanted. Because of her age I do not agree that this is even a viable experience because people over forty typically have troubles finding a new job whereas those just out of college have no problem. I thought the book became repetitive with networking and the ways that she attempted to find a job only to fail again and again.

Eldery Woman Journalist Pretends to Look For A Job

This is a book about an elderly woman in her 60s who writes in journalistic fashion about what it is like to look for a job--despite not having held a 'real' job in several decades (her own admission). First of all, I want to point out that the young blond woman on the cover of the hard cover version of this book is definitely not Barbara Ehrenreich. The REAL Barbara Ehrenreich is--I'm guessing--30-40 years older. Is that why this book was titled Bait and Switch? This book is not about an attactive young woman. It is a book about a tired, hate-filled, elderly journalist who spends most of her job search posting her resume on job boards like Monster.com and seeking the good counsel of career coaches. In fact, she spends page after page describing these people--even though 99% of true job seekers do not look for a job this way. This was supposed to be a book about what is is like to work in corporate America. Oddly enough, even though the author was offered TWO jobs, she turned both down. She acted like they weren't good enough. Correction, not good enough for Barbara Ehrenreich. This book stinks.