TBR: Bait and Switch
Following up on the theme of last week’s book, today’s review is of Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, by Barbara Ehrenreich. After the success of Nickel and Dimed, her report on her undercover experience as a minimum wage worker, she planned to go similarly undercover in corporate America. But she couldn’t get hired, so the book turned out to be her exploration of the various services being offered to the desperate white-collar unemployed.
The book isn’t nearly as good as Nickel and Dimed. Compared to the deep sympathy Ehrenreich showed for her low-wage counterparts, she shows nothing but scorn for her fellow travellers on this journey. She doesn’t believe that corporate public relations (which is what she’s trying to get hired to do) actually involves real skills, and so sees her efforts as purely a matter of puffery. She even seems to suggest that it’s somehow unethical or misleading to target your resume to each job you apply for. (By contrast, see Kristie Helms’ killer advice for job seekers.)
Moreover, Ehrenreich seems to have checked her common sense at the door, pouring hundreds of dollars into job coaches and networking groups that offered absolutely nothing of value. She reserves her worst scorn for church-based job search groups, not knowing whether she is more concerned for other atheists who might wander unwittingly into their midst or for the poor fools who actually believe that God will help them find a job.
But, as The Disposable American makes clear, there really is a problem. The reason there are so many people selling half-baked services to job seekers is that there are a lot of very desperate people out there who are willing to buy. And the more you (used to) make, the harder it is to convince a potential employer that your job can’t be done for half the price by someone right out of college (or one-tenth the price by someone overseas).
The most persuasive part of the book for me was Ehrenreich’s anger at the way so many of the job search services she encountered encouraged workers to blame themselves for their failure to be hired, rather than looking for systematic causes. While there’s a lot of sense to idea that workers should focus on the things that they can control — including their own attitude — rather than things they can’t, Ehrenreich is right that the focus on the personal prevents workers from organizing to demand societal change.
May 16th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
That’s interesting & dismaying, Elizabeth. I hadn’t read _N&D_, since I’d lived that life along with everyone else in the early 90s, and I didn’t really want to read about it as astonishing/exotic news. I still make major decisions based on the possibility of having to live like that again, still panic buying things I don’t absolutely need & haven’t looked for used. You should’ve seen me in Kmart today dithering over whether my 8-year-old sandpaper towels really needed replacing.
I don’t really understand Ehrenreich’s attitudes towards PR and self-promotion, as you describe them. It sounds as if she hasn’t been in the non-“creative” market for a good 20-25 years. (Whether you really _want_ the skills necessary for corporate PR is something else, I think.)
May 17th, 2006 at 5:06 am
“She reserves her worst scorn for church-based job search groups”
Yes, this came up in N&D too, in which she receives advice from a friend always to approach a local church whenever moving to a new area, and never once tries this (though she does go to a revival kind of thing once, and is totally contemptuous of it and the attendees). Maybe she was trying to make the point, implicitly, that this option isn’t available for non-Christians, and she won’t compromise her principles to take advantage, but it was very strange that she never explores what she’s told is an important strategy for survival, if she really wants to understand the lives of her erstwhile peers. Totally aside from the dismissive attitude it betrays toward them and their faith.
May 17th, 2006 at 9:16 am
I liked N&D quite a bit, but I remember feeling let down that it didn’t more clearly and articulately lay out a solution to the problems of the struggling low-wage blue-collar worker. It sounds like once again, Ehrenrich has the ability to turn a keen eye toward a flawed system, but offers no alternative. What exactly does she want those out-of-work white-collar workers to agitate for? What are her answers?
May 17th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
merseydotes comment about Ehrenreich resonates with me “What exactly does she want [people] to agitate for?” I see no simple solutions to the large scale changes that are going on in the structure of our workplace. These changes are being measured against a highpoint in the american economy (i.e. the post-war period) where rising oportunity was available to many: solid unionized factory jobs that raised people from rural poverty to the middle class; increasing educational oportunity that really did allow sons of farmers to become history professors (GI bill, expansion of education); the list goes on. Our parents, and some of us lived that dream. But the world is changing. There is no way to stop the flattening of the world, and that means that it will simply be impossible to stop the changes, and trying will cause changes of their own.
Did anyone read the article about homework tutors from India (i.e. outsourcing tutors) in the NYT? The scheme is that you set up a computer program, with a graphics tablet, and a Indian engineer/statistician/scientist gives you a private tutoring session on your computer. They’re not sitting next to you, but it’s hard to imagine it being much better. People complain about qualifications, but frankly, with the vast intellectual resources available in India, that’s largely foolish. The realities in a workplace where that’s possible are the beginning of a different world. They spoke to a college student who was getting last minute tutoring in statistics before an exam; he’s working at 2 AM, which is conveniently in the middle of the day for the Indian mathematician.
Are we going to use regulation to try to prevent such activities? I think that’s going to be politically impossible because we as consumers benefit too much from such outsourcing. So, what exactly are the suggestions for how we change the demands of the domesitic workplace when the world-wide competition is so fierce.
bj
PS: I’ll add the caveat that I am a foreign-born american; I can feel sorry for Ehrenreich’s disposessed, but I can’t see the moral justification in taking away the Indian tutor’s livlihood to save the American.