Review by Choice Review
In Nickel and Dimed (2001), social critic Ehrenreich demonstrated that if someone sets out with an implicit goal of failing at blue-collar jobs, that person can succeed and then make several hundred thousand dollars writing about it. With Bait and Switch, she switches to corporate white-collar employment and, armed with fake credentials and relying on inefficient job-search strategies, strikes out again. The only sector left to exploit in this fashion is the public arena, which may be even easier because markets tend to spot and expose such ploys quicker. Bait focuses on Ehrenreich's yearlong odyssey to hone a resume, use career coaches and networks (she includes a gratuitous slap at Christian groups), attend job fairs, interview, and ultimately land some unattractive offers. Her anecdotes, quotes from people she encountered along the way, and occasional factoids are hardly representative of US labor markets--or even accurate--for college-trained employees and employers in the US. Her real goal here is increased unemployment benefits and health care for all. Those predisposed to agree with Ehrenreich, Michael Moore, and Morgan Spurlock will certainly want to pick up Bait; and it will certainly be widely read and talked about. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. General readers. A. R. Sanderson University of Chicago
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
What to expect from a journalist and author as profiled as Ehrenreich (because of the publicity garnered from Nickel and Dimed,0 2001), who now tackles the issue of the unemployed white\b -\b0 collar worker? Laughter and well--meaning self-deprecating humor, that's what. More importantly, she offers a realistic, sometimes despairing perspective on the corporate world and a job hunter's travails. The statistics are revealing: 20 percent of the unemployed today are professionals. Ehrenreich's own story involves a 10-month job search with $5,000 in funds under her maiden name. She endured so-called coaches, networking events, Web sites, even job fairs in the hunt for employment, taking a barrage of personality tests (Myers Briggs, Enneagram) and often suffering fools gladly. The result was two sales-position offers without benefits or salary. Her conclusions are harsh, perhaps atypical for many, yet she tempers the realities with clear-cut recommendations for change. Anticipate a waiting list for this title. --Barbara Jacobs Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A wild bestseller in the field of poverty writing, Ehrenreich's 2001 expos? of working-class hardship, Nickel and Dimed, sold over a million copies in hardcover and paper. If even half that number of people buy this follow-up, which purports "to do for America's ailing middle class what [Nickel and Dimed] did for the working poor," it too will shoot up the bestseller lists. But PW suspects that many of those buyers will be disappointed. Ehrenreich can't deliver the promised story because she never managed to get employed in the "midlevel corporate world" she wanted to analyze. Instead, the book mixes detailed descriptions of her job search with indignant asides about the "relentlessly cheerful" attitude favored by white-collar managers. The tone throughout is classic Ehrenreich: passionate, sarcastic, self-righteous and funny. Everywhere she goes she plots a revolution. A swift read, the book does contain many trenchant observations about the parasitic "transition industry," which aims to separate the recently fired from their few remaining dollars. And her chapter on faith-based networking is revelatory and disturbing. But Ehrenreich's central story fails to generate much sympathy-is it really so terrible that a dabbling journalist can't fake her way into an industry where she has no previous experience?-and the profiles of her fellow searchers are too insubstantial to fill the gap. Ehrenreich rightly points out how corporate culture's focus on "the power of the individual will" deters its employees from organizing against the market trends that are disenfranchising them, but her presentation of such arguments would have been a lot more convincing if she could have spent some time in a cubicle herself. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Having examined the fate of low-wage earners in Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich goes behind the scenes to investigate life for white-collar workers liberated from their jobs and struggling to find employment, meaningful or otherwise. With a national tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The middle class, writes Ehrenreich, is losing ground as steadily as the poor--and it has even more parasites feasting on its wounds. Poised, well-educated, but of a certain age and without a classic career trajectory, Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed, 2001) changes her name back to her natal Barbara Alexander, takes a new social security number and tries to get a job in the corporate world. Poor thing, she sets her sights high, hoping for something with a nice health plan and "an income of about $50,000 a year, enough to land me solidly in the middle class." Phase 1, deliciously detailed here, encompasses Ehrenreich/Alexander's meetings with a succession of bullshit artists who attempt to soak as much of her money as they can while fixing the commas on her résumé, helping her concoct lies about her working past and indoctrinating her in New Age nonsense that hardnosed corporate America seems to have swallowed whole. Phase 2 involves dreadful meet-and-greet networking rituals, many of them gateways to fundamentalist Christianity, another species of false hope to fuel the unemployed and underemployed. "The white-collar workforce," writes Ehrenreich, "seems to consist of two groups: those who can't find work at all and those who are employed in jobs where they work much more than they want to. In between lies a scary place where you dedicate long hours to a job that you sense is about to eject you, if only because so many colleagues have been laid off already." After months of looking and landing only pyramid-scheme offers in return, she concludes that the corporate world has sent her and her kind a clear message--anyone with a brain need not apply, and past success does not matter. What does is obedience, and the sure knowledge that one can be sacrificed at any moment. Another unsettling message about an ugly America from a trustworthy herald. Read it and weep--especially if you're a job-seeker. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
