Ehrenreich stumbles as she storms the corporate gates
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan, 237 pp., $24
For years, Barbara Ehrenreich -- social critic, public intellectual, national treasure -- has been reporting incisively on the inner and outer life of class identity. She's best known for her breakthrough bestseller, ''Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," in which she went undercover into the daily realities of the people who cook, clean, serve, and sell for a single-digit hourly wage. The human indignities, the physical exhaustion and pain, the utter creativity required simply to keep a roof overhead: describing all this, she delivered real news to a primarily college-educated readership about a world that wasn't its own.
In her new book, ''Bait and Switch," Ehrenreich attempts to extend that franchise and report on the white-collar unemployed -- those who followed the rules, got college degrees, delivered their ''deliverables," and got downsized anyway. As an unabashed fan, I expected to be riveted. Unfortunately, ''Bait and Switch" neither rings true nor delivers any real news. Taking a low-wage job and reporting on it were exactly that: reporting. But pretending to have lost a corporate job and to be looking for a new one is also just that: pretending.
The first-person approach simply doesn't work here. For more than half the book, Ehrenreich relates her misadventures in inventing a persona named Barbara Alexander who will, Ehrenreich hopes, somehow come across as fit for a $60,000-per-year (plus benefits) job. She spends chapters (and hundreds of dollars) on unemployment consultants to help her create and polish this persona, going to coaches, seminars, resume polishers, makeover artists. She gets an interview here and there for sales jobs that are thinly disguised pyramid schemes.
Many of her advisers are psychobabble-laden clowns about whom she is funny and snarky. But she clearly despises them, to an unnecessary degree. Consider her comments on her resume coach, a tiresomely perky woman who is herself trying to land a job: ''She represents something about the corporate world that repels me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness. [She] seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness, and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered." But obviously she hasn't mastered it; she's looking for a job herself.
While Ehrenreich thinks this coach represents something, she's merely guessing about something generic. Which corporation? Doing what? Based where? She seems not to understand that there's as much variation among American corporate cultures and attitudes as there is among American cities. Google, Fidelity, American Airlines,
And that's the problem with much of the book: Anyone who's actually had a corporate job will see right away that she doesn't know what she's talking about. In her fictional identity as PR consultant turned job seeker, Ehrenreich can't do (or feel) any of the actual things that a real-life Barbara Alexander would do. The real Alexander would call her friends, relatives, or former colleagues for insights into the latest vagaries of the job market. She would ask former colleagues who have new jobs for small projects that might help her build a reputation at that company. She would be increasingly horrified at the prospect of losing her home, her health care, her ability to feed her kids, her membership in the middle class, her sense of everyday safety -- all of which would push her to take more desperate measures to get any kind of job. But Barbara Alexander/Ehrenreich doesn't have any such experiences. In a tight job market crowded with other applicants who really do know what they're doing, no wonder she couldn't get a real job interview.
In her conclusion Ehrenreich acknowledges some of these limitations, but she doesn't seem to understand how much they undermine her book's verisimilitude. Which is not to say that her comments are entirely off. She's right about the semi-illiterate business language that passes as insight, about the annoyance of endless PowerPoint presentations in which the presenter reads the slides aloud. She's right about the painful need, at times, for the corporate denizen to divide her ethical and emotional self from her work self, or the need to feign a ''genuine" personality that conforms to the culture. But Ehrenreich extracts these insights secondhand, from the worst kind of inspirational seminars and business-advice books, rather than showing the actual Kafkaesque details of corporate and ex-corporate life.
''Bait and Switch" is best when Ehrenreich lets go of the first-person pose and instead interviews failed corporate job seekers, delves into government statistics, and synthesizes social science. In the last two chapters especially, she gives a damning overview of a demanding system that sucks the juice out of young college graduates, lays them off in middle age for making too much money -- and never lets them back in. ''The longer you are unemployed, the less likely you are to find an appropriate job," Ehrenreich explains. ''At the same time, you are inexorably aging past the peak of occupational attractiveness, which seems to lie somewhere in the midthirties now. [Once] you fall into the low-wage, survival-job trap, there's a good chance that you will remain there -- an unwilling transplant from a more spacious and promising world." That's the sharp summary and moral condemnation that one hopes for. Paradoxically, had she stuck to that kind of secondhand reporting -- interviewing, analyzing, synthesizing -- this could have been a powerful book. After all, who else but Barbara Ehrenreich could deliver so keenly what my corporate friends would call the ''bottom line": ''When skilled and experienced people routinely find their skills unwanted and their experience discounted, then something has happened that cuts deep into the very social contract that holds us together."
