Book Review: Bait and Switch

by Kathy Recchiuti

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Barbara Ehrenreich, Copyright 2005. Nonfiction. ISBN:  0-8050-7606-9

This is not the book to read if you would like to be encouraged and uplifted about the job search process or the corporate world. In this disheartening portrayal of the white collar world and unemployment, Ehrenreich pursues insight into what has been causing so many experienced, well performing, midlevel workers to lose their jobs, and how they must go about looking for a new one.

For ten months, Ehrenreich searches for a public relations job. She hires career coaches, attends networking and career search training sessions, applies for jobs, and submits her resume to corporate web sites and job boards. Through this account of her feelings and experiences and those of the people she meets, we see depression, loneliness, frustration, and despair. In her experience, networking events were not conducive to interacting with others. She finds that career coaches were more focused on tests that sort people into personality groups than specific pointers for finding a job.

The book’s gloomy tone is maintained with words and phrases such as the following:  shadowy, bitter, lonely, queasy, dulled passive expressions, chronological defect, requisite phoniness, and individual failings. If you are currently without a job and job hunting, reading the book can indeed make your situation seem desperate. For example, because of the trouble you might encounter due to a gap of time on a resume she comments, “being unemployed may in and of itself disqualify one for a job.”

If you need a pep talk about the payoff for all the hard work you invest in the job search (or in the job itself, for those currently employed), this may not be the right time to read this book. The book emphasizes the dehumanizing aspects of the corporate world. For example, it says, regarding layoffs, “whatever wild process is chewing up men and women and spitting them out late in life, damage is definitely done.” She says that while corporations purportedly seek diversity, they insist on employees who are at all times “cheerful, enthusiastic, and obedient.” And she quotes a management consultant as saying “organizations that used to see people as long-term assets to be nurtured and developed now see people as short-term costs to be reduced…”

On the other hand, you might enjoy the book for the sympathy it offers regarding the many frustrations of a job search, such as lack of response when electronically submitting resumes, lack of personal contact with potential employers, difficulty networking, and so on. Ehrenreich paints the job seeker as victim, as opposed to responsible party, which is how they are portrayed by several philosophies she encounters in books and at job-seeker events.

Ehrenreich concludes by suggesting that the unemployed work together toward improving benefits for the unemployed, such as health insurance and unemployment pay. Since technical communicators are often vulnerable to layoffs, many might be able to relate to the experiences and themes conveyed in the book. The book could trigger some interesting discussion.