Bait and Switch

Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Format:Hardcover

List Price:$24.00
Our Price:$5.99 (75% OFF) USD
Qty Avail:11

Overview:

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible résumé of a professional "in transition," she attempts to land a middle-class job - undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover, works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and - again and again - rejected. Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right - gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés - yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today's ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding their "surplus" employees - plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, there are few social supports for these newly disposable workers - and little security even for those who have jobs. Like the now classic Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch is alternately hilarious and tragic, a searing exposé of economic cruelty where we least expect it.

Can't find what you're looking for? Add it to your wishlist.
Wondering about our product?