Bait and Switch

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Granta Books, 2005, 237 pages, $24.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/36871

At the start of her search for a job in public relations in the US corporate world, Barbara Alexander had a "seriously goofy" encounter at the local Starbucks with the first of her "career coaches", Morton ("first session free"). The numerological effort to keep track of his Three Centres of Excellence, Four Competencies, Nine Personality Types and three parts of a harness-racer, with some Euclidian triangles and circles thrown into a mix further befuddled by Wizard of Oz characters, made Barbara feel "a dizziness that cannot be explained by the growing distance from breakfast".

In 2004, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich posed as a job seeker, her task to find a well-paying white-collar job. It would, she acknowledged, be a somewhat unfair test of the corporate job market in the US. She was well into middle age, with no previous experience, and she would be shielded from the real pain of plummeting income and self-confidence. But for 10 months, armed with a false name (Barbara Alexander) and a false resume giving her an exemplary history in public relations, Barbara would be among the burgeoning ranks of out-of-work, middle-ranking professionals.

Her first step is to find a guide to get her to the magical kingdom of jobs. After the disappointment of Morton's "elaborate personal metaphysics" and a US$60 personality test, she plucks Kimberley ("career and outplacement consultant") from the 10,000 "career coaches" who have proliferated in direct proportion to rising white-collar unemployment. Kimberley is nothing if not excited by her new client (which may have something to do with the $200 an hour coaching-meter she runs), but Barbara is drained by Kimberley's psychobabble and is further out-of-pocket for yet another of the empirically baseless personality tests that "add a veneer of scientific respectability" to the coaching process and hiring practices of the corporate world.

Career coach number three, Joanne, begins more promisingly. Joanne teaches Barbara the practical skill of how to pad out a resume with the right jargon — how to soup up a CV with lies. As Joanne, however, fusses over commas in the resume ("which has become a project on the scale of a graduate thesis"), Barbara begins to suspect that, at $100 per half-hour session, the process is being "artificially prolonged for purely commercial reasons".

The internet also proves to be a mixed blessing. She learns that when Googling for job opportunities, "unemployed, white-collar, professional and jobs turn out not to be the best keywords". Jobless white-collar people are never unemployed, they are "in transition", while the word job can lead to numerous sites in which it is prefaced by hand or blow. The web does, however, provide leads to the personal way to landing a job — networking.

Barbara, alas, discovers that networking through commercial support groups for the long-term, white-collar unemployed is only an entree into recruitment for executive "boot camps", which are themselves feeders into more intensive personal career coaching, the job-seeker shedding hundreds of dollars to these preying entrepreneurs at each stage. Christ offers no more assistance. Networking with businesspeople in the evangelical, right-wing Christian work-based ministries proves useless, their ulterior motives opportunistically scamming the job-searchers.

Neglecting nothing, however, Barbara addresses a potential cause of her job-search failure — her appearance. For $250 and a small splurge on the consultant's special line of make-up, she gets "a corporate makeover", because "by dressing correctly, you let it be known that you are willing to conform in other ways, too, like following orders and blending in with the corporate culture". This "product enhancement", however, requiring that she "must first become a commodity, a thing", makes Barbara feel a queasiness that is more than a follow-up to the bacon double cheeseburger she had for lunch.

After seven months and $6000 worth of job searching, Barbara had exactly two job offers — for commission-only insurance and cosmetics sales representative, not counting internet offers of sex work from posting her resume on the internet. Her 200 failed job applications, concludes Barbara, are a history depressingly familiar to her job-seeking white-collar peers, a history of "unrelenting rejection", or, more accurately, "complete invisibility and futility". The only hands that reach back to the aspirant job-seeker are the overpriced services of the leech-like career coaches, resume-fetishists, "boot camp" charlatans and religious missionaries who feed off the desperation of the white-collar unemployed, serving up a mess of expensive bosh in return for their clients' dwindling job-search capital.

Like most of the white-collar, semi-professional jobless, Barbara's quest ends with vastly lowered expectations, although she stops short of the small business franchise with its uncertain rewards and high risk of failure, and short of the "temporary", low-paid, menial, "survival" jobs, all end-markers of the inexorable slide past the peak of occupational attractiveness.

Barbara's odyssey exposes the gigantic hoax perpetrated by corporations that proclaim their reason for existence is to provide jobs: "at least that is the rationale given for every corporate tax cut, public subsidy, or loosening of regulations", as "elected officials coddle the corporations for our sake, we are always told; there is no other way to generate jobs". But, with employers viewing white-collar employees as "short-term costs" rather than "long-term assets", the white-collar scrap-heap grows as sackings boost quickie dividends and plump up obscene executive salaries, leaving exhausted, insecure survivors to carry the burden.

Barbara's anthropological adventure among the middle to upper levels of the unemployed white-collar, corporate work force, changes her view of this relative elite of professional, technical and managerial employees as "too comfortable and powerful to merit my concern". For every unemployed blue-collar worker, there is now one white-collar "executive", while those hanging onto jobs face long, unsocial hours.

Their relatively high rung in the employment hierarchy, however, contributes to their job vulnerability and their passivity when things go wrong. Encouraged to identify with their employer rather than with the rest of the work force, their union consciousness is low whilst, when unemployed, their career coaches and boot camps reinforce a simple victim-blaming message — if you are unemployed, it's your fault, a result of your failure to "maintain a winning attitude". This corporate sermon seeks to invalidate all complaints to do with the economy, the market or the inhuman corporate demands on your time — "so no need, then, to band together to work for a saner economy or a more human-friendly corporate environment".

Ehrenreich's book aims to transform this consciousness, a task greatly assisted by her trademark humour, which is deployed to debunk fad management theories, business jargon and the "corporate disability with language". Written in a skilfully effortless style, Bait and Switch is an equally entertaining companion to Ehrenreich's undercover foray into the blue-collar world of the lowly paid in her previous book, Nickel and Dimed. Whatever colour the collar, says Ehrenreich, the labour market obeys an unforgiving class logic that hurts and rejects those who have only their labour to sell to those with the power and money to exploit it.