Barbara Ehrenreich (1941–2022)

The writer Barbara Ehrenreich has died at the age of eighty-one. The New York Times has an obituary.

I can recommend Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001) and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (2005).

Related reading
Two posts about Bait and Switch

Brief review: Bait and Switch

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005. $24.00

Like Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich's new book bears a title in which the word in parenthesis makes all the difference. Between the hope and its fulfillment falls the futility.

Bait and Switch takes us into a world of people living in parenthesis, white-collar people who are "in transition," the corporate newspeak substitute for "unemployed." As in Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich goes undercover, this time seeking a corporate position, presenting herself as a long-time freelancer (better make that consultant) looking for a position in public relations. Her job-search becomes a job in itself, a miserable one, with episode after episode in a surreal world of life-coaches, image consultants, and résumé rewriters, whose fees total several thousand dollars. Her recommended reading includes The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want, which declares that "you alone are the source of all the conditions and situations in your life." (If you're unemployed, it's not the economy, stupid; it's you.) "Networking" events bring her into impersonal contact with other jobseekers, all trying to be upbeat in chain restaurants and windowless hotel conference rooms. I won't reveal how Ehrenreich's search turns out, except to say that the offers that finally come her way are a very far cry from what she was looking for. Bait and Switch closes by looking at white-collar people who have taken what are called "survival jobs" as "associates" in big-box stores and such: sad to say, their failed searches have ended in the world of Nickel and Dimed.

Many colleges are using Nickel and Dimed in "one book, one campus" programs. I greatly admire that book, but its campus use has, for me, always smacked of piousness--an intention to make students feel a vague compassion for poor people. A college community with reckless courage might ask its students to follow up with Bait and Switch. The two books would give business majors (and everyone else) a chance to rethink the ethics of the brave new corporate world awaiting them.

"White-Collar Hell"

Q: Nickel and Dimed has become a standard reading assignment for undergraduates over the past few years, and some of that audience must now be entering the white-collar job market you describe in Bait and Switch. Is there anything in the new book intended as guidance for readers who will be facing that reality?

A: I'd like to reach undergraduates with Bait and Switch before they decide on a business career. I'm haunted by the kid I met at Siena College, in N.Y., who told me he was really interested in psychology, but since that isn't "practical," he was going into marketing, which draws on psychology--though, as this fellow sadly admitted, only for the purpose of manipulating people. Or the gal I met at University of Oregon who wants to be a journalist but is drifting toward PR so she can make a living.

Right now, business is the most popular undergraduate major in America, largely because young people believe it will lead to wealth or at least security. I want them to rethink that decision, or at least do some hard thinking about what uses they would like apply their business skills to.

From "White-Collar Hell," an interview with Barbara Ehrenreich about her new book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.

Link: "White-Collar Hell" (from Inside Higher Ed)