Book #13: Bait and Switch

I don’t know why I decided to read “Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream” by Barbara Ehrenreich. Perhaps it was because it looked like a quick read, and I’m about to dive into a big book. Perhaps because it seems like the kind of book that if you don’t read soon after its published, it becomes too dated to read. Perhaps because I liked “Nickel and Dimed,” Ehrenreich’s most famous book. All I know is that after reading “Bait and Switch,” I’m terribly depressed about the job market and pretty fed up with Barbara Ehrenreich.

Here’s the premise of the book: having gone undercover with the working class in “Nickel and Dimed,” Ehrenreich decides to go undercover with the middle class with a white collar job. She gives herself a few months to find a job in the corporate world, and then she will work at this job for a few more months, to learn all of the corporate world’s secrets, and then she will quit. So she fashions a fake resume and goes about doing the kind of job-searching things that make great book anecdotes, like going to a religious networking event and getting a wacky career coach and getting a makeover.

Now, here’s the thing that made this book so hard to read: Ehrenreich’s immense derision for everything that doesn’t fit within her prescribed world view practically drips off every page. I just kept thinking, man, it must be exhausting to be Barbara Ehrenreich because you never get to have any fun. To make matters worse, one of the places that she did her job-searching was Atlanta, so she took some potshots at Atlanta that seemed a little unfair. Perhaps not unfair, but it just showed how little research she did in the course of her journalistic undertaking. Perhaps research doesn’t make a good book anecdote.

The process of being unemployed and looking for a job is one that many, including myself, can relate with. But it quickly became tiresome reading Ehrenreich’s complaints, particularly when you consider that she really shouldn’t get an interview or a 60k a year job on the basis of her slightly exaggerated resume. Boo hoo Barbara. She rambles for 200 pages and then ends with a call for better unemployment insurance and universal health care. Hope that wasn’t a spoiler for anyone.

While I couldn’t stand Ehrenreich’s condescension to everyone who wasn’t her, I will say that this book was immensely useful in one important way: it made me want to stay at my job for a good long time, if only because this book was like an awful nightmare flashback to what job hunting is like. And I do think that the difficulty of finding a job that pays you enough to live the American Dream is a worthy topic. It’s just not a topic that Ehrenreich should have left her pearl-crusted room to undertake.