In Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, Barbara Ehrenreich attempts to infiltrate the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed in an effort to shed light on their plight, and expose the unfairness of the corporate world. It is an interesting premise for sure, but sadly one that she is unable to pull off. In the end, she only makes disingenuous efforts to get a job, mocking and criticizing the very people she wants to hire her, and seeks out only people and groups that confirm her pre-existing ideas.
By all rights, Barbara Ehrenreich is a very successful author, but she admits that she's never held a "normal" 9 to 5 job in her life. She's never been in the corporate world, yet she plans on "infiltrating" this world and getting a job. It's obvious that she has no real intention of doing this early on, for this would destroy the entire premise of her book, which is that it's too hard to get a job. She decides that she's going to attempt to get a job in PR, as that is close to being a journalist, and then invents a resume, filling it with mostly lies that have some sort of factual basis in her life, and finds friends who are willing to lie about her employment history.
With her newly minted resume and employment history in hand, she delves into the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. She starts by paying for various career counselors and resume "experts" to help her polish what she created. But the effort is poorly done. She seems to seek out the worst people on the Internet, and hires only them, and then complains about the lack of quality people to help the unemployed, and about the unqualified individuals who are trying to take advantage of the helpless. Yet by her own descriptions of the advertisements she answers, they are obviously snake oil salesmen who nobody would bother to hire in the first place. No efforts are made to actually seek out qualified individuals to help her, perhaps because they would see through the fake persona.
Even her attempts at networking are a sham. She never actually networks with anyone, although given her situation, it would be hard to see how she truly could (which she eventually admits in the conclusion). Real networking involves reconnecting with former coworkers, college friends, and professionals who have jobs, in an attempt to secure one for herself. Ehrenreich's only efforts at "networking" amount to nothing more than going to unemployment support groups, where no real networking occurs. In fact, the majority of her book takes place at these events. While this allows her to meet other unemployed people and showcase their plight, this does nothing to help her with her own job hunt.
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