Book Review: Bait and Switch - The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich - Page 2

Surprisingly little time is actually spent talking about her own honest efforts to secure a job. She only occasionally mentions in passing that she has updated her resume, or made phone calls to several companies, but that is all. The only interviews that she mentions are a session with a career counselor where she tried to convince him to hire her (which she never thought would work anyway), and interviews with AFLAC and Mary Kay for non-salaried, commission-paying jobs with no benefits. According to her own ground rules, this wasn't the type of job she intended to get anyway, so the only purpose in going on these interviews is to condemn that type of employment. The irony of course is that she works in a similar workforce. By trade, she is a freelance writer. Her job is really no different than that of a commissioned salesperson, yet she spends half a chapter denigrating those who would use that type of workforce as taking advantage of people.

Sadly, her efforts to expose the hidden group of unemployed is so transparent that it leads me to wonder whether she actually made any real concerted efforts to secure an actual job at all. While there are certainly people who languish in support groups, the plight of the unemployed is not nearly as tragic as she makes it out to be. Having coped with a six-month period of unemployment after a layoff myself, it was easy for me to spot all the things she did absolutely wrong, and then I cringed when I realized that she knew they were wrong herself, but perpetuated the myths to satisfy the premise.

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Article Author: Nick Schweitzer

Nick Schweitzer is a software consultant in the Milwaukee area. In his spare time he is an amatuer triathlete, political pundit, and is a recovering geek. He maintains two blogs: The World According to Nick and The Coding Monkey.

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