[Barbara] Ehrenreich’s new book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, is also about class. Once again, she reports on her experiences going incognito. But this time she has infiltrated a world that, one imagines, will be far more familiar to her readers: the world of the white-collar middle class, the middle managers of corporate America. The premise of Bait and Switch is that there is as much outrage to expose in cubicles of major corporations as in the service sector. While things don’t turn out exactly as Ehrenreich had expected, her book still reveals the strength of long-form reporting for showing how social forces bear down to shape an individual’s life.
...But there was a hitch. After almost a year on the market, Ehrenreich wasn’t offered a single corporate job. It wasn’t for lack of trying. She hired several career coaches and attended networking sessions; still, she was unable to find gainful employment. Lest we think her difficulties were unique to her situation — why would someone with no connections or experience think she could get a decent middle-manager job right off the bat? — Ehrenreich contacts all the job-seekers whose cards she collected along the way. None of the eleven people who responded to her have found a decent corporate job; they are all still searching, or else they have taken low-wage jobs in the service sector, working at retail chains or grooming dogs or driving a limousine.
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