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The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch,, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with a plausible résumé of a professional "in transition," she attempts to land a middle-class job—undergoing career coaching and personality testing, then trawling a series of EST-like boot camps, job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job-search ministries. She gets an image makeover, works to project a winning attitude, yet is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and—again and again—rejected.
'Ehrenreich rightly points out how corporate culture's focus on "the power of the individual will" deters its employees from organizing against the market trends that are disenfranchising them, but her presentation of such arguments would have been a lot more convincing if she could have spent some time in a cubicle herself.' - PW.
This information about Bait and Switch was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Barbara Ehrenreich was the author of more than 20 books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. She was a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, as well as a contributing writer to Time magazine.
She died in September 2022 aged 81. Her daughter said the cause was a stroke. She continued to write into her eighties leaving an unfinished work about the evolution of narcissism.
According to her New York Times obituary, Ms. Ehrenreich said she believed that her job as a journalist was to shed light on the unnecessary pain in the world: "The idea is not that we will win in our own lifetimes and that's the measure of us...but that we will die trying."
If you liked Bait and Switch, try these:
by Nancy Johnson
Published 2022
Powerful and revealing, The Kindest Lie captures the heartbreaking divide between Black and white communities and offers both an unflinching view of motherhood in contemporary America and the never-ending quest to achieve the American Dream.
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 2020
The bitingly funny, eye-opening story of a college-educated young professional who finds work in the automated and time-starved world of hourly labor.
by Sarah Smarsh
Published 2019
A perfect companion to Evicted and Nickel and Dimed, Heartland reveals one woman's experience of working class poverty with a startlingly observed, eye-opening, and topical personal story.
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