Bait and Switch

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  1. See Daniel C. Feldman, “Career Coaching: What HR Professionals Need to Know,” Human Resources Planning 24:2 (2001), p.26. Even an improving economy poses no threat to the coaching industry, representatives of the Career Coach Academy and the Career Coach Institute assured me, since companies often hire the same coaches to rev up their executives and employed individuals often seek them out when they see “the handwriting on the wall”—a subject common enough to be the topic of Internet and conference call seminars. Some coaches work as individuals; others are in firms offering, for a fee, office space and equipment for the job seeker.

  2. See Stratford Sherman and Alyssa Freas, “The Wild West of Executive Coaching,” Harvard Business Review, November 2004. Although this article is about executive, as opposed to career, coaching, many individuals do both, and the same lack of credentialing and regulations applies to career coaching generally.

  3. The corporate disability with language is now an acknowledged problem, with some companies paying for writing courses for their executives. See Sam Dillon, “What Corporate America Cannot Build: A Sentence,” New York Times, December 7, 2004.

  4. Annie Murphy Paul, The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 125.

  5. Paul, Cult of Personality, pp. 133–34.

  6. Ibid., p. 130.

  1. Mackay, We Got Fired!, p. 56.

  2. A period of unemployment is also likely to damage one’s credit rating. In a fiendish catch-22, 35 percent of U.S. companies now run a credit check as a condition for employment, up from 19 percent in 1996—making it far more difficult to bounce back after hard times. See Marie Szaniszlo, “Employers Turning to a New Kind of Ref Check,” Boston Herald, December 12, 2004.

  3. Claudia Wallis, “The Case for Staying Home,” Time, March 22, 2004.

  4. Robert Jackall, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 47.

  5. Jeffrey J. Fox, Don’t Send a Resume: And Other Contrarian Rules to Help Land a Great Job (New York: Hyperion, 2001), p. 5.

  1. Mike Hernacki, The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want (New York: Berkley, 2001), pp. xii, 47.

  2. Hernacki, The Ultimate Secret, pp. 90, 95.

  3. In yet another scheme, which was forwarded to members of the Atlanta Job Search Network, it is magnetism that connects our desires to their fulfillment: “Dr. Karl Pribram, the respected neuropsychologist, has found that. . . the ‘law of attraction’ is alive and well and working within the mind of every human being. Dr. Pribram discovered that any visual image, imagined in complete detail, sets up a force field of energy that begins to attract into your life the people, ideas, things and even circumstances that are consistent with that image. If you visualize a positive outcome . . . you begin to exert a powerful magnetic force that brings the desired goal or outcome into reality.”

  4. Bruce I. Doyle III, Before You Think Another Thought (Winter Park, FL: Rare Shares Ltd., 1994), pp. 18, 19, 48.

  5. Ibid., p. 67.

  1. Jackall, Moral Mazes, p. 59.

  2. Andrea R. Nierenberg, Nonstop Networking: How to Improve Your Life, Luck, and Career (Sterling, VA: Capital Books, 2002), pp. 77, 78–79.

  3. Ibid., p. 18.

  4. Pensions are becoming a thing of the past. In 1979, more than 80 percent of U.S. workers retired with a defined-benefit pension; by 2001, only a little over 40 percent did so. (Eduardo Porter and Mary Williams Walsh, “Retirement Turns into a Rest Stop as Pensions and Benefits Dwindle,” New York Times, February 9, 2005.) As for health insurance, the health provisions of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986 (COBRA) allow laid-off workers from eligible firms to continue with their company’s health insurance for eighteen months, if they pay 102 percent of the premiums. Because of these high costs, only about one in five unemployed workers utilizes the COBRA program (wwww.familiesusa.org.).

  5. Jackall, Moral Mazes, p. 47.

  6. John T. Molloy, New Women’s Dress for Success (New York: Warner Books, 1996), p.16.

  7. Ibid., p.43.

  8. Molloy, New Women’s Dress for Success, p. 175.

  9. In 1992, the Washington Post quoted Harvey Hornstein, a psychology professor at Columbia University who studies gender roles, as saying: “For women, it’s a Catch-22. If they dress in ‘feminine’ ways, men don’t think they’re suited for the job. If women don’t play the stereotypical role, then men complain they’re not ‘feminine’ enough.” (Amanda Spake, “Dressing for Power,” Washington Post, January 5, 1992.)

  10. Marcia Clark, the prosecutor in O. J. Simpson’s murder trial, was given a similar diagnosis. According to the Chicago Tribune, “After a focus group assembled by a jury consultant criticized her appearance and manner of presentation, Clark has changed her highly successful style. She has changed her hairstyle, dress and personal manner, become softer, more feminine, warmer and more open—in short, less like the aggressive trial lawyer she is and more like a stereotypical woman.” (Cynthia Grant Bowman, “Fashion Weighs in on Simpson Case,” Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1994.)

  11. Fox, Don’t Send a Resume, pp. 33–35.

  12. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, p. 22.

  1. Russell Shorto, “Faith at Work,” New York Times Magazine, October 31, 2004.

  2. David Cho, “A Pastor with a Drive to Convert: McLean Sanctuary Opens with Grander Plans,” Washington Post, June 27, 2004.

  3. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, p. 30.

  4. The laid-off IBM employees studied by Sennett tended to withdraw from civic engagement and, at the same time, become more involved in their churches. One of them told Sennett, “When I was born again in Christ, I became more accepting, less striving” (The Corrosion of Character, p. 130). In recent self-help literature, Christians are encouraged to see the workplace as a site for “witnessing,” proselytizing, and otherwise advancing their religious goals. Kim Hackney’s book, Thank God It’s Monday: Celebrating Your Purpose at Work (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2003), for example, is advertised on www.praize.com as offering advice on “living out your God-given purpose at work” and “transform[ing] attitudes about the ‘daily grind’ and find[ing] satisfaction and joy in your job.”

  1. Qorvis’s principal client, I later learn, is Saudi Arabia, which would have represented a considerable ethical stretch even for me.

  2. Meyer, Executive Blues, p. 34.

  3. Lisa Belkin, “No Yes; No No; No Answer at All,” New York Times, June 6, 2004.

  1. Arne L. Kallenberg, Barbara F. Reskin, and Ken Hudson, “Bad Jobs in America; Standard and Nonstandard Employment Relations and Job Quality in the United States,” American Sociological Review, 65: 1 (2000), pp. 256–78. In personal communications, Kallenberg and Hudson assured me that the trend is continuing.

  2. According to www.francorp.com. Francorp bills itself as “The Leader in Franchise Development and Consulting.”

  3. Peter M. Birkeland, Franchising Dreams: The Lure of Entrepreneurship in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 1–2, 31, 115.

  4. Kris Hundely, “Get-Fleeced-Quick,” St. Petersburg Times, April 12, 2004.

  5. Susan B. Garland, “So Glad You Could Come. Can I Sell You Anything?” New York Times, December 19, 2004.

  6. Internet announcements of job fairs generally offer a list of the “exhibiting” companies.

  1. Outside of college job fairs, organized for graduating seniors, most are organized by companies like JobExpo and advertised on the Internet.

  * Most of July was spent on Ehrenreich business.

  2. Sodexho was first targeted by student activists in the late nineties for its investments in private, profit-making prisons. In 2003, students at a number of colleges relaunched the “Drop Sodexho” campaign in the wake of a bias suit alleging racist management practices.

  3. Kate Zernike, “The Reach o
f War: Contractors,” New York Times, June 10, 2004.

  4. Leland, “For Unemployed, Wait for New Work Grows Longer.”

  5. Newman, Falling from Grace, p. 10.

  6. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, p. 94.

  1. Meyer tells of a friend whose career at a publishing house hit a dead end, apparently because he had a master’s degree in English and had taught for years: “Because of it he never became one of the boys” (p. 169).

  2. Newman, Falling from Grace, p. 65.

  3. Porter and Walsh, “Retirement Turns into a Rest Stop as Pensions and Benefits Dwindle,” New York Times, February 9, 2005.

  4. Jackall, Moral Mazes, p. 41.

  5. The exception was one meeting of the Washington, D.C., Forty-Plus Club, where pending changes in unemployment insurance were mentioned, though no action was suggested.

  6. Hernacki, The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want, pp. 55–56.

  7. Quoted in Alan Downs, Corporate Executions: The Ugly Truth About Layoffs —How Corporate Greed Is Shattering Lives, Companies, and Communities (New York: AHACOM, 1995), p. 31.

  8. Downs, Corporate Executions, p. 28.

  9. John Cavanagh, Sarah Anderson, Chris Hartman, Scott Klinger, and Stacy Chan, Executive Excess 2004: Campaign Contributions, Outsourcing, Unexpensed Stock Options, and Rising CEO Pay, available at www.faireconomy.org.

  10. John G. Miller, QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: What to Really Ask Yourself to Eliminate Blame, Complaining, and Procrastination (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004).

  11. David Noer, Healing the Wounds: Overcoming the Trauma of Layoffs and Revitalizing Downsized Organizations (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), p. 17.

  12. Lucy Kellaway, “Companies Don’t Need Brainy People,” Financial Times, November 22, 2004.

  13. Mackay, We Got Fired! p. 105.

  14. Stephen R. Covey, The Eighth Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 4.

  15. Del Jones, “Best Friends Good for Business,” USA Today, December 1, 2004.

  16. Covey, The Eighth Habit, p. 4.

  17. Professionalization was not entirely a progressive development. As I argued in Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon, 1989), the educational requirements for entry into medicine, the “model profession,” were created in no small part to exclude women, minorities, and people from the lower classes.

  18. Rakesh Khurana, Nitin Nohria, and Daniel Penrice, “Is Business Management a Profession?” SearchCIO.com, February 22, 2005.

  1 http://www.bis.gov/emp/emptab3.htm

  2 Farber, Henry S., “What Do We Know about Job Loss in the United States? Evidence from the Displaced Workers’ Survey, 1984–2005,” Working Paper 498, Princeton University Industrial Relations Section, January 5, 2005.

  3 John J. Sullivan, quoted in Taylor, William C., “To Hire Sharp Employees, Recruit in Sharp Ways, New York Times, Business Section, April 23, 2006, p. 3.

  The New York Times bestselling investigation into white-collar unemployment, “an astonishing trip through downsized America” (Baltimore Sun)

  Americans’ working lives are growing more precarious every day. Corporations slash employees by the thousands, and the benefits and pensions once guaranteed by “middle-class” jobs are a thing of the past. In Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover again, as she did in Nickel and Dimed, this time exploring another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed. Armed with the plausible résumé of a professional “in transition,” she attempts to land a “middle-class” job. She submits to career coaching, personality testing, and a series of EST-like boot camps. She attends job fairs, networking events, and evangelical job search ministries. She is proselytized, scammed, lectured, and—again and again—rejected.

  Bait and Switch charts the increasingly common fate of people who have done everything right—gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés—yet still fall prey to financial disaster, as today’s ultra-lean corporations take pride in shedding “surplus” employees. There are few social supports for these newly disposable workers, Ehrenreich finds, and little security even for those who have jobs. Worst of all, rather than faulting the harsh new economy, the jobless are persuaded that they have only themselves to blame.

  Alternately hilarious and tragic, Bait and Switch, like the now-classic Nickel and Dimed, is a searing expose of the cruel new reality in which we all live.

  BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to Harper’s and The Nation, she has been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine. She lives in Virginia.