In 2001, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich published “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” a memoir of the months she spent working undercover in America’s hardest, most underpaid service economy jobs, from waitressing to cleaning houses and stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. The book was a compelling story of how America’s working poor can’t make ends meet and became a best seller.
Ehrenreich has turned her formidable gaze to the broken hopes of white-collar workers in her new book, “Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream,” where the prospect of a secure corporate job doesn’t exist anymore. Ehren- reich has once again taken the pulse of a major American economic crisis, for the new book also has hit the national best-seller lists.
“The American Dream becomes more and more like a delusion,” Ehrenreich said from her publisher’s office in New York. “There is a growing insecurity in the middle class.”
The idea for Ehrenreich’s new book came from readers of “Nickel and Dimed.” “I get a lot of mail from people in horrendous conditions, working low-wage jobs and facing eviction,” she said. “I noticed that many of these people once had decent-paying white-collar jobs. They had college degrees and even masters’. I realized I should explore this turmoil in the corporate world.
Using her maiden name, Ehrenreich spent 10 months posing as a public relations consultant seeking a corporate full-time job that pays $50,000 with benefits.
“I did everything you could because I was so clueless about the corporate world,” she said. “I hired job coaches and a consultant to work on my fake résumé. I started posting my résumé on the job websites.”
At employment clubs and networking meetings, Ehrenreich found legions of unemployed, desperate people with education, skills and no jobs. These were people, most between 40 and 60, who were in shock over their certain prosperous futures being pulled out from beneath them.
She attended “job boot camps” where shell-shocked people stripped of careers and social status paid for useless lectures and employment leads. Some job seminars and lunches even turned out to be Christian religious groups fishing for converts.
“Most people I met seemed depressed, anxious and withdrawn,” Ehrenreich said.
Despite the bleak outlook, Ehrenreich leavens the book with her brilliant gallows humor. As she plunged into the industry of scams to exploit the unemployed workers, her characterizations of money-grubbing job coaches was dead on.
“Most of the job coaches were useless,” she said. One “consultant” used Wizard of Oz dolls of the Tin Man, the Lion and the Scarecrow to make his $200-an-hour points. Ehrenreich got a clothing makeover to become more attractive to potential employers. She obscured the fact she is over 60 on her résumé. One job coach told Ehrenreich, an award-winning columnist, that she is clearly a bad writer.
Ehrenreich found the corporate groupthink distressing. “The degree of conformity that was required was almost incomprehensible, including attitude, self-presentation and clothing,” she said. “The personality they want is upbeat, perky and sycophantic. They say you have to be a team player and conform completely.”
But in these modern times of brutal corporate layoffs to help stock prices, destroying your individuality to be a team player doesn’t help in the end. “You find that these teams don’t mean much, because people are ejected from them all the time,” she said.
Ehrenreich also found a corporate culture rife with absurd New Age philosophies. “It seems that the corporate world is shot through with the idea that their thoughts can control the world,” she said. “Some of these business self-help books said that your ideas can control the universe.”
In Ehrenreich’s view, the American social contract has been broken twice. “First, for low-wage workers, I don’t really think that it is possible to get by on $7 an hour, and working two jobs is not sustainable over a long period of time.
“The second part of the social contract, with the white-collar workers, is that if you work hard and apply yourself, you will get ahead,” she said. “If you don’t flake out and study poetry, if you are practical- minded, play the game and work hard, you will have some kind of corporate career. It may not be spectacular, but your income will rise and you will retire with a pension. That’s gone. That is so 1975.”
The bleak labor statistics backed up Ehrenreich’s fruitless job search. “Forty-
four percent of the long-term unemployed are white-collar,” she said. “That is an amazing statistic.”
Still, Ehrenreich noted, business is the No. 1 major of college students in the United States. “That is where the real bait and switch is,” she said. “Kids go into business, suppressing the desire to have a garage band. They do this because they want the American Dream. That is not going to happen. The career trajectories are full of turmoil – getting bumped out of jobs, maybe getting back in. If you reach the age of 45, you may never get back in. When people are re-employed, 70 percent of the time it is at a lower salary.”
In the end, after 10 months of hard job hunting and after spending $6,000 on job coaches, employment boot camps and résume consultants, Ehrenreich received two job offers: one as a makeup salesperson for Mary Kay Cosmetics and the other selling insurance for AFLAC. Both jobs were as a contractor working on commissions with no benefits.
“The job with AFLAC (was) selling supplemental insurance, though I’d have none myself,” Ehrenreich said. “These are not jobs. There is no salary, no office and no physical infrastructure. In both cases, you have to put up about $2,000 to get started. What?”
Looking out over a sea of several million downsized and unemployed white-collar workers, Ehrenreich’s economic diagnosis of the American dream is grim.
“The most mundane part of this dream is to become a company man or woman,” she said, “to gradually move up, but that is not there anymore.”
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books, 256 pages, $24
