Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, has just hit the bookstores and provides a fascinating read for career advisors and job seekers alike.

In her previous book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Ehrenreich explored the world of dead-end minimum wage jobs. In Bait and Switch she concentrates on the higher end of the career ladder, targeting and infiltrating the corner offices of big business in corporate America. She attempts to understand the psychodynamics of the workplace and the people who inhabit those jobs.

The impetus for the book arose from responses to Nickel and Dimed. Readers wrote that even with bachelor’s and master’s degrees, they were still suffering financially and/or were out of work. Most were finding the job search process very difficult.

Ehrenreich became curious as to what was actually happening in corporate America when someone loses a job due to firings and layoffs. She discovered that there are few social supports and limited economic assistance available. Unemployment insurance benefits only last for six months (it used to be 15), and health insurance, which is tied to employment, is often lost. So, to whom does one turn?

There are currently two major forces reshaping U.S. labor markets.

• First, many U.S. corporations have lost their privileged oligopolistic positions. The halcyon days of a General Motors or an IBM ruling the global markets are over. Now, international competition puts increased pressure on managers to fire mediocre workers (perceived or real) and eliminate what they see as superfluous positions. Economic growth in East Asia and around the world is now the driving economic force.
  
• Second, information technologies provide a “big brother watching,” so it is easier to quantify who provides economic value to an organization. Investors watch for and focus on the profit centers, and departments of mid-level managers are cut. The white-collar worker has suffered in this adjustment and is still reeling from the devastating effects.

In attempts to find a high-end job, Ehrenreich drafted expertly executed cover letters (using her maiden name and a fake résumé) and posted her profile on Internet job sites. She sought career fairs in numerous cities, networked with other job seekers, and even hired two career coaches to guide her through a host of assessment and personality counseling. She learned to pitch her three-minute elevator speech and adopt that well-crafted “winning attitude.”

In Bait and Switch Ehrenreich sympathizes with other increasingly desperate job seekers and finally concludes that the whole nature of corporate employment has changed dramatically in the last 10 to 15 years. She indicates that employers have moved away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to the notion that he/she is a disposable commodity. A research group found that 56 percent of major companies surveyed in the late ’80s agreed that “employees who are loyal to the company and further its business goals deserve an assurance of continued employment.” A decade later only six percent agreed.

It was in the ’90s that companies started weeding people out as a form of cost reduction. That’s why the person who achieves more may be the most vulnerable to a layoff because he or she is now making enough money to look like a tempting target for cost cutters. One person recently related a story about a boss who said to an employee, “You don’t want a raise; it’s like painting a target on your back.”

Ehrenreich’s commiserations with other increasingly desperate job seekers only added to her bitterness and fueled her ideas on what should be done. While most of her criticism is aimed at the companies that suck the life from their employees before firing them, she also issues a call for action to the unemployed to rise up and organize. “No group is better situated,” she writes, “or perhaps better motivated, to lead the defense of the middle class than the unemployed.”

Unemployed? Laid off? Alumni Career Services is here to offer advice and help, providing coaching, testing, moral support, job leads, and constructive workshops for résumés and interviewing.

Need more information? Call Julie Swaner, Program Manager, Alumni Career Services, (801) 585-5036