Claire Conger

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream author Barbara Ehrenreich is trying to land a white-collar position in a corporation. She wants to find out what job hunting is like in the trenches of the middle-class unemployed and expects to write her book with a happy “I got the job” ending. That’s not what happens.

Because she actually has a job, writer, and is a best-selling author—Nickel and Dimed, for example—she must disguise her identity, fake a resume, and forgo references. She figures she’ll need help, so she attends job fairs and executive-job-search training sessions, posts on job boards, signs up for coaching, and pays for networking sessions that turn out to be mostly just with other job seekers. She spends $6,000 on the endeavour.

Having myself been laid off from a corporate job and myself attended job-seeker coaching sessions, I could relate to Ms. Ehrenreich’s having found them futile. Mainly, she, as I, needed better networking—like with people who actually have actual jobs. Reading Bait and Switch, I kept talking back to the book: Join a club, like say Toastmasters or the Rotary. Get out on the town and hobnob with people who are working, people who hire. Did I do that myself? No. I didn’t really want another job.

Bait and Switch, in its conclusion, is about much more than a cottage industry selling itself to job seekers. It’s about the end of the era in which the middle-class college educated could expect upward mobility. It’s a head-spinning loss.