I’m late to the party on this one, as Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream was published in 2005. Unfortunately, its relevance has only increased in today’s disastrous economy.
Years ago, a cyber-friend told me I absolutely must read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. When I finally did read it, the book blew me away. Ehrenreich committed actual journalism: trying to learn about blue-collar people’s lives, she decided to become one. She went to three cities, each time with $1000 and a car, and set herself the challenge of finding housing and getting an entry-level job that would meet all her expenses, leaving her able to pay the next month’s rent. Each attempt (housekeeper, waitress, Wal-Mart "associate") forced her to get a second job just to make ends meet. She had gone in with the assumption that working-class (oh, say it: poor) people had secret tricks to stretch their dollars further. Instead, she found that being poor has all kinds of hidden costs: higher interest rates for being a "bad risk," inflated health care costs without insurance, the vampiric payday-loan industry, etc.
In Bait and Switch, she undertook a similar project: get hired for a corporate job and spend a few months learning about corporate culture. She went so far as to legally take back her maiden name of Alexander because her real name was recognizable. She again came in with assumptions: that it would take her about five months to find a job (the national average at the time), that it would be less physically demanding than her work in Nickel and Dimed, and that it would be emotionally easier because she wouldn’t have to put on the façade of robotlike obedience that was expected of her while waitressing and working at Wal-Mart. She ruefully admits that she was wrong on all counts.
After creating a plausible resume using her real skills, Ehrenreich dove into the world of job coaches, networking events, and a $200-an-hour resume-writing service. (Hint: if the resume preparer charges by the hour rather than the finished product, your resume is always going to need just a few more tweaks.) She was also given endless advice on what to wear and coming across as "approachable," which (especially for a woman) was apparently more important than actual job qualifications. And she discovered how painful it can be to spend hours in "boot camp," doing nothing but sit.
The various job coaches and seminars mostly consisted of exhortations to develop a "winning attitude." Any discussion of the collapsed economy was deemed an excuse: if you really wanted a job, you would MAKE it happen. Ehrenreich met long-term employees hit by corporate downsizing, small business owners who’d gone bust, and realtors who’d watched the market dry up. Somehow, huge numbers of people in the same industries had all lost their "winning attitudes" at once.
Ehrenreich has no patience for blame-the-victim thinking (a theme that recurs throughout her work, most recently in Bright-Sided ). But it’s a popular view because it preserves the fantasy that life is fair: the Haves are deemed worthy, a view that will always be popular with the Haves. As for the Have-Nots, some of them also endorse this view because it holds out the promise of control: just try hard enough, and you’ll be a Have too.
Another commandment endlessly given to job seekers was to network, network, network. Of course, most of their actual opportunities to network were with other unemployed people. Seminar speakers treated them to anecdotes about people who got jobs from networking at the gym or the 7-11. One of Ehrenreich’s fellow job seekers discussed a plan to wait tables at a posh restaurant in the hopes of slipping resumes to the elite diners. Ehrenreich may have been the only one to benefit from all of this networking: she called up the various people she’d met at job-seeking events and interviewed them for the book. Some had taken "survival jobs" at or near minimum wage; none had succeeded in getting back into the corporate world.
Following another common instruction given to the unemployed, Ehrenreich treated her job search as a full-time job in itself. The closest she came to actual employment was an offer to sell AFLAC insurance. But she would have to spend $1900 on classes and a broker’s license, and the sales would be commission only, no salary or benefits. No health insurance for her while selling health insurance. She declined.
In the intro, Ehrenreich quotes a letter from a reader who complains that she writes too much about those unworthy Have-Nots:
Try investigating people like me who didn’t have babies in high school, who made good grades, who work hard and don’t kiss a lot of ass and instead of getting promoted or paid fairly must regress to working $7/hr, having their student loans in perpetual deferment, living at home with their parents, and generally exist in debt which they feel they may never get out of.
When it’s just the Have-Nots getting screwed, it’s routinely dismissed or blamed on their bad choices (starting with their failure to be born to white middle-class parents, presumably). But when large numbers of Haves find themselves sliding down into Have-Not status, it might be possible to get the public to pay attention. Of course, that depends on getting past the stigma of being newly minted Have-Nots. The inevitable news story about the guy who "never thought he’d have to use food stamps" always seems to contain the disclaimer that he’s careful not to buy steak, unlike all those other bums on food stamps. That’s if you can even get the media interested in a recession-related story that doesn’t involve a rich guy forced to sell his second yacht.
Ehrenreich ends with a call to arms that she admits is probably too optimistic, particularly for someone like herself who’s not given to optimism. With so many people out of work, perhaps they ought to move beyond the usual questions suggested by job coaches et al: What do I want to do with my life? And How can I develop a winning attitude? What if instead they joined together to ask What’s wrong with this picture? Now is the perfect time to shore up the safety net, strengthen unions, extend unemployment payments for a realistic period, reform businesses that exploit low-income people (like credit cards) – and oh yeah, push for universal health insurance. We could try designing policies that care more about Have-Nots (newly minted or not) than about that second yacht.
Now THAT would be a winning attitude.