Bait and Switch

I finally finished Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch, a somewhat tedious look at unemployed corporate America. Ehrenreich goes undercover, as she did in the superior but flawed Nickle and Dimed, this time to study the lifestyles of a white-collar workforce rightly fretting over increasing job insecurity. Essentially, Ehrenreich repeats the Nickle and Dimed experiment--to document her attempt to survive in low-wage jobs--this time with higher-prestige corporate jobs. Maybe because of the rehashed premise, Bait and Switch often reads like a movie sequel. Nickle and Dimed made waves in 2001 and had some revelatory moments, like the ruthless treatment Ehrenreich endures during her tenure as a waitress who is not allowed to rest for even a moment. Ethically, though, Nickle and Dimed was often on shaky ground, treating the real-life low-wage workers in the book like circus performers. And, as my students often pointed out (I taught the book for several years), Ehrenreich let her classism (ewwww, look at all the mayonaise and red meat they're eating...look at them sitting in church like fools) undermine her credibility.

In Bait and Switch, undercover Ehrenreich can't actually GET a corporate job, so she documents white-collar unemployment. She points out that 44% of the unemployed are from middle-class, "professional" and/or corporate lines of work. In the book she describes corporate job searches, networking events (with their frequent religious agendas), career coaches, internet pseduo-businesses meant to aid the job search, and the desperation of those using these services. Overwhelmingly (and not at all surprisingly), these job search services use a rhetoric of individualism and blame-the-victim that divert attention from the context of corporate unemployment (greed, downsizing, etc.). It's a familiar narrative and Ehrenreich offers few new insights, and fewer solutions to the problem.

How should folks concerned about these issues organize? How might the unemployed middle class and working class take common cause to fight the systemic abuses Ehrenreich describes? These questions, or other productive/proactive queries, aren't pursued in the book.

In fact, I kept thinking as I read Bait and Switch that the book underscores the limits of rhetorical analysis, or rather that the book uses a limited version of rhetorical analysis. What I mean is that there's no praxis, only a critique of language with no identified implications. Ehrenreich shows the uses of terms like "self adaptation" and "in transitions," obvious euphemisms, but doesn't reveal much about the constitutive value of the terms. Put another way, she doesn't do much with the "so what" question. Like the new Wal Mart film I blogged the other day, Bait and Switch doesn't do much to reach beyond the like-minded.