Bait and Switch

Bait and Switch is a story of ‘white collar downward mobility’ in the US. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the bestseller on low pay in America, Nickle and Dimed, plots her return to the world of paid employment as a mid-level executive. But instead of writing an exposé on corporate America as seen from the inside, she finds herself thrust into the clutches of the ‘transition industry’ – a bizarre world of career-coaching charlatans and preaching weirdos who feed off the anxieties and insecurities of unemployed professionals.

In the course of her (ultimately unsuccessful) quest for a PR job, Ehrenreich lays bare the absurdity of a career gap itself becoming a cause of unemployability, or job-seeking itself becoming a full-time job (complete with its own surrogate ‘boss’ figures). She draws out the obvious humour of a careers coach who represents the ‘three centres of intelligence’ with Wizard of Oz dolls and a plastic Elvis, but reminds us that what underlies this is a corporate culture in which the unfounded pseudo-science of ‘personality types’ has become an accepted norm of recruitment.

This two-step movement is typical, with vivid descriptions of the surreal situations that Ehrenreich encounters followed up by more analytical passages that strip away the outlandish appearance to reveal something rotten in the state of US corporate culture. Ehrenreich argues that the psychiatrisation of employment problems, with job-seekers encouraged to look inwards in the search for answers to their predicament, is a convenient ideology for those who grow rich from corporations.

But for the unlucky losers, the consistent injunction to develop a ‘winning attitude’ – ‘cheerful, upbeat and compliant’ – is little more than an exercise in self-commodification. Employability means being able to identify with one’s (potential) employers, and so ‘forecloses the possibility of collective action’ to reign in their excesses, or demand better than the commission-only sales and ‘survival jobs’ on offer.

If I have one main criticism of Bait and Switch, it is that the wide cast of genuine job-seekers encountered by Ehrenreich are rarely allowed more than cameo roles. But this may simply reflect the shallowness of human contact in a world of windowless meeting rooms, where solidarity has been replaced by networking, the ‘deflection of human sociality to an ulterior end’.

There may well be more scholarly accounts of downward mobility available, or more theoretically sophisticated examinations of ‘precarity’. But none are as readable, or as human, as Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book.