Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

I will start this off by saying I *loved* "Nickeled and Dimed". I worked in low-end retail jobs for years and was surrounded by the kind of people she profiled, who had slipped through the cracks and couldn't climb back up. But this book was riddled with problems.

She wants to write an expose on white-collar jobs, but then couldn't get one. At some point she should have re-pitched the book, retitled it, and made it solely about job hunting. As it is, she starts off talking about A, then couldn't get A, and awkwardly spends the rest of the book talking about B.

And honestly, she didn't do a very good job with B. She tried to get a job as a PR worker to illustrate how hard it is to get a white collar job, but I would have had more sympathy for her if she had actually done that search correctly. She didn't research the jargon she should have known or the subjects she should have been talking about.

She pitched herself, over and over again, with this phrase she thought up about PR being about starting fires, not just putting them out. She talks like this is some kind of clever insight, like this line would get a HR rep thinking, but my first reaction was "DUH". I have worked with plenty of PR people, and NONE of them were ever employed to "put out" a fire. (Companies respond to PR problems by ignoring them, because they know you'll forget everything soon enough.) Every PR person I've worked with knew their job was to "start fires" 8 hours a day. What's especially baffling is that *she's an author*! She must be dealing with PR people every single day! How could she not have known how they talk or what they do? Why does she think they're professional cover-up scandal-spinners?

So the book about white collar America turned into a book about finding a job, but really, it was about people who weren't competent enough to find one.

Excellently written - I flew through this book. The story--her hunt for a white collar job--is so depressing. For those unlucky-enough to be cast-aside without prospects, the road back to employment is pretty dreary. Between ineffective career coaches, pointless networking sessions, and commission-only sales jobs, I wonder how anyone can stay sane during the ordeal...

I did not enjoy reading this book, I found it somewhat tedious and struggled to get through the book. It was somewhat narrow in it's focus/concerns, and I suppose too American, so the story failed to resonate with me. There were no broad comments or insights that I found here which caught my attention or interest.

I was very disappointed with this book. I felt the author went about the project in a lacksidaisical manner. It was poorly researched and executed. It is an insult to the people it is supposed to highlight, the victims of corporate downsizing and indifference. A much better book on this topic is Then We Came to the End: A Novel by Joshua Ferris.

I was required to read this for my college English course. Ehrenreich writes of her experience to attempt to be part of the white collar world. In the beginning she spews out a few fact of unemployment and unemployment rates in the United States among middle aged persons but then she writes more of her own journey. Ehrenreich takes on a fake personality, attends job fairs, unemployed club meetings, and hires career coaches to get her to the next level. I thought the book was somewhat entertaining and an easy read. Nothing spectacular though, just a documentary about her middle age unemployment scheme.