Running on empty

Barbara Ehrenreich set out to write a "Nickel and Dimed" for the white-collar worker -- but everything fell apart when she couldn't nab a corporate job.

By Ira Boudway

Sep 7, 2005 | Four years ago, with the widely acclaimed "Nickel and Dimed," Barbara Ehrenreich demonstrated that while working for minimum wage is no way to make a decent living in America, writing about it can be. Between the hardcover and paperback editions, her account of stints working at a breakfast diner, a Wal-Mart and a housecleaning service spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Now Ehrenreich has produced a sequel: "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream."

This time, instead of bottom-of-the-barrel service work, Ehrenreich has volunteered for a stretch of white-collar unemployment. Her catalogue of labor-market misery, as she explains in the introduction, seemed incomplete without a section devoted to the people who have followed all the rules and still lost -- people, such as one letter writer she cites, "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 for $7/hr." So after setting some ground rules -- she can't use her reputation and connections, and she must go anywhere and take any job no matter how dull or morally dubious -- Ehrenreich reverts to her maiden name, Alexander, cooks up a résumé full of legitimate skills and phony experience, and goes hunting for a public relations job.

In what passes for the book's action, Barbara Alexander conducts fruitless Web searches and endures perky and unhinged career coaches -- one of whom uses a plastic Elvis doll to illustrate his points. She attends an "executive boot camp" where a middle-aged man instructs the campers to blame themselves for everything, she gets a style makeover from the obligatory gay consultant, and she encounters evangelical testimonials where she had expected to find networking sessions. Although she originally planned to spend half a year searching and another half working wherever she landed, Ehrenreich never finds a job.

The self-as-case-study method worked well enough for "Nickel and Dimed" -- yielding a visceral account of the humiliations and deprivations of low-wage work that no amount of secondhand reporting might have matched -- but in "Bait and Switch" it feels like a stunt. In "Nickel and Dimed," Ehrenreich's experiences in retail work could easily be viewed as representative; here her plight is almost entirely contingent on the artificiality of her situation. Slipping into corporate America after spending more than a decade as one if its foremost critics is not the same straightforward project as landing a job at a Denny's, a fact that Ehrenreich fails to acknowledge in anything but a cursory way. (Not to mention that she breaks her own rule and, "in a rare moment of moral lucidity," decides not to follow up on a promising contact at a military contractor because of its alleged involvement with the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.)

But why try to put herself in the story at all? Most of her best material comes from encounters with other jobseekers and from the considerable literature on the subject. It's a fair guess that if Ehrenreich had known she wouldn't find a job, she wouldn't have written the book this way, but as it is, the reader is left to wonder who is driving the ship: Ehrenreich the reporter or Alexander the applicant. This question is particularly pressing when, for instance, Ehrenreich decides to go back to the executive boot camp counselor and convince him that he needs her P.R. services, that his marketing video and public speaking need her refining. After he makes a few lame excuses for himself, Ehrenreich makes a confession:

"I want to save him. I also -- where is this coming from? -- want to push him down deeper into the enveloping muck. 'Listen to yourself,' I say, leaning forward, 'how your voice falls when you say that. What I'm picking up on here is depression.'"

Is Ehrenreich thinking that this will help her land a job, or that it will make a good scene in her book? A couple of pages later, when the pitiable man turns her down and, rather perceptively, tells her that she seems angry, Ehrenreich is somehow surprised:

"I am taken aback. I don't feel any anger toward Patrick -- pity, of course, and a certain contempt for his entire profession. If I'm guilty of anything here, it is an excess of that vaunted corporate quality -- focus."

It was her laser focus, no doubt, that made her want to drown the guy in the "enveloping muck." On the next page, Ehrenreich further confuses the matter by admitting that she knew before entering his office that there was no job to be had. By this point, it's anybody's guess why we, and Patrick, are being dragged through this.

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