A White-collar Farce

[bibliogramma]

Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich

Bait and Switch was clearly intended as a counterpoint to Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich's expose of the difficulties faced by working-class Americans in just trying to keep their heads above water and food on their children's plates in the post-industrial North American economy.

Unfortunately, it's not nearly as successful in getting across the hazards and trials faced by the average middle-class white-collar worker in an age of down-sizing and rapidly moving cheese. But I don't think that's entirely Ehrenreich's fault. She applies the same methodology - assume the appropriate work and life history, and do everything the average person with that background would do in looking for a job - and she writes just as well about what she experiences as she did in Nickel and Dimed.

It's just that the world she was exploring in Nickel and dimed was a world of obvious disparities, injustices and barriers, in which people without power of any kind were regularly diminished, degraded and marginalised. It was a tragedy.

Bait and Switch is a farce. Her accounts of her encounters with all kinds of placement consultants and services supposedly designed to help a recently de-hired middle-management type find a new job were bizarre in the extreme, from cult-like networking groups to back-to-the-Bible prayer meetings disguised as information sessions for the white-collar job-hunter. If this is indeed what corporate culture in Noth America is turning into - and certainly none of the people Ehrenreich talked to during the period of time she was doing her undercover research thought there was anything inappropriate about the kinds of experiences she encountered - then I am very glad that the company I work for has an academic corporate culture instead of the sales and appearances oriented culture that Ehrenreich's subjects have apparently become accustomed to. Because I couldn't function in an environment that fake and farcical, and I suspect that if they allowed themselves to think about it for a minute, most of her subjects would realise that the very environment they are so desperate to re-enter is the last place that any sane person would want to work in.

Among other things, Ehrenreich talks about the role of "personality" in corporate job-hunting and how in many companies, having the right kind of personality, as judged by a host of tests that may well be meaningless and for the most part have little or no real scientific research behind them to determine their accuracy as indicators of anything (and this apparently includes the Myers-Briggs typology online tests that go around the Internet in waves every few months), is considered more important than experience or competence in one's field. Scary stuff.

Unfortunately, unless you actually live by the kinds of values that Ehrenreich's corporate job-hunters and their erstwhile employers apparently do, this book leaves the reader without the empathy and anger evoked by Nickel and Dimed. Instead, one is left wondering why on earth intelligent people would buy into any of this crap, and, sadly, struggling not to laugh at the sheer madness of it all.