The saying, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got,” finds pathetic voice in Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.
As she did in her previous book, Nickel and Dimed, this cultural critic formulates a theory about jobs in America and sets out to “prove” it by going undercover.
This time, instead of cleaning toilets, busing tables, and waiting on Wal-Mart customers for less than subsistence wage, sheposes as a job-beggar in corporate America. She endures an assortment of career charlatans, tweaks her resume endlessly, and sits through a series of demeaning networking experiences, all for the opportunity to sell insurance or cosmetics on straight commission with no benefits.
There is a definition of insanity that says it is nothing more than doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
By the end of her ten month experiment, in which she has done everything right—according to the old rules—she has not found a job, and she has no hope of finding a job. She has never even gotten a real interview.
All of which, of course, bears out her contention that the people she claims to represent, middle class professionals, are coming up empty. They have done what they have always been told they were supposed to do—get an education, work hard, become team players—but it has only led to frustration.
The book paints a picture of job search as a downward spiral that leads only to the despair Ehrenreich so frequently sees on the faces of her fellow job seekers who, unlike her, are unemployed for real.
It’s also a set-up for a political agenda (extended unemployment benefits, universal healthcare, etc.) which, while helpful for general support, will do nothing to directly contribute to someone’s finding work any more than the useless activities Ehrenreich participated in, like job boards, networking groups, executive “transition” sessions, etc.
What Bait and Switch exposes is not the “futility” of the American Dream, as the author’s subtitle claims, but the futility of doing more and more of what isn’t working.
As I read it, I found myself wishing I had Barbara Alexander, Ehrenriech’s job-begging alter ego, across the table from me so that I could ask her:
- “Why would you keep going back to people you felt were incompetent, or didn’t trust or respect, for help?”
- “If you instinctively knew you needed real dialogue with ‘fellow seekers’, a deeper connection than was possible in the orchestrated networking sessions you attended, why didn’t you just simply ask someone out for a cup of coffee?”
- “How did such a bright, creative woman wind up a sheep following the herd from bad experience to bad experience without ever trying something new?”
Bait and Switch is just another take on what I call the “Pickett’s Charge” of work search. Led by career coaches trained only in the obsolete tactics of job search 101 and wearing the uniform, the tan suit with the soft lapels to make her more approachable (according the image consultant she hired), Barbara Alexander (aka Ehrenreich) marches out into an open field and predictably gets shot down by what she calls “unrelenting rejection”. The end result is just as foreseeable as the slaughter of Confederate General George Pickett’s Virginians on the third day of the battle of Gettysburg.
I do not doubt that the bad experiences Ehrenreich describes actually happened, nor that the “cast of characters” she describes playing off the fears of middle class workers newly thrown into the battle is a real part of the landscape of what she calls the “transition industry”.
I do, however, believe that her story is superficial and contrived. She does nothing to protect herself (possibly because to do so might undercut her thesis).She keeps putting herself out there to get shot down, like some shell-shocked soldier who stays in the open under fire and doesn’t even try to find a rock or a fence to hide behind. She does nothing to provide a support system for herself, and she is always pursuing things her gut tells her won’t work.
She makes no effort to view what is happening to her as an individual job seeker within the wider context of fundamental changes in the world of work that go far deeper than corporate callousness or irresponsibility. She does not understand that the job search tools she is using are obsolete relics of the Industrial Age that are inappropriate for the Information Age.
In the end, instead of looking for answers, she simply abandons the ranks of the unemployed and “precariously” employed—presumably to write the book—andleaves her former colleagues on the battlefield fighting for a cause she has declared lost.
I have watched my clients get shot down in all the ways that Ehrenreich describes.
I have also seen clients find success by embracing a new way of going about looking for work.
Rather than compromising their values or modeling themselves to fit the image of some “corporate ideal”, they are building their future on the solid platform of bringing forward the best of who they are.
They use self-assessment tools like the Meyer Briggs Type Inventory®, which Ehrenreich ridicules without understanding its purpose or its value, to gain self-knowledge and enrich their personal and professional growth.
Instead of paying a “peppy coach” to become a “pseudo boss”, theyutilize professional resources to help them learn new attitudes and skills and the best practices of self-employment, and they have applied these perspectives both to their work search and to how they function on the job.
They understand that theconcept of “transition” not a euphemism for being out of work, but a source of genuine wisdom that teaches them to take a long hard look at the patterns that need to end in themselves before they can move ahead and how to use uncertainty and confusion as creative space for building a more meaningful way of life.
There is a definition of insanity that says it is nothing more than doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
Instead of an exposé,Bait and Switch is documentary evidence for just this type of insanity, which is sadly very much alive today. Job search 101 is all most people know how to do, because it’s all they have been taught.
But Ehrenreich’s observation, “if there were other, entirely different, tacks to take, none of the job seekers I met seemed to know them,” seems to me like a weak justification of a one sided approach, especially coming from an investigative journalist.
Because it was not part of Ehrenreich’s agenda to explore alternatives that could lead to different results, this unbalanced narrative leaves the reader feeling like the circle of unemployed comrades she describes who belong to something called the “Forty-Plus Club”. They sit around the table “frozen in a state of dull acquiescence” and there is a “prevailing emotional tone of depression, leavened with timid expectation.”
So I would like to offer a word of caution if you are unemployed or precariously employed and choose to read this book: I recommend that you immediately counterbalance its dogmatic negativity by reading The Art of Possibility by Roz and Ben Zander.
