Undercover with Barbara Ehrenreich

 by Jill Owens

Four years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America hit the shelves, quickly becoming both a runaway bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2001, and a modern classic. Ehrenreich's undercover investigation into low-wage America—the world of the working poor—struck a chord with readers across the country, as she struggled to pay rent, buy clothes (even at Wal-Mart, one of her places of employment), or eat anything other than fast food on the meager pay from minimum-wage jobs.

Now, in Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, Ehrenreich takes on the world of white-collar unemployment—a world that is becoming more familiar, unhappily, to more and more Americans. She legally changed her name to Barbara Alexander, lined up people to support her new résumé as a public relations professional, and plunged into the job-transition industry, an eerie no-man's land filled with unscrupulous (and ultimately unhelpful) job coaches, boot camps, and networking prayer breakfasts.

The Washington Post calls Bait and Switch "a worthy companion to Nickel and Dimed," and Kirkus Reviews reports, "Another unsettling message about an ugly America from a trustworthy herald. Read it and weep—especially if you're a job-seeker." Barbara Ehrenreich's new book is as acerbic and witty as only she can be, but it is also chilling in its indictment of an incompetent, downsized, and overworked America.
 

Jill: What surprised you most about doing the work for Bait and Switch?

Barbara Ehrenreich: It was a surprise right from the beginning. Now, we're talking on a very basic philosophical level. I'm a journalist, I'm educated as a scientist, I operate in a fact- and logic-based world. What I did not know is that I was leaving it, as I entered these fringes of the corporate world. I expected the corporate world would be very logical and rational, bottom-line oriented. So right from the start, I was disoriented, with, for example, my very first career coach, the guy who illustrated his "lessons," such as they were, with Wizard of Oz dolls—and an Elvis doll, too!—and that was the first clue to me that this was a whole other metaphysical framework that I was entering.

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