Bait and switch
Subtitle: the (futile) pursuit of the American dream
By: Barbara Ehrenreich.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 2005
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 237
Subjects: Displaced workers -- United States; White collar workers -- United States; Job hunting -- United States; Downward mobility (Social sciences) -- United States
Description: "Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed."

"Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right - gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive resumes - yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today's ultralean corporations take pride in shedding their "surplus" employees - plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job-searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, America's middle class is now the loser in a classic game of bait and switch, in which the promise of upward mobility and financial security has given way to a harsh reality of limited social supports for newly disposable workers - and no guarantees even for those who have jobs."--Publishers note.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Finding a coach in the land of OZ; title: Stepping out into the world of networking; title: Surviving boot camp; title: The transformation; title: Networking with the Lord; title: Aiming higher; title: In which I am offered a "job"; title: Downward mobility.