Lost in transition

Bait and Swith: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

By Barbara Ehrenriech. Metropolitan, 256 pp., $24.00.

IN 2001 Barbara Ehrenreich opened people's eyes to the life of America's working poor with her provocative bestseller Nickel and Dimed. The author, journalist and speaker had gone undercover as a low-wage worker taking positions as different as Wal-Mart cashier and cleaning woman. By telling her story in print, she focused a national spotlight on Americans who add one seven-dollar-an-hour job to another and weigh the medicine bill against the school-supplies list.

In her latest book Ehrenreich focuses her journalist's eye on middleclass corporate America, this time going undercover as a white-collar job seeker. As the title suggests, Ehrenreich had her struggles at the corporate level of the class structure as well, beginning with her struggle to get a job at all.

Ehrenreich hoped to translate her skills as a writer, lecturer and teacher into a $50,000-a-year, benefits-level public-relations position, but she ended her corporate odyssey of many months with only two offers of commission-only sales positions, both of them lacking benefits as well as salary. So in a fascinating shift, what began as a project to understand corporate life became instead a story about being unemployed, unemployable and disappointed in the American dream.

What's going on in corporate America? Ehrenreich picked up a few ideas as she attended countless networking seminars and unemployment support groups and surfed resume boards on the Internet, all under an assumed name. What she discovered is disturbing.

Ehrenreich explains what most of us already know: many of the longterm unemployed are white-collar corporate people who have been laid off in the name of higher profits for shareholders and replaced by cheaper, younger and often more enthusiastic newcomers. As grim as this picture is, another segment of the American economy is booming as a result--the "transition industry," a massive, ragtag collection of job coaches and networking specialists, many of them recently laid off from corporate jobs themselves, who are there to assist or prey upon the growing number of white-collar unemployed people.

The biggest revelation in this book may be that the ubiquitous networking events in chain restaurants and motels around the country provide few opportunities to net work and little time even to chat with one's fellow unemployed because they are set up as recruitment opportunities for paid job coaches or to encourage the purchase of the next level of networking tips, few of which actually lead to jobs.

So where is our salvation? Can the church help? Ehrenreich's description of Christian networking groups is more vexing than inspirational. She stumbles upon a number of faith-based employment groups that offer little concrete assistance but serve instead as devices for proselytizing people while they're at their most discouraged. Ehrenreich is decidedly cynical about the testimonies at one such gathering, especially because they lead into a pitch for a CD of the pastor's sermons and promise prayer-delivered employment. This scathingly de scribed episode took place at a well-known large church in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., whose congregation, Ehrenreich believes, has become so sadly utilitarian in its aping of business culture that it is a "realm drained of all transcendence and beauty."

In the arena of Christian unemployment groups, Ehrenreich's claws are out, but she fails to explore this world deeply, focusing on only one type of ministry to the unemployed.

She misses the fact that for many unemployed people, life in the local church provides both spiritual support and a way to contribute time on a volunteer basis to an institution that values them more highly than the market that has tossed them aside. Yet we can take Ehrenreich's devastating description of how at least some churches respond to white-collar unemployment as a painful shot in the arm that may improve us--or at least inoculate us.

Despite her critique of the church, Ehrenreich hurls her sharpest arrows at the magical thinking of the business world, taking aim at the latest corporate crystal ball: the personality test. In one fascinating section, Ehrenreich reflects that when she entered the business world, she expected to find herself in "a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone ... in its focus on concrete results .... But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact-and-logic-based worlds of, say, science and journalism--a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking."

Ehrenreich describes a world in which "passion," "having the fight attitude" and flimsy personality tests all carry more weight than actually being able to get the job done. Ehrenreich's stories of the outlandish results she got on her own many tests (for instance, this best-selling author of 13 books was told that she should not be a writer) are amusing until we consider how many people's God-given gifts have been swept aside by such psychologically fashionable tools.