Bait and Switch

Ehrenreich follows her 2002 revealing and best-selling investigation of the working poor, Nickel and Dimed, with a sequel structured around a surprising twist. Just as she'd entered the world of pink-collar impoverishment, she now explores the realities facing corporate, white-collar workers.

In 2002, Ehrenreich noted a sharp increase in white-collar workers experiencing prolonged unemployment, debt spirals and painful uncertainties once mainly associated with poverty. Unlike the oft-vilified urban poor, she notes, "distressed white-collar people...did everything right." To explore the phenomenon of corporate job insecurity, she positions herself as an anonymous seeker of a "good" job (with insurance and a salary around $50,000) with a corporation outside of publishing. Her journey starts out in zany self-deprecating mode—can the successful journalist pose as dislocated, middle-aged wanna-be "Barbara Alexander"?—yet winds up entering startlingly mordant and disturbing territory.

She discovers a new parasitic industry dedicated to fleecing the downsized, which includes "career coaches" specializing in chirpy New Age blather, "résumé blasters" who transform CVs into virtual junk mail, and expensive "boot camps" built around solipsism and vapid "life plans."

Besides endless self-improvement, these sources emphasize an idealized "networking," which Ehrenreich finds to consist of traveling to B-list hotels and restaurants and encountering fellow luckless job searchers, some of whom agreed later to follow-up interviews. They make revealing comments that indicate how much loyalty today's corporate life demands, and how little it offers, other than a paycheck that may be "right-sized" at any time (frequently, high earners are the first to go).

Ehrenreich's journey contains unexpected twists and humorous moments, but these don't conceal the increasingly cruel and arbitrary reality that awaits the white-collar unemployed, particularly those older than 30: a predatory corporate landscape "addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking."—Mike Newirth