Reviewed by Kelly Stewart

Fresh from the success of her thought-provoking 2001 book about the lives of the working poor – Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America – Barbara Ehrenreich started hearing from readers who recommended she explore the plight of white-collar workers. “Try investigating people like me who didn’t have babies in high school, who made good grades, who work hard and don’t kiss a lot of ass and instead of getting promoted or paid fairly must regress to working for $7/hr.,” challenged one reader.

So begins Ehrenreich’s foray into the corporate jungle, which she chronicles in her new book Bait and Switch. Her intent is good. She sets out to find a job in public relations, the corporate field that most closely matches her journalistic experience. She plans to find a full-time PR job and write about the experience. But the risky part of embarking on an immersion journalism project is that you don’t know how the story will play out. Unfortunately for Ehrenreich, the jungle turns out to be more like a zoo, and she’s standing on the outside looking in.

Ehrenreich doesn’t find a job and instead writes about being bilked out of $6,000 to progress through useless career coaching sessions, networking meetings, a style makeover and a career boot camp. Ehrenreich’s usually incisive commentary falters when she’s faced with nonsensical career-themed mathematical formulas and acronyms. She meets despondent job seekers while attending job-searching events, but can’t spend enough time with them to turn them into compelling characters. The author’s personal job-seeking quest – one that readers know is a ruse – is not strong enough to maintain the book’s narrative arc.

The real meat of the book is the provocative end chapter and conclusion, in which she discusses the plight of the average white-collar worker in the age of penny-pinching CEOs. Ehrenreich interviews several of her fellow job searchers and learns more about their emotional states than she ever did pretending to be unemployed. The end of Bait and Switch would make an excellent article, but the rest of the book is not provocative enough to warrant an additional 200 pages of material. Ehrenreich sets out to write Bait and Switch with good intentions. But, as she discovers during her job search, the best intentions don’t always lead to the desired results.