Bait and Switch: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich

Writer Barbara Ehrenreich is a critically and politically acclaimed feminist author nominated for the Book Critics Circle Award. Her articles can often be found in publications including Harpers, The Nation, and Time Magazine. She has explored the social construction of war, sexuality and most recently in her books Nickel and Dimed (2001) and Bait and Switch (2005), issues of class and work. Rather than examining her subject matter from the ivory tower of detached intellectualism, Ehrenreich gets down in the trenches. In both Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, she has sought to understand the world of work from the inside out.

In Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich explored the daily and systemic struggles of the blue and pink collar minimum wage worker. In Bait and Switch she studies the plight of the recently unemployed college-educated white collar workers. By assuming the identity of Barbara Alexander, Ms. Ehrenreich plays the role of an accomplished PR consultant looking to transition into the corporate PR world. After spending nearly a year and thousands of dollars on job coaches, resume editors, and travel to job fairs and networking events, Ehrenreich exposes an alienating world of rejection. Though this frustration is somewhat alleviated by the camaraderie of fellow job-seekers, ultimately Ehrenreich and many of her cohorts fail to find gainful employment. In Bait and Switch, Ehrenreich challenges the myth of the Puritan work ethic - that hard work guarantees success. I had the distinct honor of speaking with Ms. Ehrenreich about her newest book and her outlook on the future of the white-collar American economy.

Ehrenreich takes exception to sometimes being pigeon-holed by media critics as a liberal intellectual elitist. Nickel and Dimed was used as college summer reading at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Because she is required reading on college campuses and often tours the college circuit, it is assumed that Ehrenreich's books are intended for intellectual audiences, bypassing the mainstream. "Do I purposely gear my books towards any one group? No. When I write (books such as Bait and Switch) I don't have an intended audience. I do my best to write about the experience without an agenda for any specific group of people."

Ehrenreich's work has been known to strike up some partisan rancor from the conservative end of the spectrum. When conservative UNC-CH students discovered they were required to read Ehrenreich they (with the help of local Republican legislators) ran a full page ad in the local paper denouncing the author as a Marxist, and an enemy of the American family. With this level of controversy over Nickel and Dimed, one wonders if her new book was also met with conservative opposition. "Most of the people who come to my book signings," Ehrenreich notes, "are interested in what I have to say and have found themselves in similar positions as the people in the book… being laid off, or feeling like there is little job security where there once was."

Ehrenreich criticizes job coaches and personality tests for using seemingly empirical approaches to determine suitability for certain professions. She writes in Bait and Switch that she raced through the Myers-Briggs Test "with the mad determination of a monkey that's been given a typewriter and assigned to generate Shakespeare's oeuvre." The Myers-Briggs test has been administered for decades and has been a long-time staple of corporate personality testing. When asked about the cynical approach to taking such personality tests, she responds "How can someone definitively say they when they go out for the day whether they always plan or always 'just go?' These seem pretty situational to me."