BOOK REVIEW
REGIONAL LABOR REVIEW
Fall 2006
The Middle Class Professional at Risk: Review of Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch{PRIVATE } Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2005. reviewed by Russell Harrison
Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, taken in conjunction with her 1989 book, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, effects a kind of longitudinal study of this classically American stratum. In the earlier book she defined what she called "the professional middle class" as: all those people whose economic and social status is based on education, rather than on the ownership of capital or property. Most professionals are included, and so are white-collared managers, whose positions require at least a college degree, and increasingly also a graduate degree. . . . it includes such diverse types as schoolteachers, anchorpersons, engineers, professors, government bureaucrats, corporate executives (at least up through the middle levels of 1 management), scientists, advertising people, therapists, financial managers, architects . . . .
In that book she argued that the middle class was becoming worried and defensive about its socio-economic status as a result of a re-emerging (self-)consciousness of the working class. This middle class felt threatened and saw the professions as their "class fortresses." But as of the 1980s, it was more an anxiety than a fear. Soon enough, however, it had metamorphosed into a true fear of a true object: joblessness. Her new book concerns itself with this professional middle class, mostly with those individual members who have lost their jobs and are seeking new ones, who are, as the euphemism for unemployed now has it, "in transition." The title comes from the fact that these: are the ones who did "everything right." They earned higher degrees, often setting aside their youthful passion for philosophy or music to suffer through dull practical majors like management or finance. In some cases they were high achievers who ran into trouble precisely because they had risen far enough in the company for their salaries to look like a tempting cost cut. They were the losers, in other words, in a classic game of bait and switch. 2
In her next-to-last book, Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich became a low-waged American worker, living and working as such. In her new book she becomes "in transition," looking for a job as a public relations executive, calculating that such a job would call on her writing and public speaking skills. She changes her name (back to her maiden name, Alexander) and gets a new social security number and, budgeting $5000 for the task: The plan was straightforward enough: to find a job, a "good" job, which I defined minimally as a white-collar position that would provide health insurance and an income of about $50,000 a year, enough to land me solidly in the middle class. The job itself would give me a rare firsthand glimpse into the midlevel corporate world, and the effort to find it 2 would of course place me among the most hard-pressed white-collar corporate workers--the ones who don't have jobs.
Ehrenreich never achieves that "rare firsthand glimpse" because she never gets a "good" job. The book, thus, becomes a narrative of the various steps Ehrenreich takes towards that job that are typical of the unemployed professional.