Monday, February 08, 2010

Bait and Switch

While reading Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch, my immediate thoughts were "wow this sounds like something fun to do." She creates a new persona and tries to land a new career with this new "person". Then she goes on to really botch things up and pontificate on her beliefs. Her methods of searching for jobs seems to be to pay people money and fly all over the country.
I guess if that seems fun, go for it.
In this world, however, there seem to be a lot of depressed people, and not much in the order of real jobs. But, hey, she wasn't really looking for a job. She was looking for a way to "infiltrate" the white color world and report on how evil it is.
Unfortunately, her failure to actually land a job make it more of an exposé of the "job transitions" industry. (Perhaps people really were able to pick up that she was only doing this "artificially", and become more willing to take her money without bringing results.)
The further attacks on the corporate world, alas, seem very forced. Instead of going in to the 'experiment' with an open mind, she seems to start with notions of how corporations are destroying America, and then proceeds to interpret her failings as support of that view. These arguments distract from would otherwise be a funny story of somebody bumbling through an artificial high-cost, low-result "job hunt."

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