Bait and Switch Quotes

“This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders--orders which are in this case self-generated.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“For all the talk about the need to be a likable "team player," many people work in a fairly cutthroat environment that would seem to be especially challenging to those who possess the recommended traits. Cheerfulness, upbeatness, and compliance: these are the qualities of subordinates -- of servants rather than masters, women (traditionally, anyway) rather than men. After advising his readers to overcome the bitterness and negativity engendered by frequent job loss and to achieve a perpetually sunny outlook, management guru Harvey Mackay notes cryptically that "the nicest, most loyal, and most submissive employees are often the easiest people to fire." Given the turmoil in the corporate world, the prescriptions of niceness ring of lambs-to-the-slaughter.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say science and journalism - a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces.
Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“the very notion of personality, which is what we are trying to get at here, seems to have very limited application to me and quite possibly to everyone else. Self is another dodgy concept, since I am, when I subject this 'I' to careful inspection, not much more than a flickering of affinities, habits, memories, and predilections that could go either way- towards neediness or independence for example courage or cowardice.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“If anyone can testify credibly to the decline of the American dream, it is the white-collar unemployed—the people who “played by the rules,” “did everything right,” and still ended up in ruin.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“Suppose that the [career] transition zone encouraged free-ranging discussion. What might the topics of conversation be? For a start, people might want to address the question of what is happening in the corporate world today; in particular, why does experience seem to be so little valued and accomplishment so unreliably rewarded? Some may object that corporate world is a vague abstraction, concealing a rich diversity of environments, but it was in common use among my fellow job seekers, who often expressed hopes of escaping from it—into a small business, for example, or what they saw as a more meaningful form of work. In saying that I was searching for a corporate position, I seemed to be moving in the opposite direction from many of my fellow seekers, who often expressed a strong desire to get out.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“Capitalism, as Marx observed—with surprising admiration for its dynamism—never promised stability, and it’s been a generation since blue-chip companies like IBM offered their white-collar workers a job for life. As the best-seller Who Moved My Cheese advises, dislocated professionals must learn to adapt to new flavors of cheese as the old ones are taken away. But when skilled and experienced people routinely find their skills unwanted and their experience discounted, then something has happened that cuts deep into the very social contract that holds us together.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“Middle-class Americans, like myself and my fellow seekers, have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security. This has never been true of the working class, most of which toils away at wages incommensurate with the effort required. And now, the sociologists agree, it is increasingly untrue of the educated middle class that stocks our corporate bureaucracies.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“Less mutable qualities, like age, may have worked against me too. My résumé revealed only that I was probably over forty. But even that relatively youthful status could have repulsed many potential employers. Business journalist Jill Andresky Fraser warned me that a forty-plus woman was unlikely to be hired except by someone seeking a “motherly secretary,” Katherine Newman, among others, has documented corporate age discrimination, quoting, for example, a Wall Street executive who told her, “Employers think that [if you’re over forty] you can’t think anymore. Over fifty and [they think] you’re burned out.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“And no matter how upbeat they are—no matter how ingenious and flexible—the unemployed and underemployed understand that the clock is always ticking in the background. The longer you are unemployed, the less likely you are to find an appropriate job, and entries like “sales associate,” “limo driver,” or “server” do not make an attractive filling for the growing Gap in one’s résumé. At the same time, you are inexorably aging past the peak of occupational attractiveness, which seems to lie somewhere in the midthirties now. Experience is not an advantage; in fact, as Richard Sennett notes of corporate employment, “as a person’s experience accumulates, it loses value.” So once you fall into the low-wage, survival-job trap, there’s a good chance that you will remain there—an unwilling transplant from a more spacious and promising world.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“I had pictured the corporate world that I seek to enter as a castle on a hill, outside of which the starving vagrants wander, beset upon by wolves and barbarian hordes, begging for entry into the safety of the fortified towers. But now I see there is another zone out here: a somewhat settled encampment, where people toil for uncertain rewards at minor tasks invented by the castle dwellers. There is an advantage to occupying this zone: you are free of the rigid conformity required of those who dwell inside; you can actually “Be Your Own Boss!” A few do very well, acquiring pink Cadillacs or fortunes from real estate deals. Many more are ruined or pour themselves into efforts that generate near-poverty-level earnings year after year. There is no safety out here; the wolves keep circling.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“As the New York Times reported in June 2004: “The most common rejection letter nowadays seems to be silence. Job hunting is like dating, only worse, as you sit by the phone for the suitor who never calls.” The feeling is one of complete invisibility and futility: you pound on the door, you yell and scream, but the door remains sealed shut in your face.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“One thing I’ve learned, though: a Gap of any kind, for any purpose—child raising, caring for an elderly parent, recovering from an illness, or even consulting—is unforgivable. If you haven’t spent every moment of your life making money for somebody else, you can forget about getting a job.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“I decide to ask a question that’s been on my mind for months: “Why, when job searching could be totally rationalized by the Internet through a simple matching of job seekers’ skills to company needs, does everything seem to depend on this old-fashioned, face-to-face networking? After all, there’s going to be an interview anyway, right?”

“It’s about trust,” Ron answers opaquely, not to mention “likability.” “The higher up you get in the exec ranks, the more things depend on being likable. You’ve got to fit in.”

I catch my right hand advancing toward Ron’s untouched French fries and quickly revise the gesture into a reach for the salt. It’s distracting to think that our major economic enterprises, on which the livelihoods and well-being of millions depend, rest so heavily on the thin goo of “likability.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“I get the impression that the whole executive life cycle has changed a lot in the last few decades,” I tell him, “and that a lot of people just aren’t prepared, emotionally or any other way.” Hoping to establish my hereditary membership in the executive class, I cite my father, who worked for Gillette for over twenty years and identified so deeply with the firm that no competing products were allowed in the house. Now, however, people seem to be churned out of their companies every three years or so. Ron confirms my impression; an executive today can count on having eight to nine jobs in a lifetime. “You always think the next job will be the last one, but it never is.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“What we want from a career narrative is some moral thrust, some meaningful story we can, as [Richard] Sennett suggests, tell our children. The old narrative was “I worked hard and therefore succeeded” or sometimes “I screwed up and therefore failed.” But a life of only intermittently rewarded effort—working hard only to be laid off, and then repeating the process until aging forecloses decent job offers—requires more strenuous forms of explanation. Either you look for the institutional forces shaping your life, or you attribute the unpredictable ups and downs of your career to an infinitely powerful, endlessly detail-oriented God.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“I concentrate on Anna, noting the carefully put-together earth-toned outfit—could it be that all women of a certain age are assigned to earth tones?”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“In my exhausted state, it seemed to me that this aesthetic permeates all aspects of the world I have entered: narrative-free résumés dominated by bullets; motel-like, side-of-the-highway churches; calculated smiles; sensuality-suppressing wardrobes; precise instruction sheets; numerous slides.

It works, more or less, this realm of perfect instrumentality; it makes things happen: deadlines are met; reservations are made; orders delivered on time; carpets kept reliably speck-free. But something has also been lost. Weber described the modern condition as one of “disenchantment,” meaning “robbed of the gods,” or lacking any dimension of strangeness and mystery. As Jackson Lears once put it, premodern people looked up and saw heaven; modern, rational people see only the sky. To which we might add that the minions of today’s grimly focused business culture tend not to look up at all.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“The career coaching industry can only expand. Whether or not the economy improves. And this is because the corporate world has changed. Today, in the wake of the last recession, companies are intent on being permanently lean; they churn people in and out as needed, so that the average executive or professional can expect to hold—what?—about ten or eleven jobs in a lifetime whether he or she wants to or not. And it’s interesting, isn’t it, that our society is so unprepared for this change. College, for example, prepares people for jobs, but not for the trauma of job change.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“I know I have no problem in the area of “too sexy,” “too busty,” or distractingly beautiful, but it is clear that for any woman, of any age or condition, being female is something to compensate for.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“Robert Jackall’s book [Moral Mazes] impressed on me that corporate dress serves a far more important function than mere body covering. “Proper management of one’s external appearances,” he writes, “simply signals to one’s superiors that one is prepared to undertake other kinds of self-adaptation.” By dressing correctly, right down to the accessories, you let it be known that you are willing to conform in other ways too—that you can follow orders, for example, and blend in with the prevailing “culture.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“My major takeaway from Ron, now that I have a chance to reflect, is that getting a job is like gaining acceptance into an eighth-grade clique. There exists an elite consisting of people who hold jobs and have the power to confer that status on others, and my task is to penetrate this elite. Since my actual eighth-grade status never advanced beyond that of loathsome pariah and nerd, I have no practical experience of elite crashing, but it makes sense to include a ruthless scrutiny of the “product” I am trying to sell.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“As for posting your résumé on job boards like Monster.com—don’t even bother, if only because you’ll want to send a customized résumé for each job you apply for. I can only wonder what “customizing” involves and how much it borders on fraud.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“As he speaks, his eyes slither warily from one of us to another, reminding me of the Time Warner executives I once lunched with years ago, who seemed poised at all times between arrogance and deference, nervously calculating which to project. A line from a Robert Lowell poem comes to mind: “a savage servility/slides by on grease.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“But the white collar workforce seems to consist of two groups: those who can’t find work at all and those who are employed in jobs where they work much more than they want to. In between lies a scary place where you dedicate long hours to a job that you sense is about to eject you, if only because so many colleagues have been laid off already.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“[Networking] feels fake because we know it involves the deflection of our natural human sociability to an ulterior end. Normally we meet strangers in the expectation that they may truly be strange, and are drawn to the multilayered mystery that each human presents. But in networking, as in prostitution, there is no time for fascination. The networker is always, so to speak, looking over the shoulder of the person she engages in conversation, toward whatever concrete advantage can be gleaned from the interaction—a tip or a precious contact.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“Do I usually show my feelings freely or keep my feelings to myself? Hmm, depends on how socially acceptable those feelings might be. If it’s a desire to inflict grievous bodily harm on some person currently in my presence—well, no.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“If she doesn’t know I’m a complete fake, and I don’t think I’ve given her any reason to suspect that I am, she nonetheless has a remarkably clear idea of how to perpetrate the fakery. Which may just be the essence of résumé writing.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“I think of my father, whose personality traits included brash, cynical, bombastic, obnoxious, charming, kindly, and falling-down drunk, yet who managed to rise from the copper mines of Butte to the corporate stratosphere, ending up as vice president of research for a multinational firm. Did he ever take a personality test or submit to executive coaching? Or were things different in the fifties and sixties, with a greater emphasis on what you could actually do?”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream