Middle-Class Misery
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

It was difficult not to recoil from Barbara Ehrenreich’s last book, “Nickel and Dimed.” A bit of stunt journalism in which Ms. Ehrenreich took jobs as a cleaning woman and Wal-Mart clerk, it was notable mainly for the astonishing lack of moral empathy with which she wrote of those who work 40- and 50-hour weeks for four-figure incomes.
The one classic of this genre, “Down and Out in Paris and London,” works so well because of George Orwell’s brutal honesty. Because he was capable of examining the causes and effects of his contempt and disgust for the poor, but also because he was simply willing to admit to it, Orwell arrived at an honest appreciation of what it was like to be truly poor.
Ms. Ehrenreich brought no such capacity for self-examination to the job, and so wrote a frigid and guilt-ridden book in which people were reduced to the sum of their economic circumstances. Still, despite its flaws, the book was well worth reading, if only because the subject matter was so vitally important and so underserved in serious journalism that it survived bad treatment.
“Bait and Switch” (Metropolitan Books, 237 pages, $24) is something of a sequel to “Nickel and Dimed,” this time dealing with the middle rather than the working class. It is, basically, the same book. The subject of this one is equally pressing, but what were minor flaws in the earlier book become monstrous in the new one.
The conceit here is that Ms. Ehrenreich is trying to find a stable, white-collar job in public relations. She intends to land a job, study the corporate workplace for a few months, and then report on her findings. Largely because of her gross lack of qualifications for such a position, this doesn’t work, and so the subject changes. Ms. Ehrenreich spends a year looking for a job, during which time she deals with networking events, job-hunting Web sites, and inept coaches who change her wardrobe and resume and have her take ridiculous, mystical personality tests.
What seems to offend Ms. Ehrenreich more than anything is the sheer tackiness of the world of the job-hunter. There’s cruelty in her descriptions of a career coach’s “modest ranch house … decorated in a style I recognize as middle-class Catholic, circa 1970,” of a job hunter’s meeting in a “sad, tacky restaurant” where she’s served “tough chicken breast strips residing in a Campbell’s soup flavored sauce,” and of the churches and hotel conference rooms where much of the work of a job hunter is done in America.
Ms. Ehrenreich never seems to register her own disgust, however, and never turns it back on herself. She never asks why dated interior decorating or bad food bother her, and thus doesn’t quite seem to understand why they might bother those who have to put up with them as a condition of their lives, or why the shabbiness of places like Atlanta is not the fundamental problem of the job hunter.
We all have our prejudices, but Ms. Ehrenreich’s refusal to examine her own drains all the blood out of her writing. Take one of the book’s running jokes – her inability to understand exactly what people in business do. One might take this as a shortcoming on her part, but Ms. Ehrenreich instead treats it as perfectly obvious that people who work in finance or accounting (let alone anything like systems administration) “perform complex, even – from my perspective – occult activities” beyond all human understanding. On the third page of the book, she admits that her experience with businessmen at a management level “has been limited to seeing these sorts of people on airplanes, where they study books on ‘leadership.'”
All this is meant to be wry and self-deprecating, but it’s the kind of nervous joking that hides a serious point. It’s impossible to imagine Ms. Ehrenreich referring to store clerks or janitors as “these sorts of people,” or putting the subject of their preferred reading matter in scare quotes. Doing so shows a fundamental contempt for businesspeople – and, much worse, a lack of curiosity about them. The work of IT specialists, network engineers, and accountants may be mysterious to Ms. Ehrenreich, but what’s more mysterious is why she never simply asks someone with a job she finds vague what exactly it is that they do.
Had she done so, Ms. Ehrenreich may have gained some insight into the broader forces behind white-collar unemployment and been able to offer something beyond lame prescriptions about the unemployed banding together and agitating for universal health care. The ruthlessness of the modern corporation, the instability and precariousness of middle-class American life, the reaction of a cloistered writer to the everyday realities of the average educated American – all of these are important subjects, and deserve better treatment than they’ve received here.