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

“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 previous 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

“Today, white-collar job insecurity is no longer a function of the business cycle--rising as the stock market falls and declining again when the numbers improve. Nor is it confined to a few volatile sectors like telecommunications or technology, or a few regions like the rust belt or Silicon Valley. The economy may be looking up, the company may be raking in cash, and still the layoffs continue, like a perverse form of natural selection, weeding out the talented and successful as well as the mediocre. Since the midnineties, this perpetual winnowing process has been institutionalized under various euphemisms such as "downsizing," right-sizing," "smart-sizing," "restructuring," and "de-layering"—to which we can now add the outsourcing of white-collar functions to cheaper labor markets overseas.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“job searching, properly undertaken, should be far more time-consuming than an actual job: “If you have a job, then you might have the luxury of working 9:00 to 5:00. If you’re getting a job, then plan on twelve to sixteen hours a day.”1”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream