HAS 'BAIT AND SWITCH' HAPPENED TO YOU?

Byline: David Kronke Television Writer

Social critic Barbara Ehrenreich was bemused by the media hand-wringing at the plight of the working poor in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. After all, she examined the issue by trying to subsist in low-paying jobs for her book ``Nickel and Dimed,'' which has consistently been on best-seller lists since it was released in 2001, so one would imagine that some journalist might have read it.

``I recently had an interview with a well-known television show about, oh! the discovery of poverty,'' Enrenreich says with a laugh over an iced coffee at Pasadena's Vromans bookstore. ``It takes a lot for the American media to discover poverty now and then.''

They might pay a little closer attention to her latest best-seller, ``Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream'' (Metropolitan Books; $24), which hits closer to home. This time, Ehrenreich explores the plight of white-collar workers forced from jobs by cheapskate corporations trimming expenses; the results aren't pretty.

She posed as a job-seeker with a resume based on some of her own experience but not all (putting ``best-selling author'' on it would have given away the game). In the (demoralizing) process, she discovered just how vexingly difficult it is for middle-aged workers who spent their lives playing by the rules (getting college degrees; demonstrating loyalty to their employers) to stay in the game once the rules have changed and their employers dump them for lower-salaried, younger workers.

``I think we don't take age discrimination as seriously in this country as we should,'' Ehrenreich says. ``This seemed to be pervasive. People told me (they were canned because) 'I was paid more than anyone else; I was older and more experienced.' This goes to this fundamental shift since the '90s where you see employees not as assets - you see them as expenses.''

In the book, Ehrenreich relates her grimly comic travails in the job-hunters' market: Attending feel-good networking seminars that accomplished nothing (except, in some instances, religious proselytizing), taking batteries of discredited personality tests (one of which informed her she was ``not suited to be a writer'') and learning how to apply makeup in a manner that would make her attractive, yet not overly feminize her.

Much of this advice didn't come cheap, but much of it was nonetheless useless.

``What I was alarmed by very quickly in this (process) was this expectation that you have to smile and be perky,'' she recalls. ``Everybody in the world of job-seeking has to act. This is a bad sign about corporate America, as an efficient economic unit, when there's more premium put on personality and - one of the words they use, 'likability' - than skills or experience. If you are focusing your hiring on people who are upbeat, well-dressed and likable, you get Michael Brown running FEMA. Everything pointed to a culture of incompetence.''

Ehrenreich says that the recent disaster in the Gulf Coast can be tied into her book's central message. ``What we learned from Katrina is, in a large-scale disaster, the cavalry isn't coming; on the individual scale, with a job loss and the subsequent loss of insurance and so on, there is nothing to help you,'' she says. ``The safety net is so thin.''

Her book recommends that the unemployed, the under-employed and the anxiously employed band together to attain health insurance for those displaced as well as champion more corporate responsibility toward employees.

``There wasn't much camaraderie amongst the job seekers,'' she says. ``We're at a point where we don't seem to realize that, yes, we are individually weak and getting jerked around, but together we can make a change. What is missing too much at this point in American culture is any sense of collective action. That?s a big message I try to get out.''

David Kronke, [phone]

david.kronke(at)dailynews.com

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2 photos

Photo:

(1) EHRENREICH

(2) no caption (book: ``Bait and Switch'')