RT : Whistleblower reveals how 
Whistleblower reveals how insurers can position healthcare bill || bait-and-switch so what's new? I am tired of GREED
Testing aardvark. Registration bait&switch is not controlled. Fuck you and enjoy your mailinator.
-- (contd) and not take apart a bait and switch
SHUTTER Cay: Okay, not great. Didn't bring a whole lot of new stuff to the psychological thriller bait-and-switch genre.Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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Customer Reviews
I am a $11/hour M.A. AND I outsource!!The stew with this book is not that its anger is misplaced, but that it's about 2 or 3 decades too late to make any difference. Ms. Ehrenreich is way behind the curve! The whole paradigm of line and economic activity in this country has been doing a 180 since the 1960s. While I understand Baby Boomers' appal at the changes wrought in the economy and the disappearance of "job security", it's really not new. The cradle-to-grave "job" of the 1960s was a blip on the radar of sympathetic history. For most of history, the vast majority of people have been self-employed in various trades. My glaring-grandfathers were all farmers or grocers, and were basically self-employed. Only my parents' generation, who were pushed off the farms in the 1960s, were encouraged to get "jobs" in the intelligibility that we understand them now. The college-industrial complex adapted its mission to better churn out white collar cogs to business as "employees" in the large companies that grew out of that period. The Kauffmann Foundation recently released a communiqu showing that virtually all job creation is done at the level of small startup companies - since at least 1977. So why does Ms. Ehrenreich sensation that United Professionals can organize to make large corporations play fair, when large corporations essentially NEVER create new jobs anyway? Her efforts and energy would be better focused on discovering how newly-unemployed, milk-white collar formerly-corporate-cogs can shift their mentality from "employee" to "entrepreneur". As long as the unemployed are encouraged to send out yet another continue, and to go on yet another job interview, they will keep digging themselves a hole. The unemployed are better off applying for only 1 or 2 jobs a month (whatever the minimum is to keep their unemployement guaranty benefits coming in) and spending the bulk of their time with a SCORE representative to work on finding a furnish niche and a product or service they can form their own business around. Job hunting is a total waste of time chore-2008. Books like Dan Miller's "48 Days to the Work You Love" and "No More Mondays" can assistants anyone unemployed identify a new passion and focus for moving forward, but probably not the same type of job you had before. Books like Pat O'Bryan's "Your Pocket Empire" can teach anyone on a shoestring budget to leverage their existing knowledge and talents to build a remaining income from their own digital information products. Seth Godin's "Tribes", "Purple Cow" and "Linchpin" can lift people nostalgic for the 60s work model to change their paradigm quickly so that they can survive the new world of business. "Ali Magazine" is particularly useful for women in white collar professions to learn how to leverage their proficiency by building successful online businesses. Following Ali Brown's example you can start small, with an ezine or email newsletter in your place. A "minimalist business" model like this can generate a full-time income for you, if you work hard at it, in about 9 to 18 months (longer if you still have a job and can only interpose away at it in your spare time). Mailchimp lets you have a free account for up to your first 500 subscribers. Set up a disentangle web site on Weebly or Yola to sign up subscribers. Make a short report to give away, or start a blog, to lure readers to your newsletter. And yes, if your former employer can outsource your job, you too can certainly outsource your own sales copy, website sketch out, etc etc, for pennies on the dollar, using sites like vWorker. I outsourced the code for my own software effect for under $100. I'm ready to build my business. There is no more security in a "job". There never will be again. You can join organizations, read books by Ms. Ehrenreich and beef as much as you like, but the idea of "job security" and having an employer take care of you is a dead horse you're beating. Comprehend this book, give yourself a day or so to grieve for the past, and set your feet on a firm path for the future. The "good jobs" aren't coming back. Do yourself a favor and delineate accordingly. (All of the aforementioned books and magazines are available on Amazon.com).
Barbara, your disdain is showing
I infatuation NICKELED AND DIMED because I believe in Ms. Ehrenreich's compassion for the waitresses and hotel maids among whom she posed and about whom she wrote. Reading BAIT AND SWITCH has been an fully different experience for me. I sense that she has contempt for white-collar workers who have dared to reach for the American Delusion and fallen out of the workforce, and who face foreclosure on their homes, forfeiture of their children's college plans, and the unqualifiedness to pay their medical bills.
The book's exposition of the predatory "transition industry"--a profession largely driven by smooth-tongued and facile laid-off white-collar workers--is very valuable, but I shudder at her sarcastic and sometimes cruel evaluations of the people who are unshielded to the predators.
It is granite-like to find professional work under a false identity
The central idea of this book is that Barbara Ehrenreich would follow up on the success of Nickeled and Dimed by doing an make known on the horrible experience of looking for white color employment and then would actually work briefly in a corporation, which she expected to be equally horrific. Her attitude for this project is that corporate America is like a weird Amazonian tribe which she has heard a lot about, all very bad, and that view heavily biases everything in the book. The project is unsuccessful, since she never actually gets a single suitable job make and never works in a corporation, although this lack of experience of corporate life does not stop her from endlessly generalizing about how bad mortal is for the hapless souls who do work for corporations.
This failure is no surprise since the core of her project is trying to frame and sell a fake identity. She cannot find work in the pharmaceutical industry as a public relations professional since in fait accompli she has never worked in public relations or in the pharmaceutical industry, knows nothing about either one, and has no relevant professional contacts. She creates variations on her forged identity so often that there is some comedy when she talks to a potential employer on the phone and cannot remember which phony resume the passive employer has in hand, and therefore is unsure of how to present herself.
She also goes out of her way to waste time and money on a large diversification of the semi-parasites eager to help job seekers for a fee. It is obvious early in the book that the various job hunting and take up again coaches are fairly useless, but she goes on and on about them. When they do give some sensible, if basic advice (have a positive attitude, industry hard on a job search since a job will not fall out of the sky into her lap, take care of her appearance and be pleasant so that potential employers will get a favorable sentiment of her as a future coworker, etc.), she is unreceptive.
The fact is that looking for a job is a difficult process, and it is harder and longer the better the job being sought. Ms. Ehrenreich attributes the unpleasantness and futility of her ordeal to corporate culture, but one of the longest and most unpleasant job hunting experiences I know was a relative who lost a older job with a non-profit, and took a year to find a lower level replacement job with a state government agency. The hornet's nest is not corporate America, it is the process of looking for a good job, in any sector, and of course it is longer and more frustrating if the applicant is, like Ms. Ehrenreich, unprepared for the job being sought.
Impractical cannot find a job
While the enlist has some interesting anecdotes about shucksters who prey upon unemployed white collar workers, the overall dampen is that if Barbara cannot find a corporate job then the system must have failed. Despite having absolutely no real life work happening she feels as if she can pose as a PR Manager. After a year of trying she can't. So if an academic book writer cannot fake her way through corporate america, then the system must be unsound, or perhaps it is her high level of intelligence that must be getting in the way. That's it, she is just too smart to have a job.
how not to look for a job
Reading this register made me so grateful to have a job that I may postpone retirement. Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover to join the ranks of the over-40, ashen-collar unemployed, to find a job in corporate America. However, she has to fabricate her resumé and is seeking a high-level feeling in public relations. Somehow, I have to give corporate America some credit for not hiring this fraud. In her quest, she seems to make every confuse with possible--spending outlandish amounts of money on greedy and unqualified career coaches, networking in the first instance with other job seekers, and aiming too high. I'm not sure if these mistakes were due to her lack of experience in corporate America or if she made them intentionally for the perks of the book. In any case, I think she stereotypes corporations as unethical, unimaginative, and intolerant of dissent, and I don't about she's qualified to make these generalizations. A business is in the business of making money, and I work for a very large, broad corporation, but I don't see it as bland and heartless, although I expect that many of my co-workers do. The author also makes blanket statements about how corporations upon their employees to be upbeat and often make new hires based on personality rather than experience. What she apparently fails to perceive is that one chronic complainer can affect the morale of everyone around him/her, and poor morale is the bane of every company's existence. On the other participation, I don't think most companies discourage well-formulated ideas for positive change. Sure, there are a lot of Enrons and AIGs out there, and corporate American has certainly earned a atrocious eye with all their misdeeds and cover-ups, but I'm still naïve enough to believe that some corporations do still value their employees as their most irreplaceable asset.
