White-Collar Blues

Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream is about her experience of white-collar unemployment—at a time when 20 percent of the unemployed are white-collar professionals—1.6 million people. This is another first-person story about Barbara going underground into the world of work and taking notes. For this project, Ehrenreich made some rules for herself: she needed a new identity, so that potential employers wouldn't be able to Google her. (When I searched for "Barbara Ehrenreich" I got 2,750,000 results.) So she changed legally back to her birth name, Barbara Alexander, and got a Social Security card that matched. Then she had to come up with a plausible set of skills. Because she's a writer and public speaker, she decided to market herself in the field of "public relations"—she calls it "journalism's evil twin." Her rules decreed that she would "do everything possible to land a job," that she would "go anywhere for a job or even an interview," and that she would "take the first job I was offered that met my requirements as to income and benefits." She planned to devote ten months and five thousand dollars for travel and expenses to the job search. The plan was that, once she got a job, she would work at it for a while before quitting and writing about it.