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Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

Book by Barbara Ehrenreich · 2 quotes · Work, Business, Jobs

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Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream Quotes

“And no matter how upbeat they are—no matter how ingenious and flexible—the unemployed and underemployed understand that the clock is always ticking in the background. The longer you are unemployed, the less likely you are to find an appropriate job, and entries like “sales associate,” “limo driver,” or “server” do not make an attractive filling for the growing Gap in one’s résumé. At the same time, you are inexorably aging past the peak of occupational attractiveness, which seems to lie somewhere in the midthirties now. Experience is not an advantage; in fact, as Richard Sennett notes of corporate employment, “as a person’s experience accumulates, it loses value.” So once you fall into the low-wage, survival-job trap, there’s a good chance that you will remain there—an unwilling transplant from a more spacious and promising world.”

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“Less mutable qualities, like age, may have worked against me too. My résumé revealed only that I was probably over forty. But even that relatively youthful status could have repulsed many potential employers. Business journalist Jill Andresky Fraser warned me that a forty-plus woman was unlikely to be hired except by someone seeking a “motherly secretary,” Katherine Newman, among others, has documented corporate age discrimination, quoting, for example, a Wall Street executive who told her, “Employers think that [if you’re over forty] you can’t think anymore. Over fifty and [they think] you’re burned out.”

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Book:Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
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