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

Book by Barbara Ehrenreich · 4 quotes · Work, Business, Jobs

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

“I decide to ask a question that’s been on my mind for months: “Why, when job searching could be totally rationalized by the Internet through a simple matching of job seekers’ skills to company needs, does everything seem to depend on this old-fashioned, face-to-face networking? After all, there’s going to be an interview anyway, right?” “It’s about trust,” Ron answers opaquely, not to mention “likability.” “The higher up you get in the exec ranks, the more things depend on being likable. You’ve got to fit in.” I catch my right hand advancing toward Ron’s untouched French fries and quickly revise the gesture into a reach for the salt. It’s distracting to think that our major economic enterprises, on which the livelihoods and well-being of millions depend, rest so heavily on the thin goo of “likability.”

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“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.”

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“I get the impression that the whole executive life cycle has changed a lot in the last few decades,” I tell him, “and that a lot of people just aren’t prepared, emotionally or any other way.” Hoping to establish my hereditary membership in the executive class, I cite my father, who worked for Gillette for over twenty years and identified so deeply with the firm that no competing products were allowed in the house. Now, however, people seem to be churned out of their companies every three years or so. Ron confirms my impression; an executive today can count on having eight to nine jobs in a lifetime. “You always think the next job will be the last one, but it never is.”

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“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.”

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