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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

“Today, white-collar job insecurity is no longer a function of the business cycle--rising as the stock market falls and declining again when the numbers improve. Nor is it confined to a few volatile sectors like telecommunications or technology, or a few regions like the rust belt or Silicon Valley. The economy may be looking up, the company may be raking in cash, and still the layoffs continue, like a perverse form of natural selection, weeding out the talented and successful as well as the mediocre. Since the midnineties, this perpetual winnowing process has been institutionalized under various euphemisms such as "downsizing," "right-sizing," "smart-sizing," "restructuring," and "de-layering"—to which we can now add the outsourcing of white-collar functions to cheaper labor markets overseas.”

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“But the white collar workforce seems to consist of two groups: those who can’t find work at all and those who are employed in jobs where they work much more than they want to. In between lies a scary place where you dedicate long hours to a job that you sense is about to eject you, if only because so many colleagues have been laid off already.”

JobsWorkBusinessWorkersWorkforceOverworkDownsizingPsychological SafetyLayoffsWhite Collar Workers
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“Capitalism, as Marx observed—with surprising admiration for its dynamism—never promised stability, and it’s been a generation since blue-chip companies like IBM offered their white-collar workers a job for life. As the best-seller Who Moved My Cheese advises, dislocated professionals must learn to adapt to new flavors of cheese as the old ones are taken away. But when skilled and experienced people routinely find their skills unwanted and their experience discounted, then something has happened that cuts deep into the very social contract that holds us together.”

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