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Ehrenreich Working Poor

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The working poor do not have themselves to blame for their failure to get a job, according to the author of Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich. Despite going to college, getting career coaches, and having experience, Ehrenreich said that people still have trouble getting jobs in today’s society, which she explores in her book, Bait and Switch. Ehrenreich spoke Tuesday at Ken’s Bookshop in Alma about her new book and the research she did for it. In addition, she spoke out about economic hardships and ways we can make it easier to help the working poor. In order to understand the struggle that people go through and to make her book more realistic, Ehrenreich went undercover as someone who was searching for a job. What she discovered was an …show more content…

“I had a tailored shirt with a tailored jacket, and both the shirt and the jacket had pointy lapels. Well, as he told me, in effect, pointy lapels frighten men. I don’t know what they think we’ll do with them, but there it was.” Even after all of her career counseling and preparation for the corporate world, Ehrenreich still struggled to find a job. “The strangest thing to me, though, about my experiences with the corporate culture here is the kind of mysticism that pervades it,” Ehrenreich said. “Again and again in these networking groups, bootcamp interviewer, we were told that everything that happens to you is because of your attitude.” She could not believe that this kind of thing was being said to people who had lost their jobs, almost like the unemployed were being blamed for their own hardships. She said that when this happens it is “victim-blaming of a particularly ugly kind.” To add to the misfortune of being unemployed, many people without jobs also do not have the “luxury” of health insurance, Ehrenreich pointed out. She said that with most corporate jobs, they get health insurance as part of their benefits, but that does not mean they get to keep it

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