"Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in Bait and Switch, she enters another hidden realm of the economy: the shadowy world of the white-collar unemployed." "Bait and Switch highlights the people who've done everything right - gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive resumes - yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle. Today's ultralean corporations take pride in shedding their "surplus" employees - plunging them, for months or years at a stretch, into the twilight zone of white-collar unemployment, where job-searching becomes a full-time job in itself. As Ehrenreich discovers, America's middle class is now the loser in a classic game of bait and switch, in which the promise of upward mobility and financial security has given way to a harsh reality of limited social supports for newly disposable workers - and no guarantees even for those who have jobs."--Publishers note.

Focuses on the world of white-collar unemployment as seen through the eyes of the unemployed, describing the woes of "surplus" employees who are forced to confront the realities of financial hardship with few social supports or security.