Bait and Switch
"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.
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- With the economy in the tank, disqualifying the unemployed simply makes it easier to reduce the stack of resumes which must be passed to the hiring manager. It is hardly news - read Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich which covered this issue while the boom was still happening in 2006.
http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/baitandswitch.htm
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- If you liked Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed,"[0] you might like a few of her unrelated books as well. I highly recommend her "Dancing in the Streets,"[1] a 5,000 year history of the deadening of European culture (at Europeans' own hands, no less) that pairs nicely with Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000"[2], a book of similar pacing, as well as a much shorter book on the gendered professionalization/demolition of the medical practice in the medieval era titled "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses" or "W.M.N."[3]
Her "Bait and Switch,"[4] however, about the white-collar unemployment industry I found dull and unenlightening.
0. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1869.Nickel_and_Dimed
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24452.Dancing_in_the_Str...
2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt
3. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24453.Witches_Midwives_a...
4. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24450.Bait_and_Switch
- There are so many issues in all this. I think most self-help and how-to-be-an-entrepreneur books target people who don't read much. On the one hand, it's the bigger market! on the other hand, they don't read much.
These days, most or a large portion of books that have involve substance and research written by academics, who probably would like the books to make money but are OK with them not making money 'cause they still get fame and possibly academic kudos. Of course, there are professional researchers and writers who make a living publishing but they have their substance, they have their niche and they need only very specific advice as opposed to the (apparently confused) generalities of the article.
And thing the author of this website is he seems to aim to sell a book about getting rich writing books and those books would have to be about getting rich too. It's more a multilevel marketing scheme - which doesn't mean someone won't rich here but the entire enterprise is grim and not something I'd want to read about - well, Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait And Switch is somewhat interesting. But still.
- >" As far as I know no chakras have been found during any dissection nor have we found any evidence of them indirectly. So any claims made on the basis of chakras are invalid as far as I'm concerned."
Were someone to dissect you, they would not find your concern, or any other mental state (or your personality either). However, it would be absurd to argue that therefore you have no concern on that basis.
"Concentrate on your breathing to reduce your stress" suffers from the same problem. Upon dissection, there would be no breathing. Furthermore, "concentrate" is no less problematic than "chakra" within a logical-positivist framework.
None of which is to deny that many life coaches may be FOS -- I found Ehrenreich's description of them in Bait and Switch consistent with my observations.
- Shot down by whom?
There's nothing preventing someone from hanging a shingle as a recruiter.
That's what I was getting at.
Edit: Recruiting is one of those "make your own jobs" Ehrenreich describes in Bait and Switch.
