Time was when conservatives would dismiss out of hand another exposé by a leftist would-be rabble-rouser like Barbara Ehrenreich. But these being times of violent political realignment when Left and Right appear to merge, converge, and otherwise shape-shift all over the landscape, one approaches with an open mind any likely attempt to make sense of what ails us.

Ehrenreich earned a doctorate in biology but never entered the field professionally; her times—the early ’70s—seemed to demand activism for social change, and she decided to use her background to tackle issues of inequality, oppression, and exploitation in such periodicals as Ms., Harper’s, The New Republic, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. She became well known as a caustic, dependably radical voice, willing to attack the Left from the left if need be.

But nothing prepared her for the 2001 success of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. An interview from that year offers insight into her ongoing reservations about having chosen the scribbling/chattering life over that of the hands-on healer. Robert Birnbaum asked what she, in particular, brought to her book’s subject—the parlous paycheck-to-paycheck existence of America’s working poor—and she replied, “I like to think what was special about me … was that I actually did the work. I don’t mean the writing work, I mean I did the jobs. I take great pride in that.”

The question that torments every successful writer (“How do I top this?”) inevitably arose, and Ehrenreich cast about for some time before hitting upon the plight of laid-off white-collar professionals: evidence began pointing to “something seriously wrong within a socioeconomic group I had indeed neglected as too comfortable and too powerful to merit my concern.” As fodder for another bestseller, in other words, this group might now “merit her concern.” The crucial difference this time, however, is that while for the earlier book she had done a crackerjack job simulating a waitress and a Wal-Mart “associate,” among other low-wage occupations, to investigate the world of unemployed upper management, she now had to pass as one of them.

For a person so eager to search out and destroy any hint of duplicity in a politician or businessman, Ehrenreich is astonishingly nonchalant about the fact that for Bait and Switch she reverted to her maiden name and made up a new identity, resume, “skill set,” educational background, references, and so forth. Even more astonishing, she pays some lip service to the possibility that her failure to get hired by corporate America might have to do with not being who she claimed to be, but clearly she doesn’t view it as a major obstacle.

“Barbara Alexander’s” first step is to choose which field she will try to be hired into—“I had the disadvantage of never having held a white-collar job with a corporation.” She decides upon public relations, which she calls “journalism’s evil twin.” This is an apt characterization, as Barbara immediately discovers that “the essence of resume writing” is to “perpetrate fakery”; she even realizes that her own journalistic background—doing PR for the Left, i.e., “writing to persuade”—makes her an almost credible candidate for such jobs. “Deception is part of the game,” she marvels at one point.

Barbara’s second step is to line up job coaching in the “transition industry” for the white-collar unemployed. We are immediately introduced to her view of other people: unless they are in the most abjectly pitiable of states, her contempt seethes to the surface. Their clothes are questionable, their personal habits are a bit creepy, and they are just not very bright.

She does make some interesting observations. For instance, she nails the strange, pseudo-Zen, EST-derived fixation on “inner change” that underlies modern job coaching—although she is by no means the first person to do so—calling most of its lore “a pastiche of wispy New Age yearnings.” Her critique of the “science” of personality types is sound (they’ve proven to have “zero predictive value”) even as she dimly recognizes that she must somehow find a fit between herself and “any institutional structure that will have me.”

Barbara’s task, then, is to persuade some sucker in HR at some corporation that she wants to take the bait. What exactly is the “bait” referred to in the book’s title, what does it get “switched” to, and by whom? What she means by “bait” is never quite clear, but it seems to be the American Dream itself, still conceived of as secure lifelong employment at a paternalistic company, although such jobs have been scarce for a very long while.

Networking is step #3. Here Barbara learns that looking for a job is a full-time job, that “being unemployed may in and of itself disqualify one for a job” by creating a dreaded Catch-22 “gap” in one’s resume, and that, incredibly, “all the companies want to know is what I can do for them.” Again, she often describes social reality well enough. For instance, her description of the dull-eyed anomie of the white middle class is spot on: folk with no camaraderie, no bonhomie, no sense of community, no public presence of any kind, like strangers in a strange land trying to scuttle past without attracting attention.

But her analyses never delve below the descriptive, and this superficiality leads to several ironies. One such is the spectacle of a lifelong radical feminist discovering that when she pretends to be a displaced homemaker (in order to explain one large gap in her resume), it is now a black mark against her as a job-seeker to have been “sidelined” staying home to raise her own children. Too bad it’s an irony she’s unable to appreciate.

Another irony is her mocking description of the “magical thinking” that predominates in these self-help antechambers of the corporate world. It never occurs to Ehrenreich that such intellectual desperation—not to mention the phenomenon of ruthless layoffs itself—may have to do with the irrationalization of the business world introduced by affirmative-action measures. Why has it become the case that, as several people are quoted as saying bitterly, performance is no longer a guarantor either of job security or advancement? Ehrenreich does not inquire.

Furthermore, her ridicule of the fuzzy-minded “team player” mantra she hears everywhere—in coaching sessions, networking, at job fairs and seminars, in all the “transitional” literature—completely ignores its origin: in the anti-hierarchical thrust to make the workplace more “female-friendly.” It is enough for her to call the culprit “capitalism,” but that does not constitute an analysis.

For someone who demands the world’s sympathy (or compensatory state largesse, at the very least), Ehrenreich is remarkably unsympathetic toward those unlike herself. She is unable to comprehend the centrality to men of work, the derangement that joblessness produces in a man’s very self. Indeed, week after week she sits in rooms filled mostly with white, middle-class men, and never once takes note of the fact that the joblessness she’s investigating is a virtually all white-male phenomenon. Of course, it is now forbidden to politicize this class of person. All resentment of their dispossession is to be suppressed; it is too threatening; it might lead to “protofascist” thinking. Paul Craig Roberts has put it bluntly—“It’s open season on white males.”

So another irony: in her last chapter Ehrenreich advocates that the white-collar unemployed rise up, organize, get political, make demands, fight the power—but were they actually to do so, she and her fellow leftists would be the first to denounce them.

Actually, the solutions she proposes are the same stale old state-socialist boilerplate: (1) more government spending on “expansion of current unemployment benefits” to European levels (because then we could all go on perpetual welfare and then not have to resent the Third World taking our jobs) and (2) more government spending to provide “universal health care” to European standards. Companies can’t afford to offer their employees health care any more, but the government could afford anything, if only those in charge weren’t so greedy and mean.

Speaking of the Third World, the book mentions outsourcing a couple of times without analyzing any connection between it and the “downward mobility” Ehrenreich’s growing army of unemployed is experiencing. So much for fearlessly following the facts wherever they lead.

Yet this book lacks smack chiefly because Barbara is a fake. She has neither skills nor experience and should have aimed for entry-level positions she was qualified for rather than heading cocksurely for the top. Her situation might pluck at the heart had it been real; Ehrenreich even cites a number of books by the genuinely dumped and dispossessed which sound quite searing and well worth reading.

What she attempted here is a little like what Knut Hamsun did to write Hunger, what Orwell did to write Down and Out in Paris and London, but without the acute actual suffering those two writers underwent and without the shattering gaze into the face of their fellow man that those two forced themselves to sustain. In Barbara Alexander’s pantomime, “there [is] no sudden descent into poverty, nor any real sting of rejection” even. “An ordinary jobseeker might despair,” she shrugs, “but I have a unique advantage: I can simply upgrade [pad, inflate] my resume.” No harm is done when someone with a doctorate masquerades as a hotel maid, but what is the point of a dilettante trying to force her way into the executive suite? As she freely admits, she was selling a pig in a poke.

We take Me Journalism for granted now, a no longer remarkable feature of the feminization of culture, but books like this test the limits of the conceit. It is important for Me to be likable, and Ehrenreich is; but stripped of its gratuitous Me-talk, Bait and Switch is conceptually void. The author does not engage the material—the decline of economic stability, the disappearance of good jobs, the increasing anomie of social life, and the increasing ruthlessness of the marketplace—at a theoretical level high enough to draw useful conclusions. She is content to note, “Whatever wild process is chewing up men and women and spitting them out late in life, damage is definitely done.” It goes without saying that, for her, the “wild process” is capitalism, but is this phase new, or all bad, and can it be tamed, and if so, how?

As for the title of her book, it is Ehrenreich who’s pulling the bait-and-switch here, in more ways than one.

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Marian Kester Coombs writes from Crofton, Md