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How long does it take to read Bait and Switch?

The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

Barbara Ehrenreich

Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich takes about 4 hours 33 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 33 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2005. 248 pages, about 68,200 words.

10 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 7 hours 35 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 33 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 51 minutes

The page count is the median across 11 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

"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.

Subjects: Arbeidsmobiliteit, Mobilité descendante (Sciences sociales), White collar workers, Cols blancs, Downward mobility (Social sciences), Displaced workers

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