Here is an excerpt, first published in the Guardian, from Bait And Switch, by Barbara Ehrenreich, published by Granta on March 6, ie yesterday. Me wants.

The plan was straightforward enough: to find a job, a “good” job, which I defined minimally as a white-collar position that would provide health insurance and an income of about $50,000 a year, enough to land me solidly in the middle class. The job itself would give me a rare first-hand glimpse of the mid-level corporate world, and the effort to find it would, of course, place me among the most hard-pressed white-collar corporate workers – the ones who don’t have jobs.

Middle-class Americans, like myself and my fellow seekers, have been raised with the old-time Protestant expectation that hard work will be rewarded with material comfort and security. This has never been true of the working class, and now it is increasingly untrue of the educated middle class that stocks our corporate bureaucracies. What sets the white-collar corporate workers apart and leaves them so vulnerable is the requirement that they identify, absolutely and unreservedly, with their employers.