When it comes to pursuing her craft, author Barbara Ehrenreich isn't afraid to get her hands dirty or her ego bruised.

For her best-selling book Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich scrubbed toilets, waited tables and stocked shelves at Wal-Mart to research the lives of those who survive on minimum wage. For Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, she attended awkward networking events, suffered through job-coaching sessions and took personality tests that revealed she probably wasn't a very good writer, in order to explore the trials of the white-collar unemployed.

The experiences have made Ehrenreich a sort of George Plimpton of the working world.

"I never imagined I'd have that sort of reputation," says Ehrenreich.

While the writer had to be talked into taking on a series of low-wage jobs for Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich acknowledges that joining the ranks of the jobless middle class was her idea.

"It just started with me getting letters from Nickel and Dimed readers who were in terrible situations. I'm talking about people getting eviction notices or those just diagnosed with cancer - who had a good education and once had a white-collar job and had been downsized," she explains by phone. "I thought there's another side to the story of poverty, and it doesn't get a lot of attention."

To investigate this trend of downward mobility among white-collar professionals, Ehrenreich decided to join the hordes of middle-class job-hunters. She set aside 10 months to land a mid- to upper-level corporate position, a task that required the author to carve out a new identify for herself. Instead of marketing herself as a best-selling author, Ehrenreich legally reclaimed her maiden name and pitched herself as a public relations professional who had left the workforce to raise children. She even bought a new pair of glasses to alter her appearance.

Despite those changes, Ehrenreich expected the assignment to be much less demanding than what she endured researching Nickel and Dimed.

"I was physically exhausted in a lot of the Nickel and Dimed jobs, but I liked the camaraderie of working with other people who were very kind and generous to me," Ehrenreich says on her way out of Portland, one of several stops on a busy book tour. "In the white-collar limbo, people seem to be kind of depressed, withdrawn and guarded."

Ehrenreich also says the white-collar world required more posturing than what she experienced during her blue-collar days.

"There were these constant exhortations to have a positive attitude, to be cheerful, to be perky at all times. That was really hard, and it's not me. I don't think it's anybody," she says.

While she found that most low- paying positions stressed skills, in her hunt for a white-collar job, personality seemed to take precedence.

"There's a lot of emphasis on things that I would've thought were irrelevant, like likability," she says. "You're being told all the time that hiring decisions are based on an emotional response to you rather than the skills and experience on your resume. To me, that seems pretty screwed up, and it gets you Michael Brown heading (the Federal Emergency Management Agency). He seems like a nice guy, but he was absolutely unsuited to the position he was in."

Although she had a thriving career waiting on the back burner, Ehrenreich acknowledges that months of fruitless job searching took its toll.

"I couldn't help but feel, I won't say rejected - but I so seldom got a nibble of any kind - that I just felt ignored and completely invisible," Ehrenreich says. "I've done a lot of things in my life and faced many different kinds of challenges, usually successfully, but here I was completely unable to get a foot in the door."

Ehrenreich hopes Bait and Switch helps middle-class workers realize how easily they can go from living comfortably to struggling to survive.

"We found out with Katrina how vulnerable we are in that if there is a disaster, the cavalry is not coming for us," she says. "Well, we're equally vulnerable with job loss, because it can lead to the next job being at Wal-Mart for $8 an hour."

Although Ehrenreich's next book is a historical tome, she's not ruling out the idea of going undercover again.

"It depends what the question is. I'm not committed to the form of investigation, I'm committed to investigating," she says. "If a good way to do it is to put myself in the situation, then I'll do that."

Barbara Ehrenreich

• When and where: 7:30 p.m. today, Tattered Cover Book Store, 2955 E. First Ave.

• Cost: free

• Information: 303-322-7727 or www.tatteredcover.com

gonzaleze@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5350

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