Is it time to reject the Protestant work ethic?

I came across an article called Gizza job - (Barbara Ehrenreich, The Guardian) the other day that represents a summary/overview of Barbara Ehrenreich's new book called Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream.

Ehrenreich previously wrote of low paid and hyper-exploited workers in a book entitled Nickel and Dimed; in Bait and Switch she turns her attention to the alleged "increasing poverty and despair within America's white-collar corporate workforce."

The book can be summarised as being an investigation into the shadowy world of Internet job searches, lonely networking events and costly career-coaching sessions, a world in which 'professional' mentors and trainers offer pop-psychology and self-help mantras to desperate would-be employees. It is said to deliver a stark warning about the future that faces corporate employees everywhere and calls for collective action to guard against it.

The newspaper itself ends on quite a despondent note in that Ehrenreich believes:

"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."