Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we’ve got a very special episode for you guys. And we’re talking about the work, life, and legacy of a very special person, the late great Barbara Ehrenreich. 25 years ago this year, Barbara published what is still to this day one of the most essential and impactful books about working class life in America ever. And the book is called Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America. And if you listen to this show, then chances are you’ve probably heard of it or you may have already read it.
But if you haven’t read it yet, and if you haven’t dug into Barbara’s incredible body of work, then frankly, I kind of envy you because you have a feast before you, a feast for your mind, your heart, and for your soul. And to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Nickel and Dimed, the Nation Magazine just published a really beautiful and vital forum with folks from around the worlds of labor and journalism testifying to the enduring power and relevance of Barbara Aaron Reich’s work today. As author and friend of the show, Alyssa Cort writes in that forum, “The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly unskilled.” This is from Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 masterwork, Nickel and Dimed. I read it that year when I was 29. Eventually, Barbara became my good friend and colleague as we created a media organization, The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and wrote and edited articles together.
To recap, for that book, Barbara went undercover, reporting as she worked as a housekeeper, nursing aide, a home cleaner, a waitress at Jerry’s and Hearthside Restaurants, and a Walmart worker all in her later 50s, wrestling with cleaning products, carrying huge diner orders, and sometimes living in motels. The book was a departure from her earlier acidly funny and sociological work, ranging from midwifery to middle-class anxiety, but for which she rarely interviewed a soul. It’s hard to underestimate the effect nickel and dimes vacuum cleaner’s eye view of what it means to work a minimum wage job in this country had on so many of us. For those blinded by America’s late 20th century comforts, Barbara’s book helped us to stop unseen low wage workers. It also showed us what anyone who has ever made a pizza or taking care of a child already knew, but had perhaps not articulated that there is no such thing as “unskilled work.” As Barbara wrote, “The working poor, as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.” And Nickel and Dimed also helped precarious creatives like me and my ilk, freelance writers, art handlers, grad students, bookstore clerks, all paid hourly and shabbily, see themselves more clearly as being on a continuum with other working people.
Now, we’ve linked to the Nation Forum commemorating Barbara Ehrenreich and the 25th anniversary of Nickel and Dimed in the show notes for this episode. And you should definitely go read it when you have some time. And it goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, that you should really, really go read Nickel and Dimed. And hopefully by the end of today’s episode, you’ll see why. There’s really so much that I want to say and could say here about Barbara Ahrenreich, but to keep it short and sweet, I’m just going to say this. I never had the honor of meeting or knowing Barbara personally, but I know that I would not be here doing the work that I do on this podcast, on the Real News Network and beyond without her. Her work has inspired generations of working class journalists and non-traditional storytellers just like me.
Her advocacy and institution building has made it more possible for people like us to have places to publish our work and for working class stories and voices to be heard. And I am so grateful to Barbara for that and to all who carry on her beautiful vital legacy today. And I am so grateful to all of our amazing guests on the show today who are doing just that. Thank you all so much for being here. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.
Deirdre English:
I’m Deirdre English. I’ve written three feminist and class-conscious books with Barbara Ehrenreich, the former editor-in-chief of Mother Jones Magazine and a professor of journalism at the University of California Berkeley.
Alissa Quart:
I’m Alissa Quart. I created the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with Barbara. I’m a journalist and a poet. I’ve written seven books and edited one anthology. My last book was called Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. And the one before that was Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America.
Ann Larson:
Hi, my name is Anne Larson. I’m the author of Cleanup on Aisle five: Essential Work: Poverty Wages and The View from Behind the Supermarket Register. I’m a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and Barbara Ehrenreich is one of my intellectual and journalistic heroes and mentors.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, thank you all so much for being here. It really, really is an honor to be chatting with all three of you, and all three of you are my journalistic heroes, and I think you are all living testaments of the incredible legacy of the incredible Barbara Erin Reich. And I wanted to start by asking more about that. Whether you got to know her in person or through your work, tell us and our listeners more about Barbara and what she and her work have meant to you.
Deirdre English:
I got to know Barbara because we were both on the faculty of an experimental radical college called the College at Old Westbury with a mission of social justice and a very multiracial student body and teaching staff. And we taught women’s studies courses together, some of the first back in the ’70s, and then we spent seven years writing three different books together. Perhaps the one I’ll mention is called For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Expert’s Advice to Women, which is about the impact of health and mental health professionals on creating stereotypes about women based on gender, class, and race, and helping to authorize those stereotypes to make them seem as though they were scientifically based and authoritative. So Barbara and I were really more than friends and coworkers. We were really sisters. I lived in the same house with her for periods of time.
I’m the godmother, or as she called me, the goddess mother of her two children who I am still very close to and who are remarkable testaments to Barbara’s influence too. Her kids are both extraordinary writers and activists. I’ve had a lifelong relationship with Barbara and profoundly influenced by her. She influenced. And then when I was at Mother Jones, I became her editor and she had a column. She did a cover story on one of her books, and she was a frequent advisor. And then finally with the founding, we’ll be talking about Nickel and Dimed and that whole period. But then with the founding of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, I certainly consulted with her then, and now I continue that role with Alyssa by being on the board. And so Barbara’s just had a profound lifelong impact on my thinking and my commitments. So
Maximillian Alvarez:
Deirdre, I got to ask from one editor to another, going from friend to editor is not an easy transition to make, especially when you’re editing Barbara Ehrenreich. How was that transition for you guys?
Deirdre English:
Pretty smooth because Barbara was such a great writer. It’s actually the best writers who are the easiest to edit. They get the big picture and they get back in the day when we had a paper publication before it was digital, sometimes you just have to cut for space and the professionals know how to do that. So no, no, no, we never had any arguments. But I’ll just say one more thing though. An editor should always remember that the piece belongs to the writer. So your role is to help the writer, not to impose yourself on the writer. So throw that in too.
Ann Larson:
I never met Barbara Ehrenreich, but I read Nickel and Dimed pretty soon after it came out. And I think I was the graduate student at that time, maybe my first year in graduate school. And this was 25 years ago, this was still sort of end of history type era. We just had Bill Clinton for eight years, and there was this sense that everything had worked out how it was supposed to work out. Capitalism was great. It had defeated all the other alternatives, and everybody got what they deserved in life. If you worked hard, you could succeed. And meritocracy was the name of the game. And so Nickel and Dimed just sort of punctured that myth so profoundly and so completely that it was so necessary at that time. I taught the book or portions of the book in a class I was teaching at the time as a graduate student.
And I remember being struck by how funny it was that students that I taught, we were reading these about poverty and low wages and living in motel rooms and cleaning shit out of toilets, and yet we’re all just laughing and hooting and hollering through the whole thing. And I just remember thinking, “What an amazing writer that you could write about these topics that are so dark, and yet we’re all laughing the whole way through.” I just think that’s a very rare talent that she had. And then we can talk about this a little bit more, but at that time I was a graduate student. I was planning on a career in academia. The idea of service work was not something that I worried about for myself, though I had come from a working class background. But a few years later, I found myself working in a supermarket.
And I remember thinking about nickel and dimed and seeing it differently once I’m doing the service work and a line from the book, I hadn’t read it in several years at that point, but I remembered a line from the book. I’m working behind the cash register and I’m tired and it’s weeks and weeks and I’m struggling to learn the job. And Barbara Arenak’s voice popped into my head and it said, “What you don’t necessarily realize when you’re selling your time by the hour is that what you’re actually selling is your life.” And I just thought how apt that was and how accurate it was that she’d really captured that I was now living, I was now experiencing. And so that influenced me and made me think I should write about this job because Barbara did it. She sort of forged a path for me.
Alissa Quart:
I read it when it came out in 2001, but my favorite book by far was Fear Falling. So I had been introduced to her earlier than that. I had been, like Ann, at CUNY Grad Center in English and Sociology and had been adjuncting. It was the introduction for me to what I would later call the middle precarious, this kind of precarious middle class where we were making, I don’t remember what it was, Anne, it was 2,000, $3,000 a class, and we were somehow supposed to also go to graduate school. So I started to see after I read Nickel and Dime, a continuum for the first time between my own experience as a kind of unstably middle-class person and the people around me who were serving food and taking out the garbage and making people’s beds in hotels. And I saw the connection, which I think had been purposely obfuscated by third wave Democrats, which is part of what Anne was saying also.
And I too had gotten lost in the aestheticism of the ’90s in its attitudes, in its stances. It was a very alluring decade for Generation X people who were into alternative culture. You could just lose yourself in Sleeter Kinney or something and in poetics and theory and get disconnected from the experience of class even when you yourself were living it. So what it was, it was both a reminder and a form of self-knowledge reading it because I suddenly was like, “Wow, my time here adjuncting at Kingsborough Community College where people are screaming at me and I can’t afford my rent even in the East Village is being stolen in a way.” And so I actually wound up dropping out of graduate school for better or worse as a result. And then years later, obviously I met her. I was working on a film called The Last Clinic, which is about the clinic at the Center of the Dobbs case in Mississippi, women’s health.
And I was the producer and the writer with the great director, Macy Crow, and I was raising money from Barbara. And I called her and it was unbelievable. I was sitting in the middle of a magazine office. She said, “Hi, Alyssa.” And she starts talking about Jane, which I believe she had firsthand experience with. And I just was like, “My God.” I mean, I fell in love, I think. I felt like I had finally found not just a mentor, but family, a mother of sorts, a spouse of sorts, a place where I belonged as a person, but also as a mind and a kind of politics, which in journalism is hard to find, let’s be frank. This is not a field filled with activists or unusual poetic people or people who are incredibly moral. And she was all those things. And also as a woman, she was incredibly generous to other women, and we can talk more about that.
I feel like she didn’t have some of the conventional gender identifications of a lot of boomer women who might see themselves as internalized masculinity and all this kind of stuff. She really was about women and about encouraging women. I mean, she had a lot of male friends and male colleagues and men in her life. But I think she wasn’t competitive and defensive in a gendered way, which really set her apart, honestly. So after this love match, I started working for her at the Economic Hardship Reporting, and she insisted we call each other co-editors, which of course was a marketing person’s nightmare. She’s like, “We have an anarchist socialist nonprofit.” I was like, “Okay, but I better not share this with our funders. Flat hierarchies.” I was like, “Okay.” But I knew also that this was the only way I could actually do this was with somebody like this.
And the idea of our organization was to fund people who were truly working class and fund people like she and I who were journalists who wanted to write entirely about income inequality and no longer had the resources. So actually, yeah, Max, you were one of the people I encountered early on.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, baby. I mean, like I said, we are all in some way or fashion living proof of Barbara’s incredible legacy, and that includes me and this show. I mean, not only would I not be doing this work, there wouldn’t be a market for this work without someone like Barbara. And on top of that, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project has sponsored episodes of the show. They’ve connected us to folks that we’ve interviewed on this show. It’s an incredible, incredible organization and legacy that you and Barbara built from the ground up. And it’s touched so many of us and helped tell so many of our stories. And I think I’m honored to be in the struggle with all of you to carry that legacy forward however we can. But I want to go backward again because I think you guys have really touched on something that is super important for folks to understand about Nickel and Dimed itself and everything in it because you can’t understand it just by reading it today.
You have to understand who we were and where we were at the time that it was published. And it was published in 2001 and written in a turn of the millennium America that feels so incredibly far away today in many respects. I mean, I was still a teenager then. I was a conservative, middle-class, dipshit, mixed race kid in Orange County in Southern California who still didn’t really know a whole lot about life and who had no idea how bad things were going to get over the next 25 years. I identify with the stories that y’all were telling because when this book came out, my family was part of the middle class in that post-Cold War boom. And then we lost our middle-class status in the post – 2008 crash Great Recession, including the house that I was raised in. And so I read the book very differently later on in life than I would have had I picked it up in 2001.
So I want to really take listeners back to that time. And I wanted to ask if you could say more about who you were then, what the country was like then, and what working in America was like then.
Deirdre English:
Barbara never bought into the boom myth. I think that certainly throughout the Reagan years, which were the 1980s, Barbara was continuously aware that wages were still stagnant for the working class. The postwar boom really ended by the ’80s, and the boom was for the business elite and corporations, and it was Reagan deregulation. And then moving forward a little bit in time, Barbara never fell in with the Clintons. And in fact, a lot of her concern with poverty came about because during Clinton’s regime, the push to eliminate welfare, welfare as we know it, and to force women mothers into jobs to justify their welfare payments, that was actually the impetus of writing nickeled and dimed. I was actually part of a group with Barbara that I think was called the Committee of 100. It was 100 feminists who were protesting Clinton-esque welfare reform, and we failed to stop it.
And then Barbara was left with the question, well, what is actually going to happen to these working women who are being pushed off welfare and into the workforce? And so if that’s supposed to be the answer, get a job. Let me go out and look and see whether you can support yourself on a low wage job. And that was the genesis of nickel and dimed. So that would be some part of my answer to your question.
Ann Larson:
I mentioned earlier this idea of the end of history and the meritocracy had went out and everything was as. We were in the best of all possible worlds and how nickel and dime sort of punctured that myth. I do think also one of the things that I remember from that period is this kind of looking back, it seems like we were all living in this myth, in this kind of dream world, and our feet weren’t really on the ground in a way. I really thought I was going to get a job in academia and be a professor. I mean, I think about that now, given my background and the fact that I went to CUNY and I studied English, and that was never going to happen. That was always a failed venture. But I believed it. I got on that path and people told me it was going to work out.
If you work hard, it’s all going to work out. And so one of the things that I think nickel and dimed does is it not only punctures the myth, and I’m talking more about Barbara’s work in general, books like Fear of Falling and Natural Causes. She wanted to see the world as it really is, not how we wish it would be. She was really a critic of delusion in all its forms. And this goes from in Bait and Switch, she talks about the myth that just by updating your personality or getting a new wardrobe is going to be the key to a new job. Or in another book that she wrote, kind of busting the myth that positive thinking can cure breast cancer. She sort of refused to succumb to that kind of thinking. She was really insistent on science, on evidence, on rational thinking.
And even in one of the last books she wrote, if not the last, she wrote about these mystical experiences that she had as a young person that sort of hinted at something supernatural beyond the realm that we live in every day. But even that didn’t change her mind about the fundamental class divide in the world and the fundamental reality that we live in. And I just find this very inspiring. To me, it’s a very kind of socialist way of thinking without. Barbara didn’t wear her socialism on her sleeve. She wasn’t out there pounding the gavel. What she showed is a way of looking at the world in a concrete and material way and an insistence that we not be diluted about how things really are. And that way of thinking, that really grounded concrete way of thinking is the foundation for political change.
Alissa Quart:
Yeah, I love that, Ann. When I think about what was going on in 2001, I mean there’d be a terrorist attack six months after Nickel and Dime came out, World Trade Center buildings falling, killing over 3,000 people. There’s the Enron scandal. There’s all those accounting crises. And Wikipedia launched that year and kind of a notion of unskilled expertise, which I think is important too, because she was really pushing in nickel and dime for rethinking what unskilled labor was. And I think the knots had a complex relationship with what skilled and unskilled labor was, especially thinking work, what had to be done by amateurs and what could be done by professionals. And I also think one of the things that was interesting about that time, not just this forcing us to see what the Democrats, the centrist Democrats were masking with the end of AFPC and so forth.
It was also a moment when people could publish these kind of books. Which is less and less common. I mean, Anne, who’s on this panel, just did. I do. A few other people do, you do Max. But I think there was a time when No Logo was a bestseller, Fast Food Nation, Michael Paulin’s early books. And these were mega sellers, as was Nickel and Dimed. There was an audience for them. And there was also a real hot critique of commercialism and a lot of these factors. I mean, my first book branded The Buying and Selling of Teenagers was in this vein. And I do see Nickel and Dimed as part of that as a kind of materialist account. The years that transpired after the Forever War would say, oh, do we have the energy to worry about the consumer economy and labor? Shouldn’t we be worried about the threat against our nation?
There was all these different enemies that have been constructed since then. But it was pretty clear in that ’90s knots period, even though it was being masked, that those were the polls. It was like this flushed consumer economy that rested on the backs of workers, that rested on the brainwashing of teenagers to buy shit, that rested on people being fed terrible meals, supersize me, and Michael Moore’s films were about that. So I think that’s part of the scene that I think of. And I also think of just the level of consumerism in that time. You can’t even imagine. It was very go-go before there was a crash.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and that’s what I remember. I mean now it’s like I tell my daughter, it’s like, yeah, that was the era of what I would call free range capitalism, where we were allowed to run around as consumers and stretch our legs a little more. We had a little more buying power. And the consumer felt like an important thing in the economy, whether you were going to a restaurant or staying at a hotel. It felt like you could still vote with your wallet as the proverb goes. That we still had some power to determine what the economy looked like and get what we could from it. We could still make enough to earn a good living. Like Ann was saying, our feet weren’t even really touching the ground. But that bubble burst for me at least after 2008. And in the years that have followed, I feel like I’ve only come to see more and more what Barbara saw back then that me and my family couldn’t.
Because when we heard about worker issues like that, we saw them as consumers. And we saw them as, well, I’m the fast food consumer going in paying for my meal, or I’m the student going to get an education. Why is it my job to care about the employee on the other side? They should be doing their job kind of thing.That was such a prevalent way of thinking in America and sure as hell in conservative, middle-class, Orange County, California. But again, that really came crashing down for me and for so many of us over the next 25 years. And frankly, reading Nickel and Dimed in the America, in the world that we’ve got here and now in 2026 is quite a trip. And I wanted to ask y’all, why do you think it is still important for folks to read Nickel and Dimed and Barbara’s work in general today?
What can her work still teach us now? Or what has it been trying to teach us for years that we still haven’t learned but really need to?
Deirdre English:
Well, the economic pain has spread. And I think that Alissa really was speaking directly to that when talking about the middle-class precariot and the fact that a middle-class way of life has become increasingly unaffordable to the working class and to large parts of the middle class. I mean, of course in America, everybody thinks they’re middle-class, so it becomes very hard to talk about class for that reason. But basically the great increase in unaffordability since first the enormous crash of 2008 that wiped out so much value and showed that all that home ownership was based on a bubble economics, and then the rise of the forever war, so absorbing so much of our economy in military spending. So we’ve just seen so many social failures during this period of time. And I just want to also mention that the rise of what you were talking about, the consumer economy is also the rise of the service economy from the worker point of view.
And that was a big shift in the working class because it was largely women who got those service jobs, as Anne has written about so brilliantly in her book about grocery store work. I mean, obviously there are men working in grocery stores too, but the “opportunities for women that are often blamed on feminism,” like that feminists encourage women to go into the workforce. Well, no, economics forced women into the workforce. Feminism tried to make circumstances better for them. I don’t think we’ve succeeded. But Barbara was just very aware in nickel and dime, those are all jobs of women workers in the service economy. And so that was really burgeoning while the kind of extractive industries were all being outsourced and technology was coming in and absorbing a lot of those kinds of jobs. So Barbara was just so aware of the shifts in demographics and economic policy and economic reality so that she always saw under the surface of what people thought was going on to what was really going on.
Alissa Quart:
I sometimes see her as sort of like an ultra violet light, like forensic dusting where we can see things that we wouldn’t otherwise see. I love what you just said. That was so smart, Deirdre, and about the consumer economy being a service economy being female. And when we’ve been assigning Looking at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a lot of the pieces we assigned were people who have taken low wage work writing about what it’s like inside of that, including Anne, but also Joseph Williams, Danelle Alexander, Daryl Wellington, a bunch of other people. And that to me was part of what Barbara also wanted to do towards the end of her life was she didn’t want to just be the sort of co-pastoral woman underground, my man Godfrey, I’m going to go into the supermarket in a mask and become the worker. It was like she wanted to hire the person who had actually been that, who was a writer and a reporter and an active mind who could name and wasn’t doing it as a stunt.
And I think that to me, that was part of the understanding of the line between journalist and practitioner that started to expand in the knots when experts in amateur started to blend a little more. Publications like The Global Post started assigned to local reporters rather than to have white dudes fly in to cover shit. And I think she was doing the domestic version of that. Let’s not have people parachute in. Let’s have people write from their own place. And I followed that to the letter. I mean, I just thought it was really important. And also having people who could think critically. Anne here is such a great mind and you really are. And she can interpret a lot of the things that she was experiencing structurally. And that’s another thing that Barbara was really interested in.
Ann Larson:
Just wanted to note that one of the things I’m thinking about hearing this conversation is that Barbara was a baby boomer. And I don’t know, that seems important. Somehow we have this whole, hey boomer where we make fun of the boomers, God love them.
Deirdre English:
Okay, boomer.
Ann Larson:
Right, that they’re just like these clueless. And there’s some truth to it. They grew up in this time where there was more opportunity and you get education and it’s going to work out for you. And there was room for upward mobility in a lot of cases thanks to government investment and public goods. And we all know what the French call the tant glory is, these 30 years after World War II when working class was making gains. And so for Barbara to be in that generation and yet recognize all the things that people on this panel are talking about and just see through that mythology and to see, as Deirdre put it, what was under the surface, I think we should pause on how extraordinary that is. I mean, I think one of the reasons that was the case is because she had working class roots herself.
I grew up in Montana and I believe her dad was a minor. But then her dad, if I’m remembering correctly, ended up becoming an executive. He advanced in his career and ended up leaving the mines and became something of a professional. And so she got to see this upper mobility, this transformation. But it wasn’t just that she had a really good memory for that period of her life when she’d been working class, but she really just, she saw welfare being cut. As Alyssa mentioned, she saw what was happening to aid to families with dependent children. She saw free trade agreements sending jobs overseas and that expanding the service economy that she wrote about. And so it wasn’t just a good memory, although that was part of it. She just never lost her talent for recognizing the way the material world was the foundation for what was happening in people’s lives.
And in terms of what’s changed, I mean, I think there’s no better example of what stayed the same than the minimum wage has been stuck at 725 since 2009 or something like this. I mean, this is something out of just the dystopian universe that we have not raised the minimum wage since 2009. And I just think Barbara saw that this was the way things were going. And she was able to see not only through this and of the mythology that we’ve described, but even in her own generation, in which so many people had a different experience, and even in her own experience, her own family kind of crawled out of the working class. She still stayed true to her vision and to herself. And I think that’s very rare.
Deirdre English:
We baby boomers, we came of age in the ’60s and there was a vast movement to be a part of. And Barbara and I were both very much a part of it. The anti-war movement where I really came of age in my college days doing that and worked on two documentaries about the anti-war movement, about anti-war Vietnam, and working with Vietnam vets. And then the women’s movement that Barbara and I both really kind of shared our journey into that world and into what was missing in the women’s movement and what was missing in the labor movement, which was a lack of feminist consciousness and on the left. So all of those, there was this big thing, the movement, and we felt very much a part of it, supported by it, buoyed by it, but also the productive arguments that happened within it. And so Barbara wasn’t a lone figure, she was a standout figure, but I think she always felt part of a much larger community and with multifaceted elements in it from the labor movement, from the women’s movement, and many others.
Alissa Quart:
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s important to note, like you just said, she didn’t see a different distinction between advocacy and journalism, like that thick line that we’ve been taught in J schools for decades, the voice of God and NPR and neutrality and all the major newspapers. She thought it was really important to bring the movements into writing. And that I hope is also another part of her legacy. And honestly, I mean, look at the DSA. I mean, she was the first co-chair with Michael Harrington. So it’s not just what she’s done as a writer or what she’s done institutionally, it’s politically. And I think that is also a legacy within journalism to not forget politics on that level.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I think that’s all beautifully and powerfully put. And it really reminds me of Barbara and the rare writers and people who see and fight and write the way that she did, have taught me ever since. Like y’all said, you don’t necessarily need to see the world through socialist goggles, but once you stop seeing them through the kind of capitalist goggles that are welded to our eyes from birth, then you start seeing things how they really are and you become a socialist real quick. So that’s what it was for me is I was so conditioned for so long to see the country I lived in a certain way. And it was a massive financial crash that taught me otherwise. It was our government bailing out the banks and big corporations while families like mine fell through the drain that taught me that. It was working on a warehouse and factory floors with people I had been taught to say were dumb and deserved to be in those jobs because they couldn’t do anything else.
And here I was with a degree from the University of Chicago doing the exact same job in 2010. I mean, life taught me a lot of what capitalism and America tried to keep from me for many years. And Barbara taught me a lot more about that. And I was so grateful when I kind of lost that innocence, that American innocence of realizing the world and the country that I actually did live in, instead of believing I lived in the fiction that had been presented to me. I was so grateful to have a book like Nickel and Dimed to help guide me from that point to a greater consciousness and to more answers and to more hope about what can be done about this for families like mine, for people like me, for the hundreds of people and workers that I’ve interviewed on this show over the years, their families.
I’m so, so grateful to Barbara, to Nickel and Dimed for all that they have helped provide me in my long sort of recovery from the hangover of the capitalist fiction that I and my family had lived under for the first half of my life. And I wanted to sort of turn that into our final question here because I could talk to y’all for hours, but I know I have to let you go soon. And I wanted us to sort of finish by talking about the legacy of Barbara Ahrenreich herself and of course her work, including Nickel and Dimed, whose 25th anniversary we are celebrating this year. And so I want to frame the question this way. We now have the benefit of hindsight to see in our past what we frankly could not see coming in the future that lay before us 25 years ago.
With our life experience and with all the lessons that Barbara Ehrenreich has taught us, what wisdom can we offer through the gift of foresight to ourselves today with everything that we’re facing and to our descendants 25 years from now?
Deirdre English:
Well, I mean, I would say Barbara actually foresaw herself the advent of AI on middle-class jobs. And she actually very presciently wrote in an essay in Time Magazine that I haven’t read since it came out, but it struck me so much at the time that maybe the middle class was soon going to be facing the downward mobility that the working class was experiencing. And that when the robots came, when technology came for writing jobs, journalism jobs, teaching jobs, white collar jobs, the way it was already coming for so many working class jobs, definitely factory jobs, that maybe the middle class would wake up and understand their commonality, which Alyssa has been speaking to and which Alyssa is very alive to talking about the precariot. Maybe they would begin to understand that the bosses were not their friends and that the scraps that they were getting from the owner’s table were getting less and less and that they would begin to experience a sense of unity and class consciousness and fighting spirit.
And so that’s happening. It’s going to accelerate. And one hopes that what will also accelerate is what Barbara called for, which is that unity and oppositional spirit.
Alissa Quart:
Yeah, I’m hoping for this unity. And I’ve been talking to people about how they’re affording America. I wrote a book called Squeeze Why Of Families Can’t Afford America almost 10 years ago now. And I’ve been returning to some of those topics because it seems very of the moment, the middle precarious. And what startles me is people saying things like middle-class people, people who earn six figures saying things like, “I don’t feel like America likes me.” And just that emotionalism of that, I feel like that is where this kind of emotional politics is going to start, where people feel like they’re part of a gradient, a range of class positions that are being kept down by people who are manufacturing insecurity for really the 99%. And that concept is no longer just pablem, but it’s something that people actually live and vote by and connect to each other around.
Ann Larson:
I’ll just end by, I really want to emphasize something Deirdre just said, which strikes me as really important about movements. I think just one generation after Barbara as a Gen Xer, I didn’t feel like I was part of a movement. It was like all individuals who were working hard and trying to make it work in the professional class or whatever. And I think what Barbara would want us to do is rebuild these movements that used to serve as a foundation for social action, for thinking, for camaraderie, for solidarity. I’m also the co-founder of an organization called the Debt Collective that is trying to organize the debtors to bring some sense of community and collective strength to people that are drowning in debt. It’s why I’m so proud to be part of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project where I think the organization publishes people that are writing as part of movements, that they see journalism, like Alyssa just said, is not just something that you should be objective and talk about facts, but as part of a movement building work.
And to me, this is, I think, a real key to. We can’t think of individuals. You can do your best as an individualism, but there’s a limit there unless you have a movement behind you, unless you have a culture that supports the kind of thinking and work that Barbara did and that we should all be trying to do.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, the great Deirdre English, Alissa Quart, and Ann Larson. I also want to thank the Nation Magazine and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project for all the vital work that they do and for helping us put this special episode together. Go check them out, subscribe and support them using the links that we provided in the show notes. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our different podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.
I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and rest in power, Barbara Ehrenreich. Solidarity forever.
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