Nickel and Dimed

In a bit, a book about the benefits of quitting.

But first, on its face, Barbara Ehrenreich's nonfiction book, Nickel and Dimed, is a simple answer to a simple question, the question being: what's life like for the millions of Americans who eke by on meager wages? The answer? Well, she just lived like that for a while to find out and wrote about it.

The book came out twenty-five years ago, and it's only gotten more relevant today.

Ehrenreich co-founded the Economic Justice Reporting Project.

That is the numeric version of life.

The human side of it was captured in a landmark book that came out nearly twenty-five years ago.

The book is called Nickel and Dimed, written by journalist and activist Barbara Ehrenreich.

Ehrenreich died on Labor Day in 2022.

Today, I'm speaking with Alissa Quart and Anne Larson of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Alyssa built the organization with the legendary Barbara Ehrenreich, whose landmark book, Nickel and Dimed, is now 25 years old.

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.

Alyssa, Anne, and several others recently published a retrospective in The Nation commemorating Ehrenreich's enduring impact.

and she passed in 2022 on labor day as it were correct yeah Anne, talk about your, where did you make contact with Barbara's work and what role has it played in your intellectual development?

Yeah, it would be really hard to think of somebody who had more of an influence on me as a thinker and writer than Barbara Ehrenreich.

I never had the privilege of meeting her, but I read Nickel and Dimed, the book that's celebrating its 25th year, this year when I was in graduate school and I was teaching and I taught it to my students.

And, you know, it had such an impact on me because if you think about that historical moment, you know, 25 years ago, it was really, you know, a time when people called it the end of history.

I do the best I can to pull in outside knowledge and experience, and I know that's, uh, one of the other discussions that, uh, would naturally occur to us within the context of this podcast would be books.

The one I remember learning quite a bit from would be, um, Barbara Ehrenreich when she wrote Nickel and Dimed.

That definitely changed my perspective on life.

And books that manage to send a message that is easy to contemplate but is, is multifaceted, those are the kind of people I learn from.

Books and their theses need to be tested.

And so one can absolutely read books that don't align necessarily with how they think in order to, I don't wanna necessarily call it disprove, but certainly to evaluate what the book says and whether or not you feel that it is worthwhile or useful in your own life, in your own mindset, in your own outlook, or anything else.

So when I talk about, like for instance, I, I talked about Nickel and Dimed by, um, Barbara Ehrenreich, and being able to read different books like that within the library, having the library open.

I know that there was a discussion not too long ago on shelving books from various political sources that was brought up by one of our trustees.

Thank you.

You know, I think I'm also going to answer that question because one of my favorite books that I read for school was called Nickel and Dimed.

It's called Barbara.

It was by Barbara Ehrenbach.

It is such a awful state of being that I don't necessarily judge people who, who buy a new TV because they ha-- there is this view that money never hangs around, and when you have a windfall, if you get a nice tax return or if you, you know, somebody, you win, win two hundred bucks on a scratchie, that money is just gonna go on paying for things that you don't want, like services or bills, so why not, you know, just get rid of it now and buy a new phone?

Some years ago, the American journalist Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a really great book, I think it was called Nickel and Dimed in America or something like that, about she, she actually subjected herself to living as, as a poor person in the United States-

Mm

... which if anything is even, it's much harder than here.

She's attacking what amounts to something like a national consensus about the primacy of free markets.

In 2001, the journalist and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich published Nickel and Dimed on Not Getting By in America, a book detailing the years she spent working near minimum wage jobs in rural Florida.

Ehrenreich argued that her undercover work showed it was essentially impossible to survive in the U.S. on one such job.

So-called unskilled workers, she wrote, were mostly trapped in substandard housing with long commutes and little or no professional child care.

Reading the weather in Syosset in honor of Alyssa Court.

Joining us to talk about Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Nickels and Dimes, On Not Getting By in America.

It's banned book week and it's the 25th anniversary of Ehrenreich's seminal account of trying to get by on minimum wage.

I can't imagine how impossible it is.

Yeah.

On the woman front, like you can't have it both ways.

You can't be, you know, independent and have this feminist movement and also want excused for moments of rage where you're not held accountable for your actions.

As we said last week, you know, it was really an indictment of the health care and the mental health system.

But nonetheless, there's got to be some responsibility there when you've admitted to killing your children.