Nickel & Dimed 25-years later

So who was Barbara Ehrenreich?

So Barbara was my dear friend and my colleague.

She was one of the great writers and the great interpreters of what it means to be working class in this country in the 20th century into the 21st.

I mean, she's like the George Orwell of the U.S. She was born and viewed in 1941 when it was still it was still a brawling mining town.

You know, her father was a miner and so was her mother's father.

But what happened was he got a degree, her dad, from the Butte School of Mines.

And then he became kind of white collar.

She became middle class and ultimately became a reporter and a writer and an activist and But she never forgot that early experience.

I think partially because when she was growing up in the mining town, she really liked it.

She went to Rockefeller University, studied physics.

You know, her first book was Witches, Midwives and Nurses, which she published in 1973, I think, with my other dear friend, Deirdre English.

And that was, you know, an underground bestseller.

But like all of her books, it was trying to revise and flip our narrative assumptions like so for instance in nickel and dime she'll say the poor the philanthropists of the world that the poor the working class giving their time to others is actually the biggest gift it was both brilliant and counterintuitive and i think really opened a lot of people's eyes on many different levels

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.

The rhetoric was that capitalism had won out over all the alternatives and everybody got what they deserved.

And if you work hard and play by the rules, you're going to succeed.

And Nickel and Dime really burst out.

burst that myth pretty completely for a lot of people, including for me.

I was in graduate school.

I was thinking I was going to be a professor.

I was on that path to be what Barbara later coined the term, the part of the professional managerial class.

When that path was closed off to me and I ended up working at a supermarket, working really hard and I was tired and I was thinking, what am I going to do and how am I going to get out of this? And Barbara's voice, her narrative voice, it came into my head.