Journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich speaks onstage during the 2006 Summer Television Critics Association Press Tour for PBS on July 27, 2006, in Pasadena, California.(Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images)
“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 Dimed’s vacuum-cleaner’s-eye view of what it means to work a minimum-wage job in this country had on so many of us. In my case, I had been partly lulled by the hipster aestheticism of the late 1990s and the myth that ideology itself was at its end (not so fast). For those blinded by America’s late-20th-century comforts, Barbara’s book helped us to stop “unseeing” low-wage workers. It also showed us what anyone who has ever made a pizza or taken 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, paid hourly and shabbily—see themselves more clearly, as on a continuum with other working people. Barbara showed us the label “unskilled work,” which divided underpaid hyper-educated freelancers I think of as “black turtleneck workers” and underpaid blue-collar was a false distinction.
In Nickel and Dimed’s wake, I devoted myself to what I thought of as “undercover sociology,” reporting my book Branded from teens’ bedrooms and at marketing conferences. Barbara had that influence because she was a reporter and activist, but also because she was a trickster—she liked to fuck stuff up. With each aperçu, I think of her cackling and muttering, “Take that, Yuppie American reader! Look how impossible it is to live on the wages real people earn!”
As the year 2001 and then the decade progressed, Nickel and Dimed’s thesis became even more resonant. A new recession had started, one caused by the bursting of the dot.com bubble and then by the terrorist attacks six months later, as well as the Enron scandal and other money-man-accounting crises. Wikipedia had just launched and with it a notion of “unskilled expertise.”
In the years after Nickel and Dimed, there were also major movements that were somewhat inspired by it, from Fight for $15 to Occupy Wall Street, a mass movement that started in New York City in response to the corporate bailouts, Occupy’s encampments generated hope.
Soon after Occupy, I met Barbara, in what was to be the last segment of her life. She had just founded what would become our shared organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and talked to me on the phone, in her crackling voice, about a multimedia project I was working on, The Last Clinic, devoted to the only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi, which would be the center of the Dobbs decision. She told me about her experience with the underground abortion collective Jane. I was enamored with her from the start: I thought of her as a matriarch of meaning. As with a number of her protégés, mostly women, Barbara also almost immediately put faith in me, constantly dubbing me her “successor.” Needless to say, that gave me faith in myself. Barbara’s brilliance, weirdness, and incorruptibility made her into something of an intellectual curio, an outsider-insider, and thus, for me, easier to love.
As an insider, she was paid a mighty word rate, her book sold 1.5 million copies, and she knew everyone; as an outsider, she far preferred pleasure and freaks to the famous and well-regarded. She was prickly, funny, ribald, in fact, and could be rude—she enjoyed martinis, cigarettes, and sardonic comebacks: when we went to lunch meetings with potential nonprofit funders who would order lattes, she’d enjoy ordering a plain soda, with an anti-elite glint in her eye. She hated sanctimony and reveled in a startling, even comic austerity—in fact, she cast aspersions on women who hired housecleaners. When we started to work together, she wanted us to exist in an anarchist state of shared power, as “co-editors.” (It brought about years of complications, as any management student would have foreseen, but it was worth it.)
We had gotten into the media business when a-dollar-a-word was the basic pay for an independent reporter. Thirty years later, a-dollar-a-word is a windfall. She knew that she was in the 1 percent of nonfiction writers, most of whom earn $25,000 a year. She also wanted to give back to the reporters who were working in stores or living on the street, and to make sure that not only the rich got to write about poverty. EHRP, the nonprofit she founded and that I ran with her—and then, sadly, without her—became our answer.
Barbara passed away in 2022 and since then I often wonder what she would make of what has happened since then. She was once the first co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America with Michael Harrington; many decades later, the DSA has given us Zohran Mamdani and today’s DSA-ed crop of left political leaders. What would she make of the group’s astounding political success and the rise of one of her central concerns, “affordability,” in public discourse, inspiring voters as “inequality” somehow could not? What would she think of ICE grabbing off the street the immigrant workers she had championed, the administration’s halting of crucial medical research and the spread of 20th-century diseases like measles as vaxxes are blocked? (A trained biologist, Barbara would surely be particularly appalled.) She would also be keen on AI refuseniks currently refusing to, well, play with the robots or retrain them to do their white-collar jobs. Barbara would, I think, not only report on serving Coca-Colas but also, on being an AI trainer, an Uber driver controlled by the algo, or a content filterer forced to screen violent amateur online footage.
Lastly, she would be pleased to note that Nickel and Dimed continues to sell, a director is planning to make it into a feature film (amazingly, it has already been a musical!). It is also one of the most frequently censored books in the country.
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I’ve gathered the formidable contributors that follow, Arlie Hochschild, Deirdre English, Ai-jen Poo, Bill Fletcher, and Ann Larson, all who knew or were greatly influenced by Barbara. In times like these, we should commemorate those like Barbara who fought hard, and well.
—Alissa Quart
Deirdre English
Barbara had always been keenly aware of class: This struck me the first time I met her in the early 1970s as a fellow founding faculty member at the State University of New York at Old Westbury. We co-taught a course in women’s studies and began the seven years of research that resulted in our book, For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women. That book showed how male-dominated medical mismanagement of women’s physical and mental health had helped authorize stereotypes of gender, class, and race: For example, upper-class women were diagnosed as too weak and “hysterical” for work life outside the home, while working-class and poor women, especially Black women, were deemed so robust as to thrive on hard labor. This “scientific” medicalization of class, race, and gender helped to socially construct identities that were perpetuated as if they were natural.
We remained co-conspirators for life. When I became editor in chief of Mother Jones, I published her work frequently. She interrogated the overseas dumping of banned contraceptives for a National Magazine Award–winning investigative report, and her penetrating book Hearts of Men was a cover story. When she set out to write Nickel and Dimed, she secured me as her listed reference on job applications, and I was all set to confirm her fictitious identity that she was simply a recent divorcee without job experience—but no boss ever bothered to call me to check her references. On the road, she e-mailed me her notes for safe-keeping in case anything happened to her laptop (this was before we all had the alternative of uploading files to data centers, aka “the cloud”) and she called me occasionally to reground in her “previous life.” I claim the honor of having read and discussed the drafts of all of her books over the years. Barbara thrived on questioning everything, thrashing out ideas and pushing them to their logical extremes. Conversations with her were wide-ranging, eye-opening, and often thrilling.
The impact of Nickel and Dimed was epitomized not only by the hands-on labor Barbara performed, or by her no-bullshit voice, but by the systematic class analysis she precisely laid out. It was obvious enough that costs, especially rents, were high while wages were low, as she experienced when, to maintain an adequate caloric intake, she needed a second job. Then she had to move to more expensive lodgings to be closer to that job. This workload exhausted her yet barely elevated her diet of largely beans, chopped meat, and noodles, supplemented with fast food. So the initial findings were laid out.
But Barbara wrote not only of stretched-thin workers who live, then as now, in a “state of emergency” but of the affiliates who manage them, the executives who exploit them and the owners and stockholders who profit from them. She detailed how the practices and costs of disciplining workers with invasive surveillance (so much more pervasive today) weigh against the hopes of workers organizing for higher wages: “It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever greater inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves.”
Beside her focus on class, Barbara had a message in Nickel and Dimed about gender, directed especially at members of the labor movement and the left, which still stubbornly stereotyped workers as men in mills, mines, and factories. Yet by the late 1990s, low-wage service jobs were among the fastest-growing types of work. Her choice to take on such jobs, which were done disproportionately by women, was not only a necessity but, as a socialist-feminist, the way she pushed the labor movement to wake up and be more feminist and the feminist movement to be more class- and race-conscious. This multi-issue message was always Barbara’s creed.
One anecdote about Nickel and Dimed that comes to mind occurred after a university seminar with feminist scholars. As we left to get lunch, and Barbara remarked, “They didn’t seem to like me much, I wonder why not?” Oh, I said, it’s because you made them feel guilty that their careers depend on hiring low-wage women workers!” At that, Barbara laughed it off saying, Oh well, if that’s the reason, I’m fine with it!
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It’s not that Barbara had it in for professional class women or scholars; she was one herself, after all. She was acutely aware that her own real life in the upper 20 percent also depended on the labor of the innumerable laborers all around us as well as multitudes of overseas workers. Just buying a shirt or a pound of rice makes you enmeshed, if not complicit, in the tragic vicious circle she had elaborated.
Barbara felt that as they became more successful careerists, women should not abandon their erstwhile sisters, or the initial insistence of the Women’s Liberation Movement that its cause is that of all women. Members of what she termed the Professional/Managerial Class should do whatever they could in that regard, paying very well and using their advanced skills to campaign for labor rights, higher wages, and public services such as childcare—as she did. In contrast, the “elite capture” of feminist thought in academia and abstruse jargon troubled her.
Not that she let men off the hook, sailing as they do on a sea of unequal resources, ranging from the unpaid labor of their mothers and wives, and the often lower pay of colleagues, to all the low-wage workers who serve them with the pleasant luxuries of their lives. Barbara’s attitude to them was, get over yourselves and pay up! Twenty-five years have passed, and the cruel truth is that things are even more unequal now for low-paid workers than they were when Barbara wrote her vivid call to action. Under Trump, progress has reversed. That’s no reason to quit socialist-feminism. I think she would say to all of us: Fight harder.
Ai-jen Poo
In 2001, as a young organizer, I spent my days listening to nannies in the playgrounds of Manhattan. The attention and nurturing they poured into the children in their care, juxtaposed with their conditions—not having clear job expectations or consistent hours, not having job security or access to benefits of any kind, earning wages so low that the ends rarely met—felt both enraging and perplexing. Until Barbara Ehrenreich published Nickel and Dimed and brought the epidemic of low-wage work in America into the light.
Seeing the world of work through her sharp eyes helped us all see the service jobs at the bottom of our economy as a crucial arena for change, buoying nascent organizing efforts among workers like domestic workers. Experiencing the gap between hard-earned wages and the cost of meeting our basic human needs like food, housing, and transportation through her journey, we all felt the outrage; she established a pattern that no one should stand for, certainly not the workers themselves.
Her stint as a housekeeper gave her honorary status among domestic workers in New York. We adopted her into our family of fiery women, and she bore witness to our seven-year campaign to change the New Deal–era exclusions of domestic workers from New York’s labor laws. She marched with us in Albany, stood vigil with us in front of the governor’s office, and joined me in the parks as I rallied support among workers for the first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in the nation. Sixteen years after NY’s bill was won, 12 additional states have passed a Bill of Rights, Washington State as recently as this year. Progress has been made, but much bigger threats loom as we enter the age of AI. Many important lessons from Nickel and Dimed are more salient than ever: There is much more to most jobs than the rest of us think. There’s nothing like seeing the world through the eyes of workers to show us the truth of this economy. And there is no replacement for the human genius of great storytelling. For these truths, I will forever be grateful to Barbara Ehrenreich.
Arlie Hochschild
In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell entered the life of the homeless tramp in grim one-day-stay city shelters in the 1930s, joining a society of males doomed as unemployed outsiders. In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich goes one further. She takes us with her into the world of hotel maids, waitresses, Walmart sales associates, all of whom are employed outsiders. And however many jobs they work, she notes, they are doing the extra job of managing their poverty. She counts her tips as a Florida waitress, thumbs through her thin wallet for a security deposit on a rented room, learns to make hotel beds with triple-sheet setups and wrinkle-free finish and she gags at ammonia-based window sprays and pungent toilet-bowl cleaners. Barbara conveys their sinking feeling that there is no way out of their dreary lives as outsiders within.
The same holds for the women described in a book Barbara and I co-edited, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, which describes women who leave their own children behind in the Philippines or Mexico in order to care for the children of others in the United States. In a sense they learned to live “outside” of their own motherhood, even as sex workers learned to live outside of their sexuality. Barbara also applied her outsider-within eye to her own experience as a survivor of breast cancer, as she confronted what felt to her like a jarring culture of bright pink ribbons, teddy bears, and official optimism. In all her ideas and feelings, Barbara moved with ease past the passport controls that specialist academics can put up around ideas she cared about—ranging from the cave artists of Lascaux to Mardi Gras celebrants in New Orleans to the white-coated male medical authorities whom she and Deirdre English describe as taking over the industry of advising women. Through her wild array of curiosities and joys and journeys through time and place, Barbara gives us the extraordinary gift of her special eye of the outsider-within. It is part of her legacy which will ever remain forever a world treasure.
Ann Larson
When I first read Nickel and Dimed in the early 2000s, I remember thinking that I didn’t know it was possible to write so beautifully and with such humor about low-wage work and poverty. I assigned the book in my writing classes at colleges where I was employed as an adjunct. Earning a fraction of the wages of regular faculty while racking up student debt as a graduate student, I was nervous about my future. But the world of customer service jobs was still distant enough that I could teach the book as a scholarly work. Students were enthralled at Ehrenreich’s ability to mix research with compassionate, on-the-ground reporting. And it all came together thanks to her inimitable narrative voice.
Years later, I heard that voice in my head while working as a supermarket cashier. Like many of the workers Ehrenreich encountered in the low-wage jobs she wrote about, my colleagues struggled to keep food on the table. Virtually no one could afford health insurance or a vacation. Employees suffered from repetitive stress disorders. We clocked in and out with our fingerprints, connecting our bodies to the store’s timekeeping mechanism. Being off the clock felt less like free time than like a state of waiting. There was work and then there was waiting to go back to work.
One day, a line from Nickel and Dimed popped into my head. “What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour,” Ehrenreich wrote, “is that what you’re actually selling is your life.” No longer hearing those words as a teacher but as a worker, they spoke to me more forcefully than ever. They perfectly described the existential struggle of punching a clock in a supermarket. I started thinking about writing about my job.
With the support of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, an organization founded by Ehrenreich, I published an article about cashiering. The piece was so well received that I decided to write a book. Cleanup on Aisle Five, also supported by EHRP, which came out this summer. It wouldn’t exist if she hadn’t shown the way.
Bill Fletcher Jr.
I first met Barbara in April of 1988 in New York City. A mutual friend of ours introduced us when I happened to be in New York for a wedding. Barbara was already an icon on the left, and I think that I stammered when speaking with her, in part because I had the sense that she was sizing me up. We were talking about how to unite the left—an issue that became a centerpiece of the discussions she and I had until we last saw each other.
There was, however, another piece, one related to uniting the left but also having its own identity. Of course, I am referencing Barbara’s deep commitment to the working class and to its pursuit of justice. Nickel and Dimed is both a testament to Barbara’s commitment to the working class and illustrative of an outstanding exposé of the polarization of wealth that has increased under neoliberal globalization making it more and more difficult for working people to survive.
Barbara’s commitment to workers took many forms. This included supporting unionized workers in strikes, as well as workers who were attempting to secure unionization. Yet one of the most interesting and inventive initiatives she undertook was an effort to organize professional workers. As a founder of the United Professionals, Barbara sought to organize so-called white-collar workers who are, all too often, overlooked by the media as well as traditional labor unions. Some efforts were undertaken, such as the alliance between the Service Employees International Union and 9-to-5 (the organization of women office workers) which included the creation of a local of SEIU—SEIU Local 925—to undertake that work. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees certainly organized many white-collar workers in the public sector. That said, these efforts did not address the core of what Barbara set out to address through United Professionals. Her vision was of a membership organization that could organize and advocate for white-collar professionals as workers regardless of union eligibility. It is indicative of the myopia of organized labor that her effort received little of their support and, ultimately, was forced to close up. That said, the failure of United Professionals never stopped Barbara in her quest to support the struggle of workers for social and economic justice. It is that which we should remember, especially as we celebrate the anniversary of her great book, Nickel and Dimed.
Alissa QuartAlissa Quart is the author of seven books, most recently Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, just out in paperback. She is the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
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