A noble tribune of the plebs departs

We won’t see the likes of Barbara Ehrenreich again, more’s the pity

Though I didn’t realise it until I started reading obituaries for her a few days ago, Barbara Ehrenreich was one of the main inspirations for this Substack. Ehrenreich wrote many books and even more articles over the last half-century. They were mostly about the dark side of the American dream, specifically working-class and middle-class individuals frantically trying to achieve success but falling short.   

The backstory

Ehrenreich was the daughter of a copper miner who grew up in small-town Montana. She once claimed the two “family rules” she grew up with were “never cross a picket line and never vote Republican”.

While her father did achieve upward mobility and live out the American dream – at some point, he enrolled at the Montana School of Mines, then continued his studies at Carnegie Mellon University, then ended his career as a senior executive at Gillette – Ehrenreich abandoned her own pursuit of material comfort and social status early on.

After graduating with a PhD in cellular biology in the early 1970s, she gave birth to a daughter and did some entry-level public service and academic jobs before becoming a freelance writer. Over the next five decades, she would be commissioned by every big-name publication in the US – The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vogue, Harper’s Magazine, Time, The Wall Street Journal – as well as plenty of smaller-name ones, such as The Nation, The New Republic, Salon.com, Mother Jones, Ms., The Progressive, The New Republic, the New Statesman and Working Woman.       

Nickel and Dimed  

Ehrenreich wrote about a range of topics in a range of formats, but she was best known for her books about downward social mobility. The book she is best known for is Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which ‘dropped’, as the young people now say, in 2001.

In her late fifties, Ehrenreich went undercover and worked as a waitress, cleaner and Walmart shop assistant. She wanted to investigate whether it was feasible for tens of millions of Americans to get by on $7 an hour. (That was the federal minimum wage back in 2001; it’s subsequently skyrocketed to $7.25 an hour. Except for workers who get tipped; employers only have to pay them $2.13 an hour.)

Spoiler alert: it’s rarely possible to live on $7 an hour, which adds up to $266 for a 38-hour working week.

Unsurprisingly, Ehrenreich found it was almost impossible to feed and house yourself adequately while earning minimum wage, even with a second and third job. Trying to support yourself as well as one or more children was actually impossible. And you don’t even want to think about getting sick in a society without socialised healthcare.

Never forget

If I’m right about the balance of power swinging from Capital to Labour after four decades of devil-take-the-hindmost neoliberalism, I suspect there will be a lot of corporations keen to rewrite history and crabwalk away from their previous employment practices in the coming years. So, it’s worth briefly recounting what Ehrenreich learnt during her undercover assignment.

Ehrenreich discovered that grinding poverty was only part, and arguably not even the most dehumanising part, of being a minimum-wage worker. In her book, Ehrenreich detailed how the likes of Walmart – the world’s third-largest employer after the American and Chinese military – would go to great lengths to avoid employing anyone with any fight left in them and make sure existing employees wouldn’t get any uppity ideas.

As detailed in this Current Affairs article, Ehrenreich discovered those applying for a job at Walmart had to fill in a comprehensive survey and provide responses to statements such as, “There is room in every corporation for a nonconformist” and “Rules have to be followed to the letter at all times”. (For future reference, in the event you fall on hard times, the ‘correct’ answers to those queries are, respectively, “Totally disagree” and “Totally agree”.)

Speaking of rules, Ehrenreich found Walmart and its ilk expected employees to follow a bewildering array of them. There were rules about “gossiping” with and sometimes even talking to fellow workers. Rules about taking a swig from a water bottle in public view, even while doing thirsty work. Rules against engaging in ‘time theft’ by pausing from your labours even momentarily. Rules about having to submit to regular drug tests. Rules about partaking in the creepy ‘Walmart cheer’ with a straight face at the start of every shift.

What Ehrenreich was most surprised by during her foray into the world of pink-collar work was “the extent to which one is required to surrender one’s basic civil rights and – what boils down to the same thing – self-respect”. She came to believe the rules were there not so much to wring as much labour out of employees as possible, though that was undoubtedly part of it, but to break whatever was left of their spirit. “The drug tests, the constant surveillance, being ‘reamed out’ by managers … are part of what keeps wages low… [because] if you’re made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you’re paid is what you’re actually worth.”

Lots of acclaim, no (immediate) impact  

Nickel and Dimed was a bestseller and received plenty of positive media attention. Journalists in several other countries were inspired to don mufti and live among the working poor. (In this country, The Australian’s Elisabeth Wynhausen spent nine months attempting to survive doing factory, cleaning and hospitality work and detailed her findings in 2005’s Dirt Cheap: Life at the wrong end of the job market.)    

Still, nothing changed.

Walmart and its ilk weren’t shamed into treating their employees better. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if many business owners and C-suite executives in the retail and hospitality industries read Nickel and Dimed purely to get ideas on how they could better exploit their own workers. In real terms, the minimum wage in America is significantly lower in 2022 than it was in 2001. For most American workers, real wages haven’t increased since the 1970s, while healthcare, education and, in many parts of the US, housing costs have skyrocketed.

Even at the time Ehrenreich wrote Nickel and Dimed, it was not just minimally educated individuals doing shitkicker jobs who had to fear ending up on the bones of their arse. And by 2010, the year Uber launched and what we now call the gig economy really got going, a growing number of digital economy companies no longer even needed to worry about paying their workers, sorry contractors, even $2.13 an hour.  

On the 10th anniversary of the book’s publication, The New Yorker ran an article entitled ‘Still Nickel and Dimed a Decade Later’. It argued minimum-wage workers had it better around the turn of the Millennium, when America’s economy was still booming, than they did in 2011, in the wake of the GFC. Certainly, a case could be made that rather than the working conditions of minimum-wage workers improving, the conditions of medium-wage and, in some cases, even high-wage ones have deteriorated over the last 20 years.

The election of Obama intoxicated well-heeled progressives, but it didn’t do much to improve the fortunes of America’s underclass, working class and middle class, many of whom turned to Trump in desperation in 2016. Joe Biden has talked a good game about raising the hourly minimum wage to the princely sum of $15 an hour, but don’t hold your breath waiting for that campaign promise to be fulfilled.

Ehrenreich was a big supporter of the American union movement throughout her life, but it was already a shadow of its former self by the time Ehrenreich got a job at Walmart; it’s now a complete irrelevance for all but a handful of public sector workers. (And the labour movement hasn’t exactly been kicking goals anywhere else in the Anglosphere in recent decades when it comes to improving the job security, wages or working conditions of its members.)

Middle-class angst

It’s a rare worker, be they blue, pink or white collar, who hasn’t been subjected to increasing monitoring and surveillance over the last couple of decades. Back in 2001, being reduced to sleeping in your vehicle, as some of Ehrenreich’s co-workers had to, was still uncommon and regarded as regrettable. In 2022, all but the upper-middle class are locked out of many capital city property markets in first-world nations and there’s a growing Van Life subculture.      

Way back in 1977, Ehrenreich was the first to identify and label the ‘professional-managerial class’ (PMC) just as it was beginning to make its presence truly felt in universities, the media and the political and industrial wings of the labour movement. Of course, Ehrenreich was herself a member par excellence of the PMC – “a group of professionals distinguished from other social classes by their training and education, typically business qualifications and university degrees, with occupations thought to offer influence on society that would otherwise be available only to capital owners”.

With her usual acuity, Ehrenreich recognised that while one faction of the PMC was doing incredibly well for itself during the neoliberal era, members of another faction were struggling to keep their heads above water. (As I discussed in my last Substack missive, a university degree may still confer a minor amount of social status, but it’s been a long time since it guaranteed a middle-class lifestyle.)

Ehrenreich detailed the downward mobility of those who had played by the rules (i.e. studied and worked hard from an early age) only to find themselves on a slippery slide into not-so-genteel poverty in books such as Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.

While it doesn’t directly address downward mobility, the brilliant book Ehrenreich wrote after getting cancer – Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World – has plenty of darkly humorous observations about the tendency of Americans, from all class backgrounds, to indulge in unhinged optimism and magical thinking in the face of unfortunate personal circumstances.   

In 2006, five years after the publication of Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich founded United Professionals. It’s no longer extant, but it once was an organisation:

For white collar workers, regardless of profession or employment status… reaching out to all unemployed, underemployed and anxiously employed workers – people who bought the American dream that education and credentials could lead to a secure middle class life, but now find their lives disrupted by forces beyond their control. Our mission is to protect and preserve the American middle class, now under attack from so many directions, from downsizing and outsourcing to the steady erosion of health and pension benefits. 

Final words    

Ehrenreich concluded Nickel and Dimed by pointing out, “The ‘working poor’, as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high.” She also predicted those at the bottom of the food chain “are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth”.

It's a tragedy that Ehrenreich, one of the few journalists who actually comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable (rather than pandering to the powerful and putting the boot into the powerless, as is standard journalistic practice), died as her prediction was belatedly starting to come true.