Photo by Sigrid Estrada
"It’s been the historical role of unions to fight not only
for their own members, but also for the entire working class."
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One
On One With Barbara Ehrenreich
By
Jon Melegrito
Poverty and the
working poor are familiar subjects in Barbara Ehrenreich’s writings.
In 1998, she undertook an “experiment” to find out how the roughly
four million women about to be thrown into the labor market by welfare
reform were going to survive on $6 or $7 an hour. The only way to
know, she said, is to “get out there and get my hands dirty.” So
for three months, she waited on tables, changed bed sheets and scrubbed
floors. The resulting book, Nickel and Dimed, which hit The
New York Times best seller list, related her experiences working
as a waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman, nursing home aide and
a Wal-Mart sales clerk.
Ehrenreich is an essayist, cultural critic
and activist as well as the author of several books and magazine
articles. Her former husband at one time was a staff organizer
for Local 107 of New York City’s DC 1707. Her latest book, Bait and
Switch — which came out in September and also made the Times’ best
seller list — explores “the shadowy world of the white-collar
unemployed.” For that investigation, she went after middle-class
jobs.
The rhetoric of welfare reform promised that a job — any
job — could be the ticket to a better life. But that’s
not what you discovered, correct?
I came to understand what
a serious mistake the nation made with welfare reform. Poverty
is not a psychological condition but a consequence of shamefully
low wages and lack of opportunity. All the rhetoric about welfare
reform — such as the racist
attacks on women who use welfare — have nothing to do with
reality. But what maddened me particularly was the assumption
that a job paying $6 or $7 an hour would lift anybody out of
poverty.
What
then should be done in terms of public policy to ensure that the
working poor not only survive but also prosper?
It’s no mystery.
Wages have to go up. They have been declining in recent months.
There’s a huge mismatch between wages and rent. Affordability
of housing, health care and child care are enormous issues. Other
countries have solved them by taking it as a government responsibility
to their citizens. We don’t.
But you have said that government is unwilling
to guarantee at least some social justice for the poor. How and from
where will social change ever come?
Aspirations for social
change lie in grass-roots efforts like cooperative enterprises
and aggressive trade unions. It’s been the historical role of
unions to fight not only for their own members but also for the
entire working class. Another source of activism has been community
coalitions — of
churches, unions, students and citizens — working for living-wage
legislation in their local areas. It doesn’t cure everything,
but it changes the whole outlook for the entire labor market.
During
your odyssey through the underside of working America, you took
on so-called “unskilled” jobs. What kind of folks were these
workers?
They are honest and hard working — sometimes too hard
working considering how little they are paid. I thought they
would exhibit more cynicism. They take pride in their job even
though they don’t get positive reinforcement from their bosses.
Interestingly, in my latest book, I saw the most passive, beaten-down
bunch of people: unemployed white-collar workers. They seem to
get more psychological manipulation all the time, and they have
to have a kind of loyalty to the bosses. With blue-collar people,
at least you get some wisecracking, many instances of defiance
and little acts of resistance.
You
asked why there aren’t more workers taking a stand where they
are, demanding better wages and safer conditions, either individually
or as a group. What’s the answer — and could it help union
organizers?
The overall answer is fear. People know they
can be fired for anything, for having a funny expression on your
face and — if you’re a union activist — for having a bad attitude.
We need ways of talking about it directly. To be a union member is
to become part of a movement, a crusade for social justice. It has
to appeal to people at that level. Union organizers have to be prepared
to get people talking about what they experience day to day, about
the sources of that fear, not just in a gossipy way but how it makes
you feel, how people might build solidarity and deal with the daily
humiliations. During my job experiment, when I heard my co-workers
complaining, my natural impulse was always to bring up the subject
of unions. The worst response I got was from one woman who asked, “What
exactly is a union?” and that disturbed me. We have a generation
of grownups whose parents were not in unions.
What is it about
our economy and culture that holds wages down, that cuts public services
for the poor while investing even more heavily in prisons and police?
In
the 1980s and ’90s, there was a lot of opportunism on the part
of politicians. It’s easier for them to mobilize around fear — that
some drug maniac is going to break into your house — rather
than focus on what would make our lives better and where resources
should come from. It’s more exciting to highlight crime, war
and violence than to talk about problems that really eat away
at us day by day.
You wrote eloquently about the widening gap between
the rich and the poor, the “served and the servers,” the “housed and
the homeless.” You concluded that someday these working poor
will rise in anger and demand to be paid what they’re worth.
What gives you that hope?
Part of it is just a certain faith
in human nature, but it’s also something that we work for, something
that we’re going to make happen. By “we,” I mean myself as an
activist and you and your readers as part of the union movement.
Unions should
start making it possible, on a broad scale, for people to join as
individuals. Anybody sympathetic should have a way of joining, and
all those people become the seeds of eventual organizing drives.
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