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.