We lost a wonderful woman recently. And no, I’m not talking about Queen Elizabeth — although she was a fascinating public figure. I am talking about a person who is the total opposite from the genetically privileged, wealthy, royal family of the United Kingdom. I am talking about Barbara Ehrenreich, the writer.
I have been reading Ehrenreich for 40 years. She was fiercely feminist, a fantastic columnist, a political activist, a co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America along with Michael Harrington. She had a PhD in Cell Biology, but she never worked in a lab; she earned her living as a policy analyst, an academic, a writer and a journalist.
Her work was everywhere, but I doubt that the Red Bluff Daily News ever published a column of hers. She was on the editorial board of The Nation, a liberal weekly originally founded in the 1860s as an abolitionist publication. She wrote for the muckraking Mother Jones Magazine; she was a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine.
You could find her work in the New York Times where she wrote a column for Thomas Friedman when he took a break. She worked with the National Abortion Rights Action League and the National Organization for the Reformation of Marijuana Laws. She was a member of the very influential left wing think tank The Institute for Policy Studies.
She was a towering figure on the political left whose work was original, creative and carefully researched. Yet she never forgot her working class roots.
In fact, it was her article for Harpers, and later her book: “Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting By in America” which became a best-seller and, essentially, cranked up the whole issue of income inequality in America in a very personal way.
What she decided to do was to attempt to live on the minimum wage posing as a woefully inexperienced homemaker returning to the work force. She lived in the cheapest housing she could find and took jobs as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nurse’s aide and a Walmart sales clerk.
What she discovered is that there is no such thing as unskilled work, even at the minimum wage back in 1998. All work required mental and muscular skill. And at such a low wage, she needed two jobs to survive. One reviewer of her book wrote that you will never see a hotel room or a restaurant meal in the same way again.
She came away from the experience with a deep respect for the working poor. And she became a tireless advocate for raising the minimum wage. Her book got the ball rolling and although the national minimum wage remains low at $7.25 per hour, states like California and Washington have had the wit to raise it to as much as $15 an hour.
Back in 2016, people thought Bernie Sanders was crazy for calling for a $15 minimum wage. Now that is the wage in California, which is enormously helpful to the working poor. It was Ehrenreich’s book that got the whole ball rolling on that issue.
In total, she wrote some 20 books. She contracted breast cancer in the 2000s and her critique of the pink ribbon movement was rational and realistic. She was very much a critic of the “positive thinking” movement when it comes to surviving cancer.
I watched a speech of hers from 2014 where she described the “pink ribbon experience.” She said she had enough of it when she went to a support group where they gave pink teddy bears with the ribbons to the women suffering from breast cancer. She said she wasn’t going to die with any pink teddy bear and went on to state that no man is given a blue teddy bear when he gets prostate cancer.
In a speech she gave in 2018, she was deeply critical of Hilary Clinton for calling Donald Trump’s followers “the deplorables.” The Democrats are, and continue to be, the party on the side of the working poor.
And yet the working poor have very low voter participation, and when they do vote, they tend to vote for the one party that harms the working poor the most. Barbara Ehrenreich had the empathy to see that we will never win back the working poor if we call them names.
Instead, those who take showers after work see liberals as hyper-educated, latte drinking snobs who do not understand the blue-collar worker’s problems. Unions are gone. Manufacturing has been shipped to places where workers are paid even less than our working poor.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s point was that if we pay the low wage worker more, this increases the wages for all workers. For the electricians and the plumbers. For all the service workers. It is “trickle up” economics, which is the exact opposite of what the political right preaches.
Her book “Nickel and Dimed” is a compassionate and empathetic masterful work which will remain a classic in immersive journalism. Forget J. D. Vance and his “Hillbilly Elegy” — and I hope he loses his Senate race in Ohio. “Nickel and Dimed” is a much more important, accurate and empathetic piece of work.
Barbara Ehrenreich was 81 when she passed away after having suffered a stroke. God bless her for the work she did and the millions of people that she influenced.
Allan Stellar is an RN and a freelance writer who moved to Red Bluff after the Camp Fire. He can be reached at Allan361@aol.com.