Latest / The Real News Podcast / No Such Thing as “Unskilled Work”: Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” 25 Years Later

Transcript

No Such Thing as “Unskilled Work”: Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” 25 Years Later · The Real News Podcast

0:00
Speaker 1: Ah, I got work, oh right. Welcome every one to
0:08
Speaker 1: Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams and
0:12
Speaker 1: struggles of the working class today. Working People is a
0:16
Speaker 1: proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and has
0:19
Speaker 1: brought to you in partnership within These Times magazine and
0:22
Speaker 1: the Real News Network. The show is produced by Jules
0:26
Speaker 1: Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you.
0:30
Speaker 1: My name is Maximilian Alvarez and today we've got a
0:34
Speaker 1: very special episode for you, guys, and we're talking about
0:37
Speaker 1: the work life and legacy of a very special person,
0:42
Speaker 1: the late great Barbara Ehrenreich. Twenty five years ago this year,
0:47
Speaker 1: Barbara published what is still to this day one of
0:50
Speaker 1: the most essential and impactful books about working class life
0:54
Speaker 1: in America ever. And the book is called Nickel and
0:58
Speaker 1: Dimed on Not Getting By in America. And if you
1:02
Speaker 1: listen to this show, then you know, chances are you
1:05
Speaker 1: probably heard of it, or you may have already read it.
1:08
Speaker 1: But if you haven't read it yet, and if you
1:11
Speaker 1: haven't dug into Barbara's incredible body of work, then frankly
1:16
Speaker 1: I kind of envy you, because you have a feast
1:20
Speaker 1: before you, a feast for your mind, your heart, and
1:25
Speaker 1: for your soul. And to commemorate the twenty fifth anniversary
1:28
Speaker 1: of Nickel and Dimed, The Nation magazine just published a
1:32
Speaker 1: really beautiful and vital forum with folks from around the
1:35
Speaker 1: worlds of labor and journalism testifying to the enduring power
1:40
Speaker 1: and relevance of Barbara Aaron Reich's work today as author
1:44
Speaker 1: and friend of the show, ALYSSA. Court writes in that
1:47
Speaker 1: forum quote, the first thing I discovered is that no job,
1:51
Speaker 1: no matter how lowly, is truly unskilled. This is from
1:56
Speaker 1: Barbara Aharon Reich's two thousand and one master work, Nickel
1:59
Speaker 1: and Dime. I read it that year when I was
2:02
Speaker 1: twenty nine. Eventually, Barbara became my good friend and colleague
2:06
Speaker 1: as we created a media organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project,
2:12
Speaker 1: and wrote and edited articles together to recap for that book.
2:17
Speaker 1: Barbara went undercover reporting as she worked as a housekeeper,
2:21
Speaker 1: nursing aid, a home cleaner, a waitress at Jerry's and
2:25
Speaker 1: Hearthside restaurants, and a Walmart worker, all in her later fifties,
2:31
Speaker 1: wrestling with cleaning products, carrying huge diner orders, and sometimes
2:36
Speaker 1: living in motels. The book was a departure from her earlier,
2:41
Speaker 1: acidly funny and sociological work ranging from midwifery to middle
2:46
Speaker 1: class anxiety, but for which she rarely interviewed a soul.
2:51
Speaker 1: It's hard to underestimate the effect Nickel and Dimes Vacuum
2:55
Speaker 1: Cleaner's eye view of what it means to work a
2:58
Speaker 1: minimum wage job in this country had on so many
3:02
Speaker 1: of us. For those blinded by America's late twentieth century comforts,
3:07
Speaker 1: Barbara's book helped us to stop unseeing low wage workers.
3:11
Speaker 1: It also showed us what anyone who has ever made
3:14
Speaker 1: a pizza or taken care of a child already knew,
3:17
Speaker 1: but had perhaps not articulated, that there is no such
3:22
Speaker 1: thing as quote unquote unskilled work. As Barbara wrote, quote,
3:26
Speaker 1: the working poor, as they are approvingly termed, are, in
3:30
Speaker 1: fact the major philanthropists of our society end quote, and
3:34
Speaker 1: Nicol and Dime also helped precarious creatives like me and
3:38
Speaker 1: my ilk freelance writers, art handlers, grad students, bookstore clerks,
3:44
Speaker 1: all paid hourly and shabbily, see themselves more clearly as
3:49
Speaker 1: being on a continuum with other working people end quote.
3:53
Speaker 1: Now we've linked to the Nation Forum commemorating Barbara Ehrenreich
3:57
Speaker 1: in the twenty fifth anniversary of Nicol and Dome in
4:00
Speaker 1: the show notes for this episode, and you should definitely
4:03
Speaker 1: go read it when you have some time. And it
4:05
Speaker 1: goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway
4:08
Speaker 1: that you should really really go read Nickel and Dimed,
4:12
Speaker 1: and hopefully by the end of today's episode you'll see why.
4:16
Speaker 1: There's really so much that I want to say and
4:19
Speaker 1: could say here about Barbara Ehrenreich, but to keep it
4:23
Speaker 1: short and sweet, I'm just going to say this. I
4:26
Speaker 1: never had the honor of meeting or knowing Barbara personally,
4:30
Speaker 1: but I know that I would not be here doing
4:33
Speaker 1: the work that I do on this podcast, on the
4:36
Speaker 1: Real News Network and beyond without her. Her work has
4:41
Speaker 1: inspired generations of working class journalists and non traditional storytellers
4:47
Speaker 1: just like me. Her advocacy and institution building has made
4:51
Speaker 1: it more possible for people like us to have places
4:56
Speaker 1: to publish our work and for working class stories and
4:59
Speaker 1: voice this is to be heard. And I am so
5:02
Speaker 1: grateful to Barbara for that and to all who carry
5:06
Speaker 1: on her beautiful, vital legacy today. And I am so
5:10
Speaker 1: grateful to all of our amazing guests on the show
5:13
Speaker 1: today who are doing just that. Thank you all so
5:16
Speaker 1: much for being here. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.
5:21
Speaker 2: I'm deer Drew English. I've written three feminist and class
5:25
Speaker 2: conscious books with Barbara Ehrenreich, the former editor in chief
5:28
Speaker 2: of Mother Jones magazine and professor of journalism at the
5:32
Speaker 2: University of California, Berkeley.
5:34
Speaker 3: I'm only sa Court. I created the Economic Hardship Reporting
5:38
Speaker 3: Project with Barbara. I'm a journalist and a poet. I've
5:41
Speaker 3: written seven books and edited one anthology. My last book
5:46
Speaker 3: was called Bootstrapped, Liberating Ourselves in the American Dream, and
5:49
Speaker 3: the one before that was Squeezed WI Our Families, Cantaford, America.
5:54
Speaker 4: Hi, my name is Ann Larson. I'm the author of
5:56
Speaker 4: clean Up on Aisle five, Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and
6:00
Speaker 4: The View from Behind the Supermarket Register. I'm a fellow
6:03
Speaker 4: with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and Barbara earn Reich
6:07
Speaker 4: is one of my intellectual and journalistic heroes and mentors.
6:12
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, well, thank you all so much for being here.
6:16
Speaker 1: It really really is an honor to be chatting with
6:18
Speaker 1: all three of you, and all three of you are
6:21
Speaker 1: my journalistic heroes, and I think you are all living
6:25
Speaker 1: testaments of the incredible legacy of the incredible Barbara Aharon Reich,
6:30
Speaker 1: and I wanted to start by asking more about that,
6:34
Speaker 1: like whether you got to know her in person or
6:38
Speaker 1: through your work. Tell us and our listeners more about
6:42
Speaker 1: Barbara and what she and her work have meant to you.
6:45
Speaker 2: I got to know Barbara because we were both on
6:48
Speaker 2: the faculty of an experimental, radical college called the College
6:53
Speaker 2: at Old Westbury, with a mission of social justice and
6:56
Speaker 2: a very multi racial student body and teaching staff. And
7:02
Speaker 2: we taught women studies courses together, some of the first
7:04
Speaker 2: back in the seventies, and then we spent seven years
7:07
Speaker 2: writing three different books together. Perhaps the one I'll mention
7:11
Speaker 2: is called for her Own Good Two Centuries of the
7:13
Speaker 2: Experts Advice to Women, which is about the impact of
7:16
Speaker 2: health and mental health professionals on creating stereotypes about women
7:21
Speaker 2: based on gender, class, and race, and helping to authorize
7:25
Speaker 2: those stereotypes to make them seem as though they were
7:27
Speaker 2: scientifically based and authoritative. So Barbara and I were really
7:33
Speaker 2: more than friends and co workers, we were really sisters.
7:37
Speaker 2: I lived in the same house with her for periods
7:39
Speaker 2: of time. I'm the godmother, as she called me, the
7:43
Speaker 2: goddess mother of her two children, who I am still
7:48
Speaker 2: very close to and who are remarkable testaments to Barbara's
7:51
Speaker 2: influence too. Her kids are both extraordinary writers and activists.
7:57
Speaker 2: I've had a lifelong relationship with Barbara and profoundly influenced
8:02
Speaker 2: by her. She influenced and then when I was at
8:05
Speaker 2: Mother Jones, I became her editor and she had a column,
8:08
Speaker 2: she did a cover story on one of her books,
8:10
Speaker 2: and she was a frequent advisor. And then finally with
8:14
Speaker 2: the founding you know, we'll be talking about Nicolon Dimed
8:18
Speaker 2: and that whole period. But then with the founding of
8:21
Speaker 2: the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, I certainly consulted with her
8:25
Speaker 2: then and now I continue that role with Alyssa by
8:28
Speaker 2: being on the board. And so Barbara's just had a profound,
8:32
Speaker 2: lifelong impact on my thinking and my commitments.
8:37
Speaker 1: So Deirdre, I got to ask from one editor to another.
8:40
Speaker 1: You know, going from friend to editor is not an
8:43
Speaker 1: easy transition to make, especially when you're editing Barbara Ehrenreich,
8:47
Speaker 1: How was that transition for you guys pretty smooth?
8:50
Speaker 2: Because Barbara was such a great writer. You know, it's
8:53
Speaker 2: actually the best writers who are the easiest to edit.
8:57
Speaker 2: They get the big picture and they get back in
9:00
Speaker 2: the day when we had a paper publication before it
9:03
Speaker 2: was digital, you know, sometimes you just have to cut
9:05
Speaker 2: for space, and the professionals know how to do that.
9:08
Speaker 2: So no, no, no, we never had any We never
9:10
Speaker 2: had any arguments. But I'll just say one more thing though.
9:14
Speaker 2: An editor should always remember that the piece belongs to
9:17
Speaker 2: the writer. So your role is to help the writer,
9:21
Speaker 2: not to impose yourself on the writer. So I'll throw
9:24
Speaker 2: that into.
9:26
Speaker 4: I never met Barbara Aaron Reich, but I read Nikolin
9:29
Speaker 4: Dined pretty soon after it came out, and I think
9:32
Speaker 4: I was a graduate student at that time, maybe my
9:34
Speaker 4: first year in graduate school. And you know, this was,
9:38
Speaker 4: you know, twenty five years ago. This was still sort
9:40
Speaker 4: of end of history type era. Like you know, we
9:44
Speaker 4: just had Bill Clinton for eight years, and there was
9:47
Speaker 4: this sense that, like, you know, everything had.
9:49
Speaker 3: Worked out how it was supposed to work out. Capitalism
9:52
Speaker 3: was great.
9:52
Speaker 4: It had defeated all the other alternatives, and everybody got
9:56
Speaker 4: what they deserved in life. If you worked hard, you
9:59
Speaker 4: could succes and meritocracy was the name of the game,
10:04
Speaker 4: and so nicol and Dimed, you know, just sort of
10:07
Speaker 4: punctured that myth so profoundly and so completely that it
10:12
Speaker 4: was so necessary. At that time, I taught the book,
10:16
Speaker 4: or portions of the book in a class I was
10:17
Speaker 4: teaching at the time as a graduate student, and I
10:20
Speaker 4: remember being struck by how funny it was that students
10:23
Speaker 4: that I taught were reading these like about poverty and
10:26
Speaker 4: low wages and living in motel rooms and cleaning shit
10:31
Speaker 4: out of toilets, and yet we're all just like laughing
10:33
Speaker 4: and you know, hooting and hollering through the whole thing.
10:36
Speaker 4: And I just remember thinking, what an amazing writer that
10:39
Speaker 4: you could write about these topics that are so dark,
10:43
Speaker 4: and yet we're all laughing the whole way through. I
10:46
Speaker 4: just think that's a very rare talent that she had.
10:49
Speaker 4: And then, you know, we can talk about this a
10:51
Speaker 4: little bit more. But you know, at that time, I
10:54
Speaker 4: was a graduate student. I was planning on a career
10:56
Speaker 4: in academia. You know, the idea of service work was
11:00
Speaker 4: not something that I worried about for myself, though I
11:03
Speaker 4: had come from a working class background. But a few
11:05
Speaker 4: years later I found myself working in a supermarket, and
11:08
Speaker 4: I remember thinking about nicol and dimed and seeing it differently.
11:12
Speaker 4: Right once, I'm doing the service work and a line
11:15
Speaker 4: from the book. I hadn't read it in several years
11:17
Speaker 4: at that point, but I remembered a line from the book,
11:20
Speaker 4: you Know. I'm working behind the cash register, and I'm tired,
11:23
Speaker 4: and it's weeks and weeks and I'm struggling to learn
11:26
Speaker 4: the job. And Harbert Ahrenyx's voice popped into my head
11:28
Speaker 4: and it said, what you don't necessarily realize when you're
11:32
Speaker 4: selling your time by the hour is that what you're
11:34
Speaker 4: actually selling is your life. And I just thought how
11:39
Speaker 4: apt that wasn't how accurate it was, And she'd really
11:41
Speaker 4: captured that I was now living, I was now experiencing,
11:45
Speaker 4: And so that, you know, influenced me and made me
11:48
Speaker 4: think I should write about this job. Because Barbara did it,
11:51
Speaker 4: she sort of forged a path for me.
11:53
Speaker 3: I read it when it came out in two thousand
11:56
Speaker 3: and one, but my favorite book by far was Fear Falling.
12:00
Speaker 3: I had been introduced to her earlier than that. I
12:02
Speaker 3: had been like Anne at CuNi Grad Center in English
12:05
Speaker 3: and Sociology and had been adjuncting it was the introduction
12:11
Speaker 3: for me to the what I would later call the
12:13
Speaker 3: middle precariate, this kind of precarious middle class where we
12:16
Speaker 3: were making I don't remember what it was, and it
12:18
Speaker 3: was two thousand and three thousand dollars a class, and
12:21
Speaker 3: we were somehow supposed to also go to graduate school.
12:24
Speaker 3: So I started to see, after I read Nicol and Dim,
12:27
Speaker 3: a continuum for the first time between my own experience
12:31
Speaker 3: as a kind of unstably middle class person and the
12:35
Speaker 3: people around me who were serving food and taking out
12:38
Speaker 3: the garbage and making people's beds and hotels. And I
12:42
Speaker 3: saw the connection which I think had been purposely obfuscated
12:46
Speaker 3: by third wave Democrats, which is part of what Anne
12:49
Speaker 3: was saying also, and I had too, had kind of
12:52
Speaker 3: gotten lost in the aestheticism of the nineties, in its attitudes,
12:57
Speaker 3: in its stances. It was a very alluring decade for
13:02
Speaker 3: Generation X people who are into alternative culture. You could
13:06
Speaker 3: just kind of lose yourself in you know, Sleeter Kinney
13:09
Speaker 3: or something, and in kind of poetics and theory and
13:13
Speaker 3: get disconnected from the experience of class even when you
13:16
Speaker 3: yourself were living it. So what it was it was
13:19
Speaker 3: both a reminder and like a form of self knowledge
13:22
Speaker 3: reading it, because I suddenly was like, Wow, yeah, my
13:25
Speaker 3: time here adjuncting at Kingsborough Community College where people are
13:29
Speaker 3: screaming at me, and I can't afford my rent. Even
13:32
Speaker 3: in the East Village is being stolen in a way.
13:35
Speaker 3: And so I actually wound up dropping out of graduate
13:37
Speaker 3: school for better or worse as a result. And then
13:40
Speaker 3: years later, obviously I met her. I was working on
13:44
Speaker 3: a film called The Last Clinic, which is about the
13:47
Speaker 3: clinic of the center of the Dobbs case in Mississippi
13:50
Speaker 3: women's health, and I was the producer and the writer
13:55
Speaker 3: with the great director Mazie Crowe, and I was raising
13:58
Speaker 3: money from Barbara and I and it was like come
14:01
Speaker 3: believe I was and sitting in in the middle of
14:03
Speaker 3: a magazine office, she lessa and she starts talking about
14:07
Speaker 3: Jane and which I believe she had like firsthand experience
14:11
Speaker 3: with and I just was like, my god, I mean,
14:15
Speaker 3: I fell in love. I think I felt like I
14:17
Speaker 3: had finally found not just a mentor, but family, a
14:25
Speaker 3: mother of swords, a spouse of swords, a place where
14:28
Speaker 3: I belonged as a person but also as a mind,
14:31
Speaker 3: and a kind of politics which in journalism is hard
14:35
Speaker 3: to find. Let's be frank, this is not a field
14:38
Speaker 3: filled with activists or unusual poetic people or people who
14:44
Speaker 3: are incredibly moral, right, that's not and she was all
14:48
Speaker 3: those things. And also as a woman, she was incredibly
14:51
Speaker 3: generous to other women, and we can talk more about that.
14:54
Speaker 3: She really I feel like she didn't have some of
14:56
Speaker 3: the conventional gender identifications of a lot of kind of
15:01
Speaker 3: boomer women who might see themselves as you know, internalized
15:08
Speaker 3: masculinity and all this kind of stuff. She really was
15:10
Speaker 3: about women and about encouraging women. I mean she also
15:14
Speaker 3: she had a lot of male friends and male colleagues
15:16
Speaker 3: and men in her life. That's not to but I
15:18
Speaker 3: think she wasn't competitive and defensive in a gendered way,
15:22
Speaker 3: which really set her apart. Honestly. So we after this
15:28
Speaker 3: love match, I started working for her at the Economic
15:32
Speaker 3: Curture Reporter, and she insisted we call each other co editors,
15:36
Speaker 3: which of course was like a marketing person's nightmare.
15:40
Speaker 2: You know.
15:40
Speaker 3: It's like, she's like, we have an anarchist socialist nonprofit.
15:43
Speaker 3: I was like, okay, but better not share this with
15:45
Speaker 3: our funders flat hierarchies. I was like, okay, but I
15:49
Speaker 3: knew also that this was the only way I could
15:51
Speaker 3: actually do this was with somebody like this. And the
15:54
Speaker 3: idea of our organization was to fund people who were
15:56
Speaker 3: truly working class and fund people like she and I
15:59
Speaker 3: who were journalists who wanted to write entirely about income
16:03
Speaker 3: inequality and no longer had the resources. So actually, yeah, Max,
16:07
Speaker 3: you were one of the people I encountered early on.
16:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, baby, I mean, like, like I said, like, we
16:12
Speaker 1: are all, in some way or fashion like living proof
16:15
Speaker 1: of Barbara's incredible legacy. And that includes me and this show, right,
16:20
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, not only would I not be
16:23
Speaker 1: doing this work would there there wouldn't be a market
16:26
Speaker 1: for this work without someone like Barbara. And on top
16:31
Speaker 1: of that, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project has sponsored episodes
16:34
Speaker 1: of the show. They've connected us to folks that we've
16:37
Speaker 1: interviewed on this show. It's an incredible, incredible organization and
16:42
Speaker 1: legacy that you and Barbara, you know, built from the
16:46
Speaker 1: ground up, and it's touched so many of us and
16:49
Speaker 1: helped tell so many of our stories. And you know,
16:52
Speaker 1: I think I'm honored to be in the struggle with
16:55
Speaker 1: all of you to carry that legacy forward however we can,
17:00
Speaker 1: but I want to go backward again, right, because I
17:02
Speaker 1: think you guys have really touched on something that is
17:06
Speaker 1: super important for folks to understand about Nickel and dimed
17:11
Speaker 1: itself and like everything in it, because you can't understand
17:16
Speaker 1: it just by reading it today, Like you have to
17:18
Speaker 1: understand who we were and where we were at the
17:22
Speaker 1: time that it was published, right, And it was published
17:25
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one, and you know, written in
17:28
Speaker 1: a turn of the millennium America that feels so incredibly
17:32
Speaker 1: far away today in many respects. I mean, I was
17:36
Speaker 1: still a teenager then. I was a conservative, middle class,
17:40
Speaker 1: dipshit mixed race kid in Orange County, southern California, who
17:44
Speaker 1: still didn't really know a whole lot about life and
17:47
Speaker 1: who had no idea how bad things we're going to
17:49
Speaker 1: get over the next twenty five years. You know, I
17:52
Speaker 1: identify with the stories that y'all were telling, because when
17:54
Speaker 1: this book came out, my family was part of the
17:57
Speaker 1: middle class in that post you know, Cold War boom,
18:02
Speaker 1: and then we lost our middle class status in the
18:05
Speaker 1: post two thousand and eight crash, you know, great recession,
18:09
Speaker 1: including the house that I was raised in right, And
18:12
Speaker 1: so I read the book very differently later on in
18:17
Speaker 1: life than I would have had I picked it up
18:20
Speaker 1: in two thousand and one. So I want to really
18:22
Speaker 1: take listeners back to that time, and I wanted to
18:26
Speaker 1: ask if you could say more about who you were then,
18:30
Speaker 1: what the country was like then, and what working in
18:33
Speaker 1: America was like then.
18:35
Speaker 2: You know, Barbara never bought into the boom myth. You know,
18:39
Speaker 2: I think that certainly throughout the Reagan years, which were
18:43
Speaker 2: the nineteen eighties, Barbara was continuously aware that wages were
18:50
Speaker 2: still stagnant for the working class. The post war boom
18:52
Speaker 2: really ended by the eighties, and the boom was for
18:56
Speaker 2: the business elite and corporations, and it was Reagan regulation.
19:01
Speaker 2: And then moving forward a little bit in time, Barbara
19:03
Speaker 2: never fell in with the Clintons, and in fact a
19:08
Speaker 2: lot of her concern with poverty came about because during
19:11
Speaker 2: Clinton's regime, the push to eliminate welfare, welfare as we
19:16
Speaker 2: know it, and to force women mothers into jobs to
19:22
Speaker 2: justify their welfare payments. That was actually the impetus of writing.
19:26
Speaker 2: Nickeldon timed Barbara. I was actually part of a group
19:30
Speaker 2: with Barbara that was I think it was called the
19:32
Speaker 2: Committee of one Hundred. It was one hundred feminists who
19:34
Speaker 2: were protesting Clinton esque welfare reform, and we failed to
19:38
Speaker 2: stop it. And then Barbara was left with the question, well,
19:41
Speaker 2: what is actually going to happen to these working women
19:44
Speaker 2: who are being pushed off welfare and into the workforce.
19:47
Speaker 2: And so if that's supposed to be the answer, you know,
19:51
Speaker 2: get a job, like let me go out and look
19:53
Speaker 2: and see whether you can support yourself on a low
19:56
Speaker 2: wage job. And that was the genesis of Nickeldon time.
20:00
Speaker 2: It would be some part of my answer to your question.
20:02
Speaker 4: I mentioned earlier, you know, this idea of the end
20:05
Speaker 4: of history and the meritocracy had went out and everything
20:09
Speaker 4: was as you know, we were in the best of
20:11
Speaker 4: all possible worlds. And how nicol and Dime sort of
20:14
Speaker 4: punctured that myth. I do think also one of the
20:17
Speaker 4: things that I remember from that period is this kind
20:20
Speaker 4: of looking back, it seems like, you know, we were
20:23
Speaker 4: all living in this myth, in this kind of dream world,
20:27
Speaker 4: and our feet weren't really on the ground in a way.
20:30
Speaker 4: You know, I really thought I was going to get
20:33
Speaker 4: a job in academia and be a professor. I mean,
20:36
Speaker 4: I think about that now, given my background and the
20:39
Speaker 4: fact that I went to Cuney and I studied English,
20:41
Speaker 4: and that was never going to happen. That was always
20:43
Speaker 4: a failed venture, but I believed it. I got on
20:47
Speaker 4: that path, and people told me it was going to
20:49
Speaker 4: work out. You know, if you work hard, it's all
20:51
Speaker 4: going to work out. And so one of the things
20:54
Speaker 4: that I think Nicolan Dime does is it only punctures
20:57
Speaker 4: the myth. And I'm talking more about Barber's work in general,
21:00
Speaker 4: you know, like books like Fear of Falling and Natural Causes.
21:05
Speaker 4: She wanted to see the world as it really is,
21:08
Speaker 4: not how we wish it would be. Right. She was
21:10
Speaker 4: really a critic of delusion in all its forms. And
21:14
Speaker 4: this goes from like you know, in Bait and Switch
21:17
Speaker 4: she talks about the myth that just by like updating
21:21
Speaker 4: your personality or getting a new wardrobe is going to
21:24
Speaker 4: be the key to a new job. And that were
21:27
Speaker 4: like in another book that she wrote, you know, kind
21:30
Speaker 4: of busting the myth that positive thinking can cure breast cancer. Right,
21:34
Speaker 4: She sort of refused to succumb to that kind of thinking.
21:37
Speaker 4: She was really insistent on science, on evidence, on rational thinking,
21:44
Speaker 4: you know, and even in one of the last books
21:46
Speaker 4: she wrote, if not the last, like she wrote about
21:48
Speaker 4: these mystical experiences that she had as a young person
21:52
Speaker 4: that sort of hinted at something supernatural beyond the realm
21:57
Speaker 4: that we live in every day. But even that change
22:00
Speaker 4: her mind about the fundamental class divide in the world
22:05
Speaker 4: and fundamental reality that we live in. And I just
22:07
Speaker 4: find this very inspiring. It to me, it's a very
22:10
Speaker 4: kind of socialist way of thinking without you know, Barbera's
22:14
Speaker 4: didn't wear her socialism on her sleeve. She wasn't out
22:18
Speaker 4: there pounding the gavel like. What she showed is a
22:22
Speaker 4: way of looking at the world in a concrete and
22:24
Speaker 4: material way and an insistence that we not be deluded
22:28
Speaker 4: about how things really are. And that way of thinking,
22:32
Speaker 4: that really grounded, concrete way of thinking is the foundation
22:34
Speaker 4: for political change.
22:36
Speaker 1: Yeah.
22:36
Speaker 3: I love that. And I mean when I think about
22:39
Speaker 3: what was going on in two thousand and one, I mean,
22:42
Speaker 3: there'd be a terrorist attack six months after Nicol and
22:45
Speaker 3: Dime came out, World Trade Center buildings falling, killing over
22:48
Speaker 3: three thousand people. There's the Enron scandal, there's like all
22:52
Speaker 3: those accounting crises and Wikipedia launched that year and like
22:58
Speaker 3: kind of a notion of unskilled experts tease, which I
23:01
Speaker 3: think is important too, because she was really pushing in
23:04
Speaker 3: Nickel and dime for rethinking what unskilled labor was. And
23:09
Speaker 3: I think the notts had a complex relationship with what
23:12
Speaker 3: skilled and unskilled labor was, especially thinking work, what had
23:16
Speaker 3: to be done by amateurs and what could be done
23:18
Speaker 3: by professionals. And I also think one of the things
23:21
Speaker 3: that was interesting about that time not just you know,
23:23
Speaker 3: this forcing us to see what the democrats, the centrist
23:27
Speaker 3: Democrats were sort of masking with the end of AFNC
23:30
Speaker 3: and so forth. It was also a moment when people
23:34
Speaker 3: could publish these kind of books. So I think which
23:37
Speaker 3: is less and less common? I mean, and who's on
23:39
Speaker 3: this panel? Just did I do some a few other people?
23:43
Speaker 1: Do you do? Max?
23:44
Speaker 3: But like, I think there's there was a time when
23:47
Speaker 3: No Logo was a bestseller Fast Food Nation Michael Pollin's
23:51
Speaker 3: early books, and these were mega sellers, as was Nickel
23:56
Speaker 3: and dimed. There was an audience for them, and there
23:59
Speaker 3: were also a real hot critique of commercialism and a
24:03
Speaker 3: lot of these factors. I mean, my first book branded
24:06
Speaker 3: the Mind, selling of teenagers was in this vein, and
24:09
Speaker 3: I do see Nicol Diamon as part of that. As
24:12
Speaker 3: a kind of materialist account the years that transpired after
24:17
Speaker 3: the Forever War would say, oh, do we have the
24:20
Speaker 3: energy to worry about the consumer economy and labor? Is
24:24
Speaker 3: that where we should shouldn't be worried about the threat
24:27
Speaker 3: against our nation?
24:27
Speaker 1: Right?
24:28
Speaker 3: There was all these different enemies that have been constructed
24:31
Speaker 3: since then, but it was pretty clear in that nineties
24:34
Speaker 3: knots period, even though it was being masked that those
24:36
Speaker 3: were the polls. It was like this flushed consumer economy
24:40
Speaker 3: that rested on the backs of workers, that rested on
24:43
Speaker 3: the brainwashing of teenagers to buy shit, that rested on
24:49
Speaker 3: people being fed terrible meals supersize me kind of and
24:53
Speaker 3: Michael Moore's films were about that, right, So I think
24:57
Speaker 3: that's part of the scene that I think of we
25:00
Speaker 3: has to think of just like the level of consumerism
25:02
Speaker 3: in that time. You can't even imagine it was very
25:06
Speaker 3: go go before there was a crash.
25:09
Speaker 1: Well, and that's that's what I remember, right, I mean,
25:12
Speaker 1: like now it's like I tell my daughter, it's like, yeah,
25:15
Speaker 1: that was the era of what I would call free
25:18
Speaker 1: range capitalism where we were we were allowed to kind
25:20
Speaker 1: of like run around as consumers and stretch our legs
25:24
Speaker 1: a little more. We had a little more buying power,
25:27
Speaker 1: and like the consumer felt like an important thing in
25:32
Speaker 1: the economy, whether you were going to you know, like
25:35
Speaker 1: a restaurant or staying at a hotel. You know, it
25:39
Speaker 1: felt like you could still sort of you know, vote
25:42
Speaker 1: with your wallet as the as the you know proverb goes, right,
25:45
Speaker 1: that we still had some power to determine what the
25:49
Speaker 1: economy looked like and get what we could from it.
25:52
Speaker 1: We could still make enough to earn a good living,
25:56
Speaker 1: like and was saying, like our feet weren't even really
25:58
Speaker 1: touching the ground. But that bubble burst for me at
26:02
Speaker 1: least after two thousand and eight, you know, and and
26:06
Speaker 1: in the years that have followed, like it's only I
26:09
Speaker 1: feel like I've only like come to see more and
26:12
Speaker 1: more what Barbara saw back then that me and my
26:15
Speaker 1: family couldn't, right because when we heard about worker issues
26:18
Speaker 1: like that, we saw them as consumers, right, and we
26:22
Speaker 1: saw them as well, I'm the fast food consumer going in,
26:26
Speaker 1: you know, paying for my meal, or I'm the you know,
26:29
Speaker 1: the student going to get an education why isn't my
26:32
Speaker 1: job to care about the employee on the other side,
26:35
Speaker 1: they should be doing their job kind of thing like
26:37
Speaker 1: that was such a prevalent way of thinking in America,
26:41
Speaker 1: and sure as hell in you know, conservative middle class
26:44
Speaker 1: Orange County, California. But again, like that that really came
26:48
Speaker 1: crashing down for me and for so many of us
26:51
Speaker 1: over the next twenty five years. And frankly, reading Nicolin
26:56
Speaker 1: Dimed in the America, in the world that we've got
26:59
Speaker 1: here in twenty twenty six is quite a trip. And
27:04
Speaker 1: you know it's I wanted to like ask y'all, like,
27:07
Speaker 1: why do you think it is still important for folks
27:11
Speaker 1: to read nicol and Dimeed and Barbera's work in general today?
27:15
Speaker 1: Like what can her work still teach us now or
27:19
Speaker 1: what has it been trying to teach us for years
27:21
Speaker 1: that we still haven't learned but really need to.
27:24
Speaker 2: Well, the economic pain has spread, and I think that
27:29
Speaker 2: Alyssa really was speaking directly to that when talking about
27:33
Speaker 2: the you know, quote middle class precarry it and the
27:38
Speaker 2: fact that a middle class way of life has become
27:41
Speaker 2: increasingly unaffordable to the working class and to large parts
27:47
Speaker 2: of the middle class. I mean of course, in America,
27:49
Speaker 2: everybody thinks they're middle class, so its it becomes very
27:52
Speaker 2: hard to talk about class for that reason. But basically,
27:55
Speaker 2: the great increase in unaffordability since first the enormous crash
28:00
Speaker 2: of two thousand and eight that wiped out so much
28:02
Speaker 2: value and showed that all that home ownership was based
28:06
Speaker 2: on a bubble bubble economics, and then the rise of
28:09
Speaker 2: the Forever War, so absorbing so much of our economy
28:12
Speaker 2: in military spending. So we've just seen so many social
28:18
Speaker 2: failures during this period of time. And I just want
28:20
Speaker 2: to also mention that the rise of what you were
28:24
Speaker 2: talking about, the consumer economy is also the rise of
28:27
Speaker 2: the service economy, you know, from the worker point of view,
28:31
Speaker 2: and that was a big shift in the working class
28:34
Speaker 2: because it was largely women who got those service jobs.
28:40
Speaker 2: And has written about so brilliantly in her book about
28:43
Speaker 2: grocery store work. I mean, obviously there are men working
28:45
Speaker 2: in grocery stores too, but the quote opportunities for women
28:50
Speaker 2: that are often you know, blamed on feminism, like that
28:53
Speaker 2: women that feminists, you know, encourage women to go into
28:56
Speaker 2: the workforce. Will know economics forced women into the workforce.
29:00
Speaker 2: Feminism tried to make circumstances better for them. I don't
29:04
Speaker 2: think we've succeeded, But Barbara was just very aware in
29:08
Speaker 2: Nickel and Dime, those are all jobs of women workers
29:12
Speaker 2: in the service economy, and so that was really burgeoning,
29:16
Speaker 2: while you know, the kind of extractive industries were all
29:19
Speaker 2: being outsourced and technology was coming in and absorbing a
29:22
Speaker 2: lot of those kinds of jobs. So Barbara was just
29:25
Speaker 2: so aware of the shifts and you know, demographics and
29:30
Speaker 2: economic policy and economic reality, so that she she always
29:34
Speaker 2: saw under the surface of what people thought was going
29:37
Speaker 2: on to kind of what was really going on. Yeah.
29:40
Speaker 3: I sometimes see her as sort of like an ultra
29:42
Speaker 3: violet light, you know, like see like forensic dusting, like
29:47
Speaker 3: where we can see things that we would otherwise see.
29:50
Speaker 3: I love what you just said. I was so smart, Deirdre. Yeah,
29:53
Speaker 3: about the consumer econdomy being a service economy, being female.
29:58
Speaker 3: And you know, when we've been assigning at the Economic
30:00
Speaker 3: Hardship Reporting Project, a lot of the pieces we assigned
30:03
Speaker 3: were people who have taken low wage work writing about
30:07
Speaker 3: what it's like inside of that, and including Anne, but
30:10
Speaker 3: also Joseph Williams, Danelle, Alexander, Daryl Wellington a bunch of
30:16
Speaker 3: other people, and that, to me was part of what
30:18
Speaker 3: Barbara also wanted to do towards the end of her life.
30:22
Speaker 3: Was she didn't want to just be the sort of
30:24
Speaker 3: whole pastoral like woman, you know, like underground, my man Godfrey,
30:29
Speaker 3: I'm going to go into the supermarket in a mask
30:33
Speaker 3: and become the worker. It was like she wanted to
30:36
Speaker 3: hire the person who had actually been that, who was
30:39
Speaker 3: a writer and a reporter in an active in mind,
30:42
Speaker 3: who could name it and it wasn't doing it as
30:46
Speaker 3: a stunt. And I think that to me, that was
30:49
Speaker 3: part of the understanding of the line between journalists and
30:53
Speaker 3: practitioner that started to expand in the nots when like
30:58
Speaker 3: experts and amateurs started to blend a little more. Publications
31:01
Speaker 3: like the Global Post started assigned to local reporters rather
31:04
Speaker 3: than to you know, have you know, white dudes like
31:07
Speaker 3: fly in to cover shit. And I think that was
31:13
Speaker 3: she was doing the domestic version of that, Let's not
31:15
Speaker 3: have people parachute in, let's have people write from their
31:18
Speaker 3: own place. And I followed that to the letter. I mean,
31:22
Speaker 3: I just thought it was really important and also having
31:26
Speaker 3: people who could think critically, like and here is like
31:30
Speaker 3: such a great mind, and you really are, and she
31:34
Speaker 3: can kind of like interpret a lot of the things
31:36
Speaker 3: that she was experiencing structurally. And that's another thing that
31:40
Speaker 3: Barbara was really interested in.
31:42
Speaker 4: Just wanted to note that, you know, one of the
31:44
Speaker 4: things I'm thinking about hearing this conversation is you know
31:49
Speaker 4: that Barbara was a baby boomer, right, and like, I
31:53
Speaker 4: don't know that that seems important somehow, Like we have
31:56
Speaker 4: this like whole hey boomer, you know, kind of where
31:59
Speaker 4: we make fun of the boomers, God love them, you know,
32:00
Speaker 4: and right that they're just like these clueless and we
32:04
Speaker 4: you know, there's some truth to it, right, like that
32:07
Speaker 4: they grew up in this time where you know, there
32:10
Speaker 4: was more opportunity and you get education and it's going
32:14
Speaker 4: to work out for you, and and there was some
32:16
Speaker 4: root for upper mobility in a lot of cases thanks
32:18
Speaker 4: to government investment and public goods. And we all know,
32:21
Speaker 4: you know what the French called the tonteorie is right
32:23
Speaker 4: these thirty years after World War Two when working class
32:26
Speaker 4: was making gains, and so for Barbera to be in
32:29
Speaker 4: that generation and yet recognize all the things that people
32:32
Speaker 4: on this panel are talking about and just sort of
32:34
Speaker 4: see through that mythology and to see, you know, as
32:39
Speaker 4: as your dre put it, like what was under the surface.
32:41
Speaker 4: I just think I think we should pause on on
32:44
Speaker 4: account of how extraordinary that is. I mean, I think
32:46
Speaker 4: one of the reasons that was the case is because
32:48
Speaker 4: she she had working classrooms herself, right, I grew up
32:51
Speaker 4: in Montana, and I believe her dad was a minor.
32:54
Speaker 4: And but then her dad, if I'm remembering correctly, ended
32:59
Speaker 4: up becoming an executive. He advanced in his career and
33:04
Speaker 4: ended up leaving the minds and became something of a professional.
33:06
Speaker 4: And so she got to see, you know, this this
33:09
Speaker 4: upper mobility, this transformation. But it wasn't just that she
33:12
Speaker 4: had like a really good memory for that period of
33:15
Speaker 4: her life which she'd been working class. But she really
33:18
Speaker 4: just she saw welfare being cut, as Alyssa mentioned, She
33:21
Speaker 4: saw what was happening to aid to families with dependent children.
33:24
Speaker 4: She saw free trade agreements, you know, sending jobs overseas
33:28
Speaker 4: and that expanding the service economy that she wrote about.
33:32
Speaker 4: And so it wasn't just a good memory, although that
33:34
Speaker 4: was part of it.
33:35
Speaker 2: She just never.
33:37
Speaker 4: Never lost her talent for recognizing the way the material
33:41
Speaker 4: world was the foundation for what was happening in people's lives.
33:44
Speaker 4: I mean, and in terms of what's changed, I mean,
33:47
Speaker 4: I think there's no better example of what stayed the
33:50
Speaker 4: same than like the minimum wage has been stuck at
33:54
Speaker 4: seven twenty five since two thousand and nine or something
33:56
Speaker 4: like this. I mean, this is something like out of
34:00
Speaker 4: just the dystopian universe that we have not raised the
34:03
Speaker 4: numb and wage in since two thousand and nine. And
34:06
Speaker 4: I just think, you know, Barbara, Barbara saw that this
34:09
Speaker 4: was the way things were going, and she was able
34:11
Speaker 4: to see not only through this sine of mythology that
34:14
Speaker 4: we've described, but even in her own generation, which in
34:17
Speaker 4: which so many people had a different experience, and even
34:20
Speaker 4: in her own experience her own family kind of crawled
34:23
Speaker 4: out of the working class, she still kept stay true
34:27
Speaker 4: to her vision and to herself. And I think that's
34:29
Speaker 4: very rare.
34:30
Speaker 2: You know, we baby boomers, we came of age in
34:33
Speaker 2: the sixties and there was a vast movement to be
34:36
Speaker 2: a part of, and Barbara and I were both very
34:39
Speaker 2: much part of it, the anti war movement where I
34:42
Speaker 2: really came of age in my college days doing that,
34:45
Speaker 2: worked on two documentaries about the anti war movement about
34:48
Speaker 2: anti war Vietnam and working with Vietnam vets, and then
34:52
Speaker 2: the women's movement that Barbara and I both really kind
34:55
Speaker 2: of shared our journey into that world and into what
35:00
Speaker 2: was missing in the women's movement and what was missing
35:03
Speaker 2: in the labor movement, which was a lack of feminist
35:05
Speaker 2: consciousness and on the left. So all of those there
35:09
Speaker 2: was this big thing, the movement, and we felt very
35:12
Speaker 2: much a part of it, supported by it, buoyed by it,
35:15
Speaker 2: but also you know, the productive arguments that happened within it.
35:20
Speaker 2: And so Barbara wasn't a lone figure. She was a
35:23
Speaker 2: standout figure, but she was I think she always felt
35:27
Speaker 2: part of a much larger community and with multifaceted elements
35:33
Speaker 2: in it, from the labor movement, from the women's movement
35:36
Speaker 2: and many others.
35:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to note, like
35:38
Speaker 3: you just said, you know, she didn't see a different
35:41
Speaker 3: distinction between advocacy and journalism like that thick line that
35:45
Speaker 3: we've been taught in j schools for decades, you know,
35:48
Speaker 3: the Voice of God on MPR and the Neutrality and
35:52
Speaker 3: all the major newspapers. She thought it was really important
35:54
Speaker 3: to bring the movements into writing, and that I hope
35:58
Speaker 3: is also another part of her legacy, honestly. I mean,
36:00
Speaker 3: look at the DSA. I mean she was the first
36:03
Speaker 3: co chair with Michael Harrington. So it's not just what
36:07
Speaker 3: she's done as a writer or what she said institutionally,
36:09
Speaker 3: it's politically and I think that is also a legacy
36:14
Speaker 3: within journalism, you know, to not forget politics on that level.
36:18
Speaker 4: You know.
36:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's all beautifully and powerfully put and
36:23
Speaker 1: it really reminds me of Barbara and you know, the
36:27
Speaker 1: rare writers and people who like see and fight and
36:34
Speaker 1: right the way that she did have taught me ever since. Right,
36:38
Speaker 1: like y'all said, you don't necessarily need to like see
36:41
Speaker 1: the world through socialist goggles. But once you stop seeing
36:45
Speaker 1: them through the kind of capitalist goggles that are like,
36:50
Speaker 1: you know, welded to our eyes from birth, then you
36:55
Speaker 1: start seeing things how they really are, and you know,
36:58
Speaker 1: you become a socialist real quick, you know. So it's
37:01
Speaker 1: like that's what it was for me, is I was
37:03
Speaker 1: so conditioned for so long to see the country I
37:07
Speaker 1: lived in a certain way, and it was you know,
37:11
Speaker 1: a massive financial crash that taught me otherwise. It was
37:15
Speaker 1: our government bailing out the banks and big corporations while
37:19
Speaker 1: families like mine fell through the drain. That taught me
37:22
Speaker 1: that it was working on the you know, a warehouse
37:26
Speaker 1: in factory floors with you know, people I had been
37:29
Speaker 1: taught to say were dumb and deserved to be in
37:32
Speaker 1: those jobs because they couldn't do anything else. And here
37:34
Speaker 1: I was, with a degree from the University of Chicago,
37:37
Speaker 1: doing the exact same job in twenty ten, right, I mean,
37:40
Speaker 1: life taught me a lot of what capitalism and America
37:44
Speaker 1: tried to keep from me for many years, and Barbara
37:48
Speaker 1: taught me a lot more about that, like, and I
37:52
Speaker 1: was so grateful when I kind of lost that innocence,
37:57
Speaker 1: that American innocence of realizing the world in the country
38:00
Speaker 1: that I actually did live in, instead of believing I
38:03
Speaker 1: lived in the fiction that had been presented to me.
38:06
Speaker 1: I was so grateful to have a book like nicol
38:09
Speaker 1: and Dimed to like help guide me from that point
38:14
Speaker 1: to a greater consciousness and to more answers and to
38:19
Speaker 1: more hope about you know, like what can be done
38:24
Speaker 1: about this for families like mine, for people like me,
38:27
Speaker 1: for the hundreds of people and workers that I've interviewed
38:31
Speaker 1: on this show over the years their families, like, I'm
38:35
Speaker 1: so so grateful to Barbara, to Nickel and Dimes for
38:39
Speaker 1: all that they have helped provide me in my long
38:43
Speaker 1: sort of recovery from the hangover of the capitalists, you know,
38:48
Speaker 1: fiction that I and my family had lived under for
38:51
Speaker 1: you know, the first half of my life. And I
38:53
Speaker 1: wanted to sort of turn that into you know, our
38:55
Speaker 1: final question here, because I could talk to you all
38:58
Speaker 1: for hours, but I know I have to let you
39:00
Speaker 1: go soon, and I wanted us to sort of finish
39:03
Speaker 1: by talking about the legacy of Barbara Ehrenreich herself and
39:07
Speaker 1: of course her work, including Nickel and dimed whose twenty
39:11
Speaker 1: fifth anniversary we are celebrating this year. And so I
39:15
Speaker 1: want to frame the question this way. You know, we
39:18
Speaker 1: now have the benefit of hindsight to see in our
39:22
Speaker 1: past what we frankly could not see coming in the
39:25
Speaker 1: future that lay before us twenty five years ago. With
39:29
Speaker 1: our life experience and with all the lessons that Barbara
39:33
Speaker 1: Ehrenreich has taught us, what wisdom can we offer through
39:37
Speaker 1: the gift of foresight to ourselves today with everything that
39:41
Speaker 1: we're facing, and to our descendants twenty five years from now.
39:45
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I would say Barbara actually foresaw herself
39:51
Speaker 2: the advent of AI on middle class jobs, and she
39:55
Speaker 2: actually very presciently wrote in an essay in time Megan
40:00
Speaker 2: Sine that I haven't read since it came out, but
40:02
Speaker 2: it just it struck me so much at the time
40:05
Speaker 2: that you know, maybe the middle class was soon going
40:07
Speaker 2: to be facing the downward mobility that the working class
40:11
Speaker 2: was experiencing, and that when the robots came, you know,
40:14
Speaker 2: when technology came for writing jobs, journalism jobs, teaching jobs,
40:22
Speaker 2: white call their jobs, the way it was already coming
40:26
Speaker 2: for so many working class jobs, definitely factory jobs, that
40:30
Speaker 2: maybe the middle class would wake up and understand their commonality,
40:36
Speaker 2: which Alyssa has been speaking to and which Alissa is
40:39
Speaker 2: very alive to talking about the precarrit you know, maybe
40:44
Speaker 2: they would begin to understand that the bosses were not
40:47
Speaker 2: their friends, and that the scraps that they were getting
40:50
Speaker 2: from the owner's table were you know, getting less and less,
40:53
Speaker 2: and that they would begin to experience a sense of
40:56
Speaker 2: unity and class consciousness and fighting spirit. And so that's happening.
41:02
Speaker 2: It's going to accelerate, and one hopes that what will
41:06
Speaker 2: also accelerate is what Barbara Kogg for, which is that
41:09
Speaker 2: unity and oppositional spirit.
41:11
Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm hoping for this unity. And you know, I've
41:16
Speaker 3: been talking to people about how they're affording America. You know,
41:19
Speaker 3: I wrote a book called Squeeze Ware Families Can'tiford America
41:22
Speaker 3: almost ten years ago now, and I've been returning to
41:26
Speaker 3: some of those topics because it seems very of the
41:29
Speaker 3: moment the middle precariate. And what startles me is people
41:33
Speaker 3: saying things like middle class people, people who earn six
41:36
Speaker 3: figures saying things like I don't feel like America likes me,
41:40
Speaker 3: and just that kind of that emotionalism of that. I
41:44
Speaker 3: feel like that is where this kind of emotional politics
41:47
Speaker 3: is going to start, you know, where people feel like
41:50
Speaker 3: they're part of a gradient, a range of class positions
41:56
Speaker 3: that are being kept down by people who are manufacturing
41:58
Speaker 3: insecurity for really the ninety nine percent, And that concept
42:03
Speaker 3: is no longer just problem, but it's something that people
42:07
Speaker 3: actually live and vote by and connect to each other around.
42:11
Speaker 4: We'll just end by I really want to emphasize something
42:14
Speaker 4: Deirdre just said which strikes me as really important about movements.
42:18
Speaker 4: You know, I think just one generation after Barber is
42:21
Speaker 4: a gen X or. I didn't feel like I was
42:23
Speaker 4: part of a movement. I was like all individuals who
42:26
Speaker 4: are you know, working hard and trying to make it
42:29
Speaker 4: work in a professional class or whatever. And I think,
42:32
Speaker 4: you know, what Barbara would want us to do is
42:33
Speaker 4: rebuild these movements that used to serve as a foundation
42:37
Speaker 4: for social action, for thinking, for camaraderie, for solidarity. I'm
42:42
Speaker 4: also the co founder of an organization called the Debt
42:44
Speaker 4: Collective that is trying to organize the debtors to bring
42:47
Speaker 4: some sense of community and collective strength to people that
42:51
Speaker 4: are drowning in debt. It's why I'm so proud to
42:53
Speaker 4: be part of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, where I
42:56
Speaker 4: think the organization publishes people that are writing as part
43:00
Speaker 4: of movements that they see journalism, like Alyssa just said,
43:03
Speaker 4: it's not just like something that you should be objective
43:06
Speaker 4: and talk about facts, but as part of a movement
43:09
Speaker 4: building work. And to me, this is I think a
43:12
Speaker 4: real key to you know, we can't we can't think
43:14
Speaker 4: of individuals. You can do your best as an individualism,
43:18
Speaker 4: but there's a limit there unless you have a movement
43:20
Speaker 4: behind you unless you have a culture that supports the
43:23
Speaker 4: kind of thinking and work that Barbera did and that
43:25
Speaker 4: we should all be trying to do.
43:32
Speaker 1: Oh right, gang, that's going to wrap things up for
43:35
Speaker 1: us today. I want to thank our guests, the great
43:38
Speaker 1: Deirdre English, Alyssaport and and Larson. I also want to
43:43
Speaker 1: thank the Nation magazine and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project
43:47
Speaker 1: for all the vital work that they do and for
43:50
Speaker 1: helping us put this special episode together. Go check them out,
43:53
Speaker 1: subscribe and support them using the links that we provided
43:57
Speaker 1: in the show notes. And of course I want to
43:59
Speaker 1: think thank you all for listening, and I want to
44:02
Speaker 1: thank you for caring. We'll see y'all back here next
44:05
Speaker 1: time for another episode of Working People, And in the meantime,
44:09
Speaker 1: go explore all the great work that we're doing at
44:12
Speaker 1: the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that
44:15
Speaker 1: lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines
44:19
Speaker 1: of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our
44:22
Speaker 1: different podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages,
44:27
Speaker 1: and help us do more work like this by going
44:30
Speaker 1: to therealnews dot com, forward slash, donate and becoming a supporter. Today,
44:35
Speaker 1: I promise you guys. It really does make a difference.
44:39
Speaker 1: I'm Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of
44:43
Speaker 1: each other, and rest in power. Barbara Ehrenreich, Solidarity Forever.
44:57
Speaker 3: When fa.
45:00
Speaker 5: Yes, I live on. Wherever we go, We're going to
45:05
Speaker 5: roll me, you and your home A song.
45:07
Speaker 1: I live on.
45:08
Speaker 5: Yes, I live on whereever I'm hungry, hungry, I'll w
45:13
Speaker 5: just as homeless hongry to be this song.
45:17
Speaker 1: I live on.
45:19
Speaker 5: Yes, I'll live on, Well, I mean things that happening
45:22
Speaker 5: in this land it's read a song. I live on. Yes,
45:26
Speaker 5: I live on wherever the book mean. The things that
45:30
Speaker 5: happened in this land is read.
45:32
Speaker 4: I live on.
45:33
Speaker 1: Yes, I live on.
45:35
Speaker 3: Whatever the video.
45:37
Speaker 5: Tells or media show. I live on.
45:40
Speaker 1: Yes.
45:41
Speaker 5: I live on if I have help you make sit
45:44
Speaker 5: up in the worlds to be there, I'll live on.
45:47
Speaker 1: Yes.
45:48
Speaker 5: I'll live on When my body the start and then
45:51
Speaker 5: something long a grade, I live on. Yes, I live
45:56
Speaker 5: on when my song the one again, all the one,
46:02
Speaker 5: yet all of one.