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Nickel & Dimed 25-years later · A New Angle

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SPEAKER_03: This is A New Angle, conversations about how we're doing and where we're going.
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SPEAKER_03: I'm your host, Justin Angle.
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SPEAKER_03: This show is supported by the Headwaters Foundation,
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SPEAKER_03: First Security Bank, and the University of Montana College of Business.
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[music]
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SPEAKER_03: Hey, folks, welcome back, and thanks for tuning in.
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SPEAKER_03: Today, I'm speaking with Alyssa Quart and Anne Larson of
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SPEAKER_03: the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
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SPEAKER_03: Alyssa built the organization with the legendary Barbara Ehrenreich,
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SPEAKER_03: whose landmark book, Nickel and Dimed, is now 25 years old.
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SPEAKER_00: What you don't necessarily realize when you're selling your time by the hour is
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SPEAKER_00: that what you're actually selling is your life.
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SPEAKER_03: Alyssa, Anne,
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SPEAKER_03: and several others recently published a retrospective in
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SPEAKER_03: The Nation commemorating Ehrenreich's enduring impact.
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SPEAKER_03: Alyssa, Anne, thanks for joining me.
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SPEAKER_00: Oh, great to be here, Justin.
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SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having us.
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SPEAKER_03: So tell us, where did you grow up and what did your parents do?
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SPEAKER_03: Alyssa, let's start with you.
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SPEAKER_01: I grew up in the East Village of New York,
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SPEAKER_01: New York City, Greenwich Village, and my parents were professors of film.
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SPEAKER_00: I grew up in a small town on the Snake River in Idaho.
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SPEAKER_00: You know, when I was born, my dad was actually working in a supermarket.
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SPEAKER_00: He worked, he cleaned the store at night.
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SPEAKER_00: He later used his GI Bill as a veteran and he went to college and became a school librarian.
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SPEAKER_00: My mom was a junior high school English teacher.
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SPEAKER_03: Let's just briefly describe your careers.
1:36
SPEAKER_03: How did you get into journalism?
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SPEAKER_03: What questions are you interested in and why?
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SPEAKER_03: Alyssa, why don't you start that?
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SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I started journalism.
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SPEAKER_01: Out of the Village Voice in the early 90s, mid 90s, I got my first bylines there.
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SPEAKER_01: And I was always from the beginning interested in where politics
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SPEAKER_01: and economics met culture and how it influenced people's lives,
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SPEAKER_01: which led to my first book,
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SPEAKER_01: Branded the Buying and Selling of Teenagers,
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SPEAKER_01: which was about how adolescents internalize the commercial economy and Thought
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SPEAKER_01: of themselves as Abercrombie and Fitch girls or would say, I am Coke, I am Pepsi.
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SPEAKER_01: And for me,
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SPEAKER_01: I think I'm always interested in identity and what it means to be American
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SPEAKER_01: and how social class and commodity culture influence that.
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SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_03: And how about you?
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SPEAKER_03: What is your reporting sensibility?
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SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I came to reporting late.
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SPEAKER_00: You know, I.
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SPEAKER_00: I was trying to be an academic for a long time.
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SPEAKER_00: I got a PhD.
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SPEAKER_00: I moved to New York City.
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SPEAKER_00: I was at the City University of New York.
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SPEAKER_00: But there were no jobs.
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SPEAKER_00: So I struggled a long time working a lot of part-time jobs and gigging.
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SPEAKER_00: And I eventually, after the Occupy Wall Street movement...
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SPEAKER_00: Introduced me to some folks.
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SPEAKER_00: I co-founded an organization called the Debt Collective, which is a national union for debtors.
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SPEAKER_00: I found myself unemployed at a certain point and I ended up working in a supermarket.
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SPEAKER_00: Part of that job made me think what I was seeing on the job and what I was observing
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SPEAKER_00: and what I was experiencing.
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SPEAKER_00: I was like, I got to get this out there.
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SPEAKER_00: I got to tell these stories.
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SPEAKER_00: There's something going on here that people need to know about.
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SPEAKER_00: So journalism was the natural path for me because I had something I wanted to say
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SPEAKER_00: and that was the way to do it.
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SPEAKER_03: So who was Barbara Ehrenreich?
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SPEAKER_01: My dear friend and my colleague,
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SPEAKER_01: she was one of the great writers and the great interpreters of what it means
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SPEAKER_01: to be working class in this country in the 20th century into the 21st.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean, she's like the George Orwell of the U.S.
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SPEAKER_01: She was born in Butte in 1941 when it was still a brawling mining town.
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SPEAKER_01: You know, her father was a miner and so was her mother's father.
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SPEAKER_01: What happened was he got a degree, her dad, from the Butte School of Mines.
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SPEAKER_01: And then he became kind of white collar.
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SPEAKER_01: She became middle class and ultimately became a reporter and a writer and an activist.
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SPEAKER_01: But she never forgot that early experience.
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SPEAKER_01: I think partially because when she was growing up in the mining town, She really liked it.
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SPEAKER_01: She went to Rockefeller University, studied physics.
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SPEAKER_01: You know,
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SPEAKER_01: her first book was Witches,
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SPEAKER_01: Midwives and Nurses,
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SPEAKER_01: which she published in 1973, I think, with my other dear friend, Deirdre English.
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SPEAKER_01: And that was, you know, an underground bestseller.
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SPEAKER_01: But like all of her books, it was trying to revise and flip our narrative assumptions.
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SPEAKER_01: Like, so,
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SPEAKER_01: for instance,
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SPEAKER_01: in Nickel and dime,
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SPEAKER_01: she'll say the poor are the philanthropists of the world,
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SPEAKER_01: that the poor,
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SPEAKER_01: the working class giving their time to others is actually the biggest gift.
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SPEAKER_01: It was both brilliant and counterintuitive and I think really opened a lot
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SPEAKER_01: of people's eyes on many different levels.
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SPEAKER_03: And she passed in 2022 on Labor Day, as it were, correct?
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SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
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SPEAKER_03: Anne, where did you make contact with Barbara's work and what role has it played
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SPEAKER_03: in your intellectual development?
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SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
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SPEAKER_00: it would be really hard to think of somebody who had more of an influence on me as
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SPEAKER_00: a thinker and writer than Barbara Ehrenreich.
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SPEAKER_00: I never had the privilege of meeting her,
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SPEAKER_00: but I read Nickel and Dimed,
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SPEAKER_00: the book that's celebrating its 25th year,
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SPEAKER_00: this year when I was in graduate school and I was teaching and I taught it
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SPEAKER_00: to my students.
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SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
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SPEAKER_00: it had such an impact on me because if you think about that historical moment,
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SPEAKER_00: you know, 25 years ago, it was really...
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SPEAKER_00: You know, a time when people call it the end of history.
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SPEAKER_00: The rhetoric was that capitalism had won out over all the alternatives
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SPEAKER_00: and everybody got what they deserved.
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SPEAKER_00: And if you work hard and play by the rules, you're going to succeed.
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SPEAKER_00: And nickel and dimed really burst that myth pretty completely.
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SPEAKER_00: For a lot of people, including for me, you know, I was in graduate school.
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SPEAKER_00: I was thinking I was going to be a professor.
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SPEAKER_00: I was on that path to be what Barbara later coined the term,
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SPEAKER_00: the part of the professional managerial class.
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SPEAKER_00: When that path was closed off to me and I ended up Working at a supermarket,
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SPEAKER_00: working really hard and I was tired and I was thinking,
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SPEAKER_00: what am I going to do and how am I going to get out of this?
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SPEAKER_00: And Barbara's voice, her narrative voice, it came into my head.
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SPEAKER_00: There's a line from Nickel and Dime where she writes,
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SPEAKER_00: what you don't necessarily realize when you're selling your time by the hour is
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SPEAKER_00: that what you're actually selling is your life.
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SPEAKER_00: And I just remember that line and thinking, oh, wow,
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SPEAKER_00: that struck me as exactly right,
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SPEAKER_00: exactly the right description for what I was experiencing.
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SPEAKER_00: And I thought, I could maybe write something about this job.
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SPEAKER_00: And so really,
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SPEAKER_00: without Barbara's influence,
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SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't have even thought that anybody would want to read about a supermarket,
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SPEAKER_00: the inner workings of a supermarket.
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SPEAKER_00: So she's just a huge, huge, profound influence.
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SPEAKER_03: So let's talk about the working class.
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SPEAKER_03: That was one of my,
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SPEAKER_03: as I recall,
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SPEAKER_03: one of my big takeaways from reading Nickel and Dime was it expanded the notion
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SPEAKER_03: of working class in my conception at least.
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SPEAKER_03: I probably was grounded in stereotypes around factory workers or a very sort
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SPEAKER_03: of male construction, people working hard in fields and factories, et cetera.
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SPEAKER_03: And so much of what the economy was then and is now,
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SPEAKER_03: it's a much broader conception of what the working class is.
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SPEAKER_03: How would you define that term, Alyssa?
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SPEAKER_01: Well,
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SPEAKER_01: I think one of the cases she's trying to make and nickel and dimed and still needs
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SPEAKER_01: to be made now is how female a working class is.
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SPEAKER_01: And it isn't, you know, men in hard hats only or automobile factories.
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SPEAKER_01: It's not that.
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SPEAKER_01: It's lots of hospitality work.
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SPEAKER_01: It's nurses aides.
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SPEAKER_01: It's people working retail.
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SPEAKER_01: It's caregivers for kids.
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SPEAKER_01: Barbara,
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SPEAKER_01: she was really trying to make a case that there is no such thing as unskilled labor,
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SPEAKER_01: which is not a, it sounds like a derogatory term, but it's actually, you know, BLS.
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SPEAKER_01: It's a way that the labor statisticians recognize certain kinds of work.
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SPEAKER_01: Barbara, me,
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SPEAKER_01: I think Anne also,
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SPEAKER_01: we don't think there's such a thing as unskilled work,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: because everything, if you work in a grocery store, if you Take care of children.
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SPEAKER_01: If you make a pizza, that shows a lot of skill.
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SPEAKER_01: And I think part of what she was trying to show in Nickel and Dime was that was true.
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SPEAKER_01: She had to wrangle vacuum cleaners and carry huge orders
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SPEAKER_01: and remember people's orders, which is like a game of concentration.
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SPEAKER_01: It's not unskilled.
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SPEAKER_01: We think of working class life as something that at least used to be a sustainable category.
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SPEAKER_01: And she's trying to show that if you're making $15 Dollars an hour,
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SPEAKER_01: which is what you can make in New York.
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SPEAKER_01: And then, you know, seven dollars an hour, which is what you make on federal minimum wage.
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SPEAKER_01: And what she made then was five something an hour plus tips like that.
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SPEAKER_01: That is not a livable wage at all.
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SPEAKER_03: And your response to that idea of the working class.
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SPEAKER_03: I mean,
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SPEAKER_03: it sounds like from how you recounted your bio and experience that you've sort
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SPEAKER_03: of moved in and out of a couple of these different to the extent they are categories
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SPEAKER_03: that you've sort of.
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SPEAKER_03: It's been a permeable idea in your upbringing.
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SPEAKER_00: One of the reasons I wrote my book and one of
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SPEAKER_00: the things I think Barbara's work does is really show the kinds of work
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SPEAKER_00: that really counts in society and that really matters.
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SPEAKER_00: When the pandemic hit,
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SPEAKER_00: a lot of people were able to stay home and work from home and good for them.
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SPEAKER_00: But there was a large category of people.
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SPEAKER_00: We're talking health care workers,
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SPEAKER_00: obviously,
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SPEAKER_00: but meat packers and warehouse workers
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SPEAKER_00: and your retail grocery store clerks making 12, 15 bucks an hour.
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SPEAKER_00: And they had to show up and punch a clock during this really scary, dangerous moment.
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SPEAKER_00: And so this idea of the working class as the philanthropists of society,
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SPEAKER_00: as Alyssa mentioned, you really saw that, I think, during the pandemic.
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SPEAKER_00: No unskilled labor, absolutely.
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SPEAKER_00: All labor is skilled and all labor requires concentration and intelligence.
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SPEAKER_00: But there's also this sense that there are some jobs that we can't do without,
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SPEAKER_00: that we simply need people to show up.
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SPEAKER_00: And I think Nickel and Dimes and Barbara's other work really emphasized
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SPEAKER_00: who those people are and they're kind of living Behind the scenes in some ways,
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SPEAKER_00: we don't necessarily know what they're going through.
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SPEAKER_00: We don't see how hard it is to work for minimum wage and try to afford an apartment.
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SPEAKER_00: Another thing that Barbara's really known for is this concept of
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SPEAKER_00: the professional managerial class that she wrote about clear back in the 70s,
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SPEAKER_00: where she was talking about this kind of strata,
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SPEAKER_00: this class strata in between working class people, but not capitalists, right?
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SPEAKER_00: Who are sort of in this awkward position where they were supposed to sort
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SPEAKER_00: of discipline, The working class and keep them in line.
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SPEAKER_00: But they also had some interest in common with working people.
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SPEAKER_00: So she definitely wrote about this and commented on the growing precariat.
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SPEAKER_00: There's this class of people,
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SPEAKER_00: educated people,
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SPEAKER_00: people who came from middle class families who thought they were going to be able
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SPEAKER_00: to do as well as their parents, and they can't.
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SPEAKER_00: They're finding that they're falling down the class ladder.
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SPEAKER_00: And she really shined a spotlight on that phenomenon.
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SPEAKER_03: What you're describing sounds like some sort of a shift or a breakdown
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SPEAKER_03: in basic social contract.
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SPEAKER_03: How do you think about the concept of a social contract?
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SPEAKER_03: Where does it work?
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SPEAKER_03: Where is it not working?
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SPEAKER_03: Alyssa, do you have thoughts on that?
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SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean,
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SPEAKER_01: I think it's really clearly not working for a lot of Americans,
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SPEAKER_01: even people who define themselves as middle class.
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SPEAKER_01: And one of the major issues Um,
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SPEAKER_01: issues right now,
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SPEAKER_01: I think is the discrepancy between wages and inflation and the tariffs
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SPEAKER_01: and all these other externalities,
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SPEAKER_01: like the cost of college, the cost of housing, the cost of medical care.
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SPEAKER_01: When you go out there and talk to people who define themselves as middle class,
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SPEAKER_01: I mean,
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SPEAKER_01: I talked to this one woman who said,
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SPEAKER_01: you know, I don't feel like America likes me anymore.
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SPEAKER_01: And that's a feeling that a lot of people have.
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SPEAKER_01: And we've been told for the last couple of years, it's just a vibe session.
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SPEAKER_01: Meaning that if we think it's a recession,
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SPEAKER_01: it's because we're into bad vibes and we're naysaying doomsters.
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SPEAKER_01: There's not a recognition of what it takes to,
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SPEAKER_01: we used to call quality of life, what it takes to attain quality of life.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean, you don't even see that term very much anymore, which is kind of telling.
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SPEAKER_01: And what Anne was just talking about with the precariat, I mean,
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SPEAKER_01: so my book,
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SPEAKER_01: Squeezed,
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SPEAKER_01: I wrote about a group I call the middle precariat, which is a lot of people...
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SPEAKER_01: Whose jobs have the volatility and the lack of narrative drive,
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SPEAKER_01: like a kind of,
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SPEAKER_01: I call it losing the narrative of your life,
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SPEAKER_01: that a lot of people who are low wage workers used to have,
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SPEAKER_01: like where you go from job to job and you don't know what's coming next.
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SPEAKER_01: It's like a lack, the loss of the narrative of your life.
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SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of a very existential thing.
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SPEAKER_01: It's about money and finances, but it's also about something else.
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SPEAKER_03: So in this narrative,
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SPEAKER_03: that suggests that something in the work has lost its meaning or something.
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SPEAKER_03: Maybe it's not the work itself.
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SPEAKER_03: Maybe it's the experience, the class, the identity.
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SPEAKER_03: How does the meaning sort of fall away in the current conception?
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SPEAKER_01: I think some of the meaning falls away even if you take journalism.
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SPEAKER_01: Right.
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SPEAKER_01: So this organization I created with Barbara Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
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SPEAKER_01: A lot of the older reporters that have been laid off
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SPEAKER_01: or have had their word counts winnowed,
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SPEAKER_01: and those people are now having a very different future to look forward to,
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SPEAKER_01: both economically and personally, than they thought they would.
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SPEAKER_01: And that's happened in multiple fields.
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SPEAKER_01: You can see it across academia.
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SPEAKER_01: You can see it in even things like accounting and software engineering.
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SPEAKER_01: And I think that that narrative piece is really devastating because it's like,
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SPEAKER_01: And it's about identity and values,
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SPEAKER_01: meaning,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
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SPEAKER_01: what they call the ancient Greeks called telos,
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SPEAKER_01: you know, like the purpose of your life.
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SPEAKER_01: And then on top of it, you're going to have trouble paying for your bills.
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SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of what I've seen a lot of.
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SPEAKER_03: We'll be back to our conversation with Alyssa Quart and Anne Larson after this short break.
14:18
SPEAKER_03: A New Angle would not be possible without the generous support of
14:21
SPEAKER_03: the Headwaters Foundation,
14:23
SPEAKER_03: working side-by-side with Western Montanans to improve the health
14:26
SPEAKER_03: of our communities.
14:28
SPEAKER_03: And you can't do that sort of work without access to capital and education.
14:33
SPEAKER_03: Two critical catalysts offered by First Security Bank and the University
14:36
SPEAKER_03: of Montana College of Business.
14:38
SPEAKER_02: This is Mike Morelli, Executive Director at MCT, and you are listening to A New Angle.
14:47
SPEAKER_03: Welcome back to A New Angle.
14:48
SPEAKER_03: I'm speaking with Alyssa Quart and Ann Larson about the legendary
14:52
SPEAKER_02: Barbara Ehrenreich.
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SPEAKER_03: That resonates with what I see and experience on campus with students.
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SPEAKER_03: You know, they're here in college.
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SPEAKER_03: They've either gotten here just through momentum or parental pressure,
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SPEAKER_03: but some of them are here with an expectation that it will Put them on a path toward
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SPEAKER_03: a better life,
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SPEAKER_03: yet they're reading about AI,
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SPEAKER_03: experiencing disruption associated with that, seeing the news, whatever.
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SPEAKER_03: And they're maybe having some doubts about like, am I in the right place?
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SPEAKER_03: Am I taking on this debt for the right reasons?
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SPEAKER_03: Is this thing going to pencil the way?
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SPEAKER_03: I sort of always thought it would or expected it would.
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SPEAKER_03: Anne, how are you making sense of what's happening in the current moment with some
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SPEAKER_03: of this technological disruption that in many ways is,
15:38
SPEAKER_03: you know,
15:40
SPEAKER_03: we'll see how it shakes out,
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SPEAKER_03: but some of the working class jobs
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SPEAKER_03: that Ehrenreich described might actually be higher value than some of
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SPEAKER_03: the office-y sort of jobs that a lot of our college graduates seem to be heading
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SPEAKER_03: toward that might not exist when they get there?
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SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm so glad that you that you're mentioning this.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: And I'm glad that you mentioned the term social contract.
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SPEAKER_00: I think that's really important.
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SPEAKER_00: I'd like to just touch on that.
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SPEAKER_00: You know,
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SPEAKER_00: I told the story earlier about,
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SPEAKER_00: and Alyssa's talking about the narratives of our lives, right?
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SPEAKER_00: My dad worked in a supermarket,
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SPEAKER_00: and then he used his GI bill from service from the military,
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SPEAKER_00: and he went to college and he became, he worked in a school library, right?
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SPEAKER_00: He was able to buy a house and raise a family and backed This is an example
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SPEAKER_00: of what Alyssa is talking about,
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SPEAKER_00: where somebody, my dad, a baby boomer, had the narrative of his life.
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SPEAKER_00: I worked hard.
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SPEAKER_00: I went to college.
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SPEAKER_00: I was able to move up in the class hierarchy, let's say.
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SPEAKER_00: And now that has turned into what feels like a scam.
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SPEAKER_00: And so people aren't able to tell those stories about themselves.
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SPEAKER_00: They are feeling bamboozled and they are being bamboozled.
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SPEAKER_00: And students in college now that you mentioned,
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SPEAKER_00: their jobs are,
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SPEAKER_00: we have a cohort of AI oligarchs who are telling us in no uncertain terms,
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SPEAKER_00: they're not hiding it, we are going to take all the jobs.
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SPEAKER_00: There will be no entry level jobs in the next five to 10 years.
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SPEAKER_00: And they just are, they seem to have no problem Threatening us all like this.
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SPEAKER_00: And so for young people today, I certainly don't blame them.
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SPEAKER_00: This is another aspect of the broken social contract.
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SPEAKER_00: It sometimes feels like it doesn't matter what you do.
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SPEAKER_00: You follow all the rules.
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SPEAKER_00: You do everything right.
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SPEAKER_00: You work hard.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: And yet there's no way to get ahead.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: And in fact, if you're taking out loans, you're digging yourself into a deeper hole.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're in a country where trying to become educated can actually leave you worse off.
17:28
SPEAKER_03: So given all that, do you have prescriptions for how to move through that?
17:31
SPEAKER_03: Like if you were advising a young person who is contemplating their future and how
17:35
SPEAKER_03: to make decisions coming out of high school and looking at college,
17:39
SPEAKER_03: what would you advise?
17:41
SPEAKER_00: I really believe in collective action.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: We can't solve this problem as individuals,
17:45
SPEAKER_00: like trying to make the right decision in the marketplace.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: That's not going to work.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: The forces arrayed against us are too big and too powerful.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: So I'm a big believer in collective action.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: That's why I organize with debtors to come together and fight their creditors
18:00
SPEAKER_00: and fight for debt relief, fight for fair terms, for loans.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: Faculty and students on campus should be forming unions, right?
18:09
SPEAKER_00: Should be collectivizing their struggles.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: That's the only way to solve this problem is to come together around the issues
18:17
SPEAKER_00: that concern us and that we all share.
18:21
SPEAKER_00: I feel like a lot of things in the economy right now try to divide us,
18:25
SPEAKER_00: to try to make us feel alone and like our problems are separate from those
18:30
SPEAKER_00: of other people.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: And that's just not the case.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: That's another weapon is the sense of atomization and isolation and
18:36
SPEAKER_00: And coming together with other people in your situation is our only, it's hard.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: It's a lot of work and it takes a long time, but man, it's our only shot.
18:44
SPEAKER_01: Brought up AI.
18:44
SPEAKER_01: I think AI is a great lever to be pulling because you have,
18:49
SPEAKER_01: you know,
18:50
SPEAKER_01: there's a recent youth poll that found 66% of young Democrats saw AI as a threat
18:55
SPEAKER_01: to their job prospects.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: You know,
18:57
SPEAKER_01: I've just spoke to some young people who've had to do these higher view,
19:01
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you know, but these AI interviews.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: Which is now a growing mechanism by which companies hire
19:09
SPEAKER_01: or don't hire people like screen potential employees and with no intention
19:14
SPEAKER_01: of hiring them.
19:16
SPEAKER_03: The data center is such an interesting ...
19:21
SPEAKER_03: Maybe in retrospect,
19:23
SPEAKER_03: it was easy to anticipate,
19:25
SPEAKER_03: but I didn't really see it coming with it being sort of the nexus of opposition
19:30
SPEAKER_03: to AI and technology.
19:32
SPEAKER_03: It's this avatar for so many things.
19:36
SPEAKER_03: And who knows what truth is on the actual sort of costs and benefits of
19:41
SPEAKER_03: a data center in a community.
19:42
SPEAKER_03: But the reality is people see it as a place where they maybe have some agency.
19:49
SPEAKER_03: They can claim some agency in this forward march of a technology that is threatening
19:54
SPEAKER_03: and uncertain and all these things.
19:55
SPEAKER_03: They can put their angst and claim some agency in opposition
19:59
SPEAKER_03: to this physical representation of this amorphous concept that's threatening.
20:05
SPEAKER_01: And I mean, also they can claim some opposition to their phones.
20:08
SPEAKER_01: I do see a lot of possibility in some of this.
20:10
SPEAKER_01: And I feel like Barbara towards the,
20:12
SPEAKER_01: to wind back to Barbara towards the end of her Life was writing about
20:16
SPEAKER_01: the robots like this became an interest of hers.
20:19
SPEAKER_01: And she actually predictably wrote that once they come for white collar jobs,
20:24
SPEAKER_01: people are going to start to question this is like happening like right on time.
20:30
SPEAKER_01: And I think if she had written nickel and dime now,
20:32
SPEAKER_01: she'd have it about,
20:34
SPEAKER_01: you know,
20:34
SPEAKER_01: AI trainers and about people who have to filter harmful videos and People
20:42
SPEAKER_01: who are controlled by the algorithm when they're driving Lyft shares.
20:47
SPEAKER_01: So I feel like that's the new nickel and dime.
20:50
SPEAKER_01: It isn't just like being a waiter.
20:51
SPEAKER_01: It's all these jobs behind consoles and screens where you're going to be fired.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: I live in Utah.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: There was a huge data center planned for a rural area, Box Elder County, Utah.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: And there was just this massive uprising against it.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: And people protested.
21:07
SPEAKER_00: And they...
21:09
SPEAKER_00: They harassed our elected officials.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: And really, it was pretty massive and something that I don't think anybody expected.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: And it's incredibly moving and powerful.
21:20
SPEAKER_00: And it's people from all walks of life.
21:22
SPEAKER_00: It's rural people and people from the cities coming together and saying, we don't want this.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: So I think Alyssa's right.
21:27
SPEAKER_00: This is a point of conjuncture where people
21:29
SPEAKER_00: from different political backgrounds can come together
21:33
SPEAKER_00: and Everybody hates these things.
21:35
SPEAKER_00: They are these giant buildings that symbolize everything that we hate about
21:42
SPEAKER_00: the people that are in charge.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: And this feeling of isolation,
21:46
SPEAKER_00: this feeling of having lost the narrative center of our lives,
21:50
SPEAKER_00: this existential crisis,
21:51
SPEAKER_00: it all seems to be sort of symbolized by these giant data centers.
21:55
SPEAKER_03: So in our remaining time,
21:56
SPEAKER_03: let's bring it back to this recent piece of reporting and writing you all have done
22:01
SPEAKER_03: with some colleagues in the nation, the retrospective.
22:05
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, describe the work.
22:06
SPEAKER_03: How did the team come together?
22:07
SPEAKER_03: How did you make choices about who to include?
22:10
SPEAKER_03: And yeah, tell us a little bit about it.
22:12
SPEAKER_03: Alyssa, why don't you take it off?
22:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I loved Barbara.
22:17
SPEAKER_01: This is an incredible anniversary, 25 years, and I wanted that commemorated.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: So I went to the nation.
22:25
SPEAKER_01: I said, hey, would you be interested in doing something with our organization around this?
22:28
SPEAKER_01: And then I was like,
22:29
SPEAKER_01: I would really like to gather people she was colleagues with,
22:33
SPEAKER_01: but also friends who knew her.
22:34
SPEAKER_01: So that's how I got Bill Fletcher,
22:37
SPEAKER_01: who's a well-known unionist,
22:41
SPEAKER_01: and Arlie Hochschild,
22:42
SPEAKER_01: who's kind of a renowned social scientist,
22:45
SPEAKER_01: Deirdre,
22:45
SPEAKER_01: who was a journalist, the All these people collaborated, as I did with Barbara.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: We wrote together.
22:51
SPEAKER_01: And then Ai-jen Poo,
22:53
SPEAKER_01: who runs the Domestic Workers Alliance,
22:55
SPEAKER_01: because I thought she knew Barbara,
22:56
SPEAKER_01: but also she was a great representative of one of the major issues,
23:02
SPEAKER_01: child care that Barbara wrote about in Global Woman and other books.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: And then Anne, who is our fellow and is...
23:10
SPEAKER_01: I think her book, Clean Up on Aisle 5, is definitely in the line of Nickel and Dimed.
23:17
SPEAKER_01: And it may even be a new stage of it,
23:19
SPEAKER_01: which is people writing their own stories
23:22
SPEAKER_01: while retaining their sociological imagination,
23:26
SPEAKER_01: which I think was Barbara's hope,
23:28
SPEAKER_01: ultimately, that it wouldn't be just people like her or even me.
23:32
SPEAKER_01: It would be like people who Had those jobs,
23:35
SPEAKER_01: left those jobs,
23:36
SPEAKER_01: toggled in and out of them,
23:38
SPEAKER_01: and wrote with,
23:39
SPEAKER_01: you know,
23:39
SPEAKER_01: critical capacity and lyrically about the experience and what it means for
23:44
SPEAKER_01: the workers left there.
23:45
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and Anne, talk about your contribution and what it felt like to put that together.
23:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's just a complete honor.
23:51
SPEAKER_00: You know,
23:52
SPEAKER_00: like I said,
23:53
SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't have even thought that I could write about the supermarket
23:56
SPEAKER_00: if Barbara hadn't done it first.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: And I also I also think I and I think we all agree would like Barbara to have
24:05
SPEAKER_00: a higher public profile.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: You know,
24:08
SPEAKER_00: she was a feminist and she was somebody who wrote
24:13
SPEAKER_00: a couple dozen books centering class and centering economic life.
24:18
SPEAKER_00: And I feel like she's to a lot of people, she's the queen, but she's also lesser known.
24:24
SPEAKER_03: We should close,
24:25
SPEAKER_03: and let's do so with our last question,
24:27
SPEAKER_03: which is, tell us about the last time you changed your mind.
24:30
SPEAKER_03: Alyssa, you want to take that first?
24:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so something I changed my mind about that was funny was the occult.
24:37
SPEAKER_01: In the last year or so,
24:38
SPEAKER_01: my mom had gotten this really difficult diagnosis,
24:42
SPEAKER_01: and I wound up in a tarot reader's tent at a town fair.
24:47
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
24:48
SPEAKER_01: I was querying the cards and I found it incredibly helpful for helping me deal with
24:54
SPEAKER_01: the uncertainty,
24:56
SPEAKER_01: political,
24:57
SPEAKER_01: economic, and in my mother's case, you know, medical that I was living with.
25:01
SPEAKER_01: And I started to think differently about some of these sort of new agey things and
25:06
SPEAKER_01: the role they play in people's lives.
25:08
SPEAKER_01: And again,
25:10
SPEAKER_01: this seemed like a Barbara-like moment in the sense that she saw value in
25:17
SPEAKER_01: That includes wishing wells and spells and runes,
25:20
SPEAKER_01: but it also includes idealistic political tendencies,
25:24
SPEAKER_01: like the election of Zoran Mamdani,
25:27
SPEAKER_01: like hyper-local efforts,
25:29
SPEAKER_01: like the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, like the Debt Collective.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: One of the elements of social change is a kind of willed magic of the people
25:39
SPEAKER_01: who are making it so.
25:41
SPEAKER_03: Anne, how about you?
25:42
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll just tell a story.
25:45
SPEAKER_00: About working in the supermarket,
25:47
SPEAKER_00: I tell the story in my book, Cleaning by Nile Five, which is inspired by Barbara.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: Before I got the job in the store,
25:54
SPEAKER_00: I thought that if somebody was shoplifting from a supermarket,
25:59
SPEAKER_00: That they probably were just hungry and we shouldn't blame them.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: They shouldn't be punished.
26:06
SPEAKER_00: I had nothing but sympathy.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: As a worker,
26:08
SPEAKER_00: as a colleague with other supermarket workers,
26:12
SPEAKER_00: there was a lot of shoplifting at our store.
26:14
SPEAKER_00: Many, many people stole food.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: A lot of people stole who appeared that they could have afforded to pay.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: A lot of people shoplifted that didn't seem,
26:25
SPEAKER_00: you know,
26:26
SPEAKER_00: one guy stole from me at the self-checkout machines and I had noticed
26:29
SPEAKER_00: before he ran out the door with his bag that he was wearing
26:31
SPEAKER_00: a very expensive looking watch.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: So there's just a lot of people stealing
26:36
SPEAKER_00: who I felt like just felt like they could get away with it and weren't actually
26:39
SPEAKER_00: in need.
26:40
SPEAKER_00: And it's true that there were a lot of people in need and people did steal
26:44
SPEAKER_00: and just put food right into their mouths.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: But even that could be very, very stressful.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: For the workers that work there,
26:50
SPEAKER_00: we were required to stop people from stealing, to stop thieves.
26:53
SPEAKER_00: It was part of our job.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: And so supermarket workers were kind of caught in the middle between our sympathy
26:59
SPEAKER_00: for thieves, our anger at thieves, and also our jobs, which were to stop them.
27:03
SPEAKER_00: And so the job,
27:04
SPEAKER_00: it changed my mind in the sense that it gave me a much more nuanced
27:07
SPEAKER_00: and complicated view of supermarket shoplifting.
27:11
SPEAKER_03: Alyssa, Ann, this has been a great conversation.
27:14
SPEAKER_03: I appreciate you both.
27:16
SPEAKER_03: Reaching out,
27:17
SPEAKER_03: doing this work,
27:18
SPEAKER_03: shining a light on Barbara's legacy and all the issues we've talked about today.
27:23
SPEAKER_03: Hopefully we can revisit down the road and check in about some of this stuff
27:27
SPEAKER_03: because I feel like we opened more doors in this conversation than we closed.
27:31
SPEAKER_03: And that's the sign of a good conversation in my view.
27:35
SPEAKER_01: Excellent.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Justin.
27:38
SPEAKER_03: Thanks for listening to A New Angle.
27:39
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27:42
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27:48
SPEAKER_03: A New Angle is recorded at Studio 49, a generous gift from UM alums Michelle and Lauren Hansen.
27:55
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27:57
SPEAKER_03: working side-by-side with Western Montanans to improve the health
28:01
SPEAKER_03: of our communities.
28:03
SPEAKER_03: We are also supported by First Security Bank and the University of Montana College
28:07
SPEAKER_03: of Business, with additional help from CED, Drum Coffee, and Montana Public Radio.
28:15
SPEAKER_03: Keely Larson is our producer.
28:17
SPEAKER_03: John Brownell, Jeff Ament, and John Wicks made our music.
28:21
SPEAKER_03: Thanks a lot, and we'll see you next time.
28:25
[music]