Barbara Ehrenreich (1941–2022)

Barbara Ehrenreich, 2014

Photograph courtesy of SLOWKING, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barbara_ehrenreich_1433.JPG; GFDL license, https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html

Working people lost a staunch ally late last year with the passing of American author Barbara Ehrenreich, who had an inspirational career of scholarship, journalism, and activism. A scientist by training, Ehrenreich’s attention was drawn to the social world outside the laboratory. In more than 20 books on poverty and inequality, her incisive thinking and powerful, no-nonsense writing style were always on the side of the exploited and oppressed. If something was asinine or unfair, she called it out. If there was a fight back, she celebrated it.

Her first book, written with then husband John Ehrenreich, was entitled Long March, Short Spring (1969), and provided analysis of student uprisings against the Vietnam War in a number of countries. In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2007), she highlighted the human desire to intersperse periods of hard labour with joyful, even ecstatic, group celebrations of diverse cultural meanings. She mourned their disappearance in the face of backlashes mounted by social elites who saw them as “crude,” “offensive” or “time-wasting.” Although in no sense a killjoy, one of her most notable preoccupations involved attacking the “positivity industry,” and in Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America (2010), the criticism was visceral. When workers were losing their jobs, being evicted from their homes, facing natural disasters, or being diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses, gurus selling the power of positive thinking and the ever-present “smiley face” were both “cruel” and “delusional.” Even worse, she argued, they were “victim blaming” – telling people that the crises in their lives were entirely their own fault because they were not being “positive” enough.

Her best-known work of “undercover” journalism, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), instigated a new wave of participant observer writings about the realities of living, working, and struggling within the confines of contemporary capitalism where wages were too low and rents were too high. Others included Elisabeth Wyhhausen’s Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market (2005) on Australian conditions, Polly Toynbee’s reprise of an earlier study in Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain (2003), and The Night Cleaner (2011) by French writer, Florence Aubenas. Nickel and Dimed challenged common assumptions that poor people were poor because of a personal failing, like lack of education or laziness – this book alone made her work a powerful teaching tool, particularly in the business school classrooms where I earn my living. Discovering that “low-skilled” work, in reality, required high levels of tacit knowledge to perform, Ehrenreich was not afraid to admit that she often flailed in low-paid jobs and only got by with the kind assistance of workmates. She also highlighted structural elements of life for working poor people that made multiple job-holding a necessity, and stymied any chance to improve life or even put a little money aside. Rental bonds were often a mountain too high to climb for low-waged workers, consigning them to substandard and often unsafe accommodation in motels and trailer parks – her phrase “canned labor” will stay with me forever. Urban geography also tells a tale, as she illustrated. Admitting that she herself had assumed middle-class ideas about abstemious ways she could save money, these did not prove possible because of the real-life predicaments she faced as a low-waged worker – a car and petrol are necessary for workers to have access to cheap groceries; local mini-marts nearby often did not sell nutritious food stuffs like lentils and vegetables at reasonable prices; a freezer and a heavy-based pan she could not afford on her meagre wages were required if she was to cook in bulk to save money.

Ehrenreich also used her journalism to call out corporate efforts to bend the law in the interests of the one per cent. In a Guardian piece entitled “Walmart: It’s Alive...