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Saluting a Matriarch—25 Years After Nickel and Dimed

Barbara Ehrenreich’s thesis has become even more resonant since the book’s 2001 release.

Saluting a Matriarch—25 Years After “Nickel and Dimed”

Barbara Ehrenreich’s thesis has become even more resonant since the book’s 2001 release.

“The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled.’” This is from Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 masterwork Nickel and Dimed. I read it that year, when I was 29. Eventually, Barbara became my good friend and colleague, as we created a media organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and wrote and edited articles together.

To recap: For that book, Barbara went undercover, reporting as she worked as a housekeeper, nursing aide, a home cleaner, a waitress at Jerry’s and Hearthside restaurants, and a Walmart worker, all in her later 50s, wrestling with cleaning products, carrying huge diner orders, and sometimes living in motels. The book was a departure from her earlier acidly funny and sociological work, ranging from midwifery to middle-class anxiety, but for which she rarely interviewed a soul.

It’s hard to underestimate the effect Nickel and Dimed’s vacuum-cleaner’s-eye view of what it means to work a minimum-wage job in this country had on so many of us. In my case, I had been partly lulled by the hipster aestheticism of the late 1990s and the myth that ideology itself was at its end (not so fast). For those blinded by America’s late-20th-century comforts, Barbara’s book helped us to stop “unseeing” low-wage workers. It also showed us what anyone who has ever made a pizza or taken care of a child already knew but had perhaps not articulated: that there is no such thing as “unskilled” work. As Barbara wrote, “The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.” And Nickel and Dimed also helped precarious creatives like me and my ilk—freelance writers, art handlers, grad students, bookstore clerks, paid hourly and shabbily—see themselves more clearly, as on a continuum with other working people. Barbara showed us the label “unskilled work,” which divided underpaid hyper-educated freelancers I think of as “black turtleneck workers” and underpaid blue-collar was a false distinction.

In Nickel and Dimed’s wake, I devoted myself to what I thought of as “undercover sociology,” reporting my book Branded from teens’ bedrooms and at marketing conferences. Barbara had that influence because she was a reporter and activist, but also because she was a trickster—she liked to fuck stuff up. With each aperçu, I think of her cackling and muttering, “Take that, Yuppie American reader! Look how impossible it is to live on the wages real people earn!”

As the year 2001 and then the decade progressed, Nickel and Dimed’s thesis became even more resonant. A new recession had started, one caused by the bursting of the dot.com bubble and then by the terrorist attacks six months later, as well as the Enron scandal and other money-man-accounting crises. Wikipedia had just launched and with it a notion of “unskilled expertise.”

In the years after Nickel and Dimed, there were also major movements that were somewhat inspired by it, from Fight for $15 to Occupy Wall Street, a mass movement that started in New York City in response to the corporate bailouts.

Soon after Occupy, I met Barbara, in what was to be the last segment of her life. She had just founded what would become our shared organization, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and talked to me on the phone, in her crackling voice, about a multimedia project I was working on, The Last Clinic, devoted to the only remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi, which would be the center of the Dobbs decision. She told me about her experience with the underground abortion collective Jane. I was enamored with her from the start: I thought of her as a matriarch of meaning. As with a number of her protégés, mostly women, Barbara also almost immediately put faith in me, constantly dubbing me her “successor.” Needless to say, that gave me faith in myself. Barbara’s brilliance, weirdness, and incorruptibility made her into something of an intellectual curio, an outsider-insider, and thus, for me, easier to love.

As an insider, she was paid a mighty word rate, her book sold 1.5 million copies, and she knew everyone; as an outsider, she far preferred pleasure and freaks to the famous and well-regarded. She was prickly, funny, ribald, in fact, and could be rude—she enjoyed martinis, cigarettes, and sardonic comebacks: when we went to lunch meetings with potential nonprofit funders who would order lattes, she’d enjoy ordering a plain soda, with an anti-elite glint in her eye. She hated sanctimony and reveled in a startling, even comic austerity—in fact, she cast aspersions on women who hired housecleaners. When we started to work together, she wanted us to exist in an anarchist state of shared power, as “co-editors.” (It brought about years of complications, as any management student would have foreseen, but it was worth it.)

We had gotten into the media business when a-dollar-a-word was the basic pay for an independent reporter. Thirty years later, a-dollar-a-word is a windfall. She knew that she was in the 1 percent of nonfiction writers, most of whom earn $25,000 a year. She also wanted to give back to the reporters who were working in stores or living on the street, and to make sure that not only the rich got to write about poverty. EHRP, the nonprofit she founded and that I ran with her—and then, sadly, without her—became our answer.

Barbara passed away in 2022 and I often wonder what she would make of what has happened since then. She was once the first co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America with Michael Harrington; many decades later, the DSA has given us Zohran Mamdani and today’s DSA-ed crop of left political leaders. What would she make of the group’s astounding political success and the........

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