Barbara Ehrenreich Brings You Life Without Safety Nets -- the Growing Reality f

[Guest guest]

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/04/int05015.html

 

April 11, 2005

 

Barbara Ehrenreich Brings You Life Without Safety Nets -- the Growing

Reality for Everyday Americans

 

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

 

I almost think there's a philosophical point they want to drive

home -- which is that they don't like anything that involves some kind

of mutual risk-sharing -- you know, pooling our wealth to help each other.

 

* * *

 

Barbara Ehrenreich is highly educated and enjoys a comfortable

lifestyle ordinarily, but in 2001, she walked away from it to take a

close-up and personal look at the struggles of the working poor. She

took whatever work she could get as a " divorced homemaker reentering

the workforce " -- waiting tables in Florida, stocking clothing at a

Minnesota Wal-Mart, and signing on as a maid with a cleaning service

in Maine -- all the while driving Rent-a-Wrecks and subsisting on her

paltry paychecks. Nickel and Dimed is the book she wrote about her

experiences. Now, author and lecturer Ehrenreich has become an

advocate for the forgotten in an America that favors corporations over

workers, and the haves over the have-nots. She talked with BuzzFlash

about economic justice and populism, elitist opinions about the poor,

and her campaign to awaken the affluent to the intensifying struggles

of our hard-working poor.

 

* * *

 

BuzzFlash: Your landmark book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By

in America, was published in 2001. How have things changed for working

families over the last four years under the Bush Administration?

 

Barbara Ehrenreich: They've just gotten worse. As I'm sure you know,

wages have actually declined. And with slightly higher unemployment,

it's harder for workers to challenge anything in the workplace because

it's so easy to replace them – replace anybody who appears to be a

troublemaker. As we speak, there is an incredible assault going on,

not just on the poor, but also the middle class, especially with the

campaign to privatize Social Security. There's also the recent

bankruptcy bill that passed, which I am aghast at, that will provide

loopholes for the wealthy so they can protect their assets. But for

the poor and the middle class, it's going to mean, as Paul Krugman

says, there's no fresh start, and families will be tied to what he

called debt peonage.

 

BuzzFlash: The bankruptcy bill was completely construed to make it

sound like working people were abusing or gaming the system, when the

reverse is true. As you said, it's actually the rich who have the

ability to make risky investments but then turn around and get

protection and avoid personal responsibility. The credit card industry

has been working on this legislation since 1997. Why do you think

progressives weren't better able to inform working Americans that

their pockets were being picked?

 

Barbara Ehrenreich: That's the question about so many things -- the

tax cuts for the rich, the coming federal budget, which is full of

cuts in almost any program that has helped poor and working-class

people, like Medicaid. I don't think it's unique to the credit card

legislation. I don't know the reason why there's not more outrage.

 

BuzzFlash: The conservatives have been able to court many working

families by using social issues such as gay marriage, school prayer

and guns, and the Democrats have been unable or unwilling to address

this fact. The Republicans have a very effective strategy, when you

consider they've been able to convince an entire bloc of voters to

vote against their own self-interest. How can progressives or

Democrats reach out to working families and convince them that their

values are actually in alignment with working families, especially in

terms of economic justice?

 

Barbara Ehrenreich: First remember that the trend holds that people

who are poorer vote Democratic, compared to people who are richer.

That did not change in 2004. I think you can overstate that case too

much. One of the problems with the Kerry campaign was that he was not

able to articulate economic justice issues as moral values issues with

the kind of passion he should have done. These are moral issues.

 

BuzzFlash: We believe the Democratic Party must become champions of

populist values -- fighting for good jobs, livable wages, and

affordable health care -- not only for moral reasons, because it's the

right thing to do, but also for purely strategic reasons. Unless the

Democratic Party can offer Americans a different vision for America,

it's just hard to see them winning elections and leading the country.

Would you agree with that?

 

Barbara Ehrenreich: I certainly do. And I think we've been arguing

this for a long time, that they need more of an economically populist

approach. I lose hope, though, in the Democratic Party -- whatever

bits of hope I had for it -- when I see, for example, that half of the

Senate Democrats voted for the bankruptcy bill. Are they too

compromised by their own campaign contributions from banks and the

credit card industry? I don't know.

 

BuzzFlash: Neo-conservatives want to take us back to pre-FDR days when

there was virtually no safety net. They're eroding workers rights with

respect to overtime rules, or making it virtually impossible for

people to get out of debt with the bankruptcy bill. As you said, the

verdict's still out on Social Security, but they want to privatize

that, too. After all the research you've done on poverty, could you

explain this world view of the neo-conservatives? What rationale could

there be for such a policy?

 

Barbara Ehrenreich: I can't figure it out. The Social Security

privatization campaign Bush is currently running does not have strong

popular support. People don't want it. Even Wall Street isn't

enthusiastic about it. And it's not going to save money. It's going to

cost, I think, about two trillion dollars just in transitional costs

because some workers will take their money and put it in private

accounts. The government will have to make up for that to pay for

those currently depending on Social Security. So it doesn't make

sense. I almost think there's a philosophical point they want to drive

home, which is that they don't like anything that involves some kind

of mutual risk-sharing -- you know, pooling our wealth to help each

other. There's no other way I can explain it to myself.

 

BuzzFlash: Let's talk just very briefly about your book, Nickel and

Dimed. Have you considered putting out a second edition or updating

the book?

 

Barbara Ehrenreich: No. My next book, which will be out in September,

is about being a white-collar worker and unemployed. It's done with

the same form of journalism, putting myself into the actual situation

and studying it that way.

 

BuzzFlash: What's the title for the book?

 

Barbara Ehrenreich: " Bait and Switch, " and the tentative subtitle is

" The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. "

 

BuzzFlash: It's becoming very common for universities to require all

incoming freshmen to read the same book, and several schools have

chosen Nickel and Dimed. It was a New York Times bestseller and is

still very, very popular. It will be on the paperback bestseller list.

I know you travel a lot and do numerous speaking engagements. How

often do people come up to you and say thank you, or talk to you about

the book in the sense that it gave a voice to working people?

 

Barbara Ehrenreich: It happens all the time, because I still trudge

around the country, if not the world, talking about these issues. I

get affluent people saying, you opened my eyes, or I never really

looked at all the people around me who were serving or cleaning, and

didn't know how hard it was, and now I do. That's great to hear. And

then I hear from a lot of people who are in these situations and have

been in them for a long time. Some of those letters I post on

NickelandDimed.net, because I want there to be a place for people to

speak for themselves.

 

BuzzFlash: One thing that people came away with from your book was

just an appreciation of the energy and skill that many workers have.

You have a Ph.D. in biology, and you joked that you thought some of

these jobs might be easy for you to pick up. But in fact, that wasn't

the case. It seems a lot of people appreciate your book and how it

created a sense of appreciation for what it takes to work in any

number of jobs.

 

Barbara Ehrenreich: That is the value of this form of journalism as

opposed to just interviewing people. When you interview people,

they'll say, yeah, the job was hard, or something like that. But I

actually put myself in that situation and found how difficult it was

for me to learn to do the work, and how difficult it was physically to

keep up, even though I'm a very strong person. That comes through, by

this type of investigating. I could only find out by entering into

this world in my actual body.

 

BuzzFlash: There's this assumption that working people are somehow

lazy, but in fact, after reading your book, the opposite is clearly

true, and they seem to never stop working. And as you say in the

subtitle, they're not getting by in America. But where does that

assumption come from, the current demonizing of the poor?

 

Barbara Ehrenreich: That's a very, very historically old assumption,

or I should say a part of elite ideology. It goes back centuries,

really, and into English poor laws in the 19th Century and even earlier.

 

It was very prominent in this country in the build-up to welfare

reform in the mid-nineties, with constant attacks on the poorest of

the poor, that people who need to rely on welfare now and then are

lazy, and promiscuous and addicted. The mindset that working people

are lazy is part of a larger view that poverty is the result of a

character defect or a set of character defects -- that people don't

know how to look ahead and only seek out personal gratification and so

forth.

 

We're hearing a little less of that since welfare reform passed. I

think what I hear more of is a kind of conservative retort that poor

people made the wrong choices, and they should have gone to college.

Getting out of poverty is something you just " will " to do, or poor

people should have postponed childbearing until they had a

middle-class income. Actually what it all comes down to is, they

should have chosen their parents better.

 

BuzzFlash: What do you say to progressives who come hear you speak and

ask what can they do in the dark days of a second term of a Bush

Administration?

 

Barbara Ehrenreich: I don't pretend to have an answer. I say some of

the best resistance has been going on at the grassroots level, at the

local and state levels, with some exceptions. And I think the AARP and

the NAACP have swung into more of a fighting stance.

 

Mostly, though, I say we're not going to see a lot of big national

initiatives. Then, if I'm giving a public lecture, I ask people in the

audience who are involved with anything local to stand up and say

something about it. And I try to turn the Q and A part of the event

into a kind of a rally. It's wonderful to see. Just two weeks ago, I

was in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah, and one person after

another stood up and said we need help providing support for striking

coal miners. We need books. We need volunteers, please get involved in

this group or that group, or an anti-war demonstration next week, or

whatever. That's what I try to do.

 

BuzzFlash: Barbara, thank you so much for talking with us.

 

Barbara Ehrenreich: Thank you.

 

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

 

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Resources

 

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

 

Barbara Ehrenreich's Web site

http://www.nickelanddimed.net/