Barbara Ehrenreich’s Reporting on Low-Wage Work Has Never Been More Relevant

It was Labor Day in the U.S. yesterday, and if you noticed how many hourly wage employees spent it doing service work for people who were lucky enough to get the day off from their office jobs, you’re not alone. Although the holiday was established in the late 19th century as a commemoration of the American labor movement, the bare facts of it—namely, that salaried workers often have the day off while service workers, who have made the news recently for organizing unions at companies including Starbucks, Amazon and Trader Joe’s, do not—don’t quite seem to add up.

This discrepancy is exactly the kind of thing that author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, who died last week at the age of 81, made her living writing about. In Ehrenreich’s hit 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, she takes aim at the false promise of welfare reform, setting out to learn how unskilled workers survived on their wages by taking a series of minimum-wage jobs across the country.

While the term “unskilled labor” has somewhat fallen out of favor in progressive circles since Nickel and Dimed came out 21 years ago (after all, isn’t all labor skilled?), the core of her message feels like it was written for the moment we’re currently living through: While inflation is on the rise, the U.S. minimum wage has stagnated at a ludicrous $7.25 an hour. (It’s double that in some states, including New York and California, but in many parts of the country, you could work a full day for the minimum wage and still barely be able to afford a tank of gas.)

One of the most striking things about rereading Nickel and Dimed in 2022 is the total lack of condescension with which Ehrenreich approaches her task. She acknowledges the good fortune that has allowed her to merely experiment with low-wage work, rather than rely on it to eke out a living as some members of her family did: “To me,” she writes, “sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”