Barbara Ehrenreich Revealed the Grim Side of Prosperity

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Sep 7, 2022

Some enterprising journalist, she mused, should take a close-up look at a question under everyone’s nose: How does anyone manage to live, let alone raise a family, on minimum wage?

Good question, Lapham agreed, and immediately suggested that she should do it herself.

But how? Coverage of low-income Americans too often runs up against what already was being called “compassion fatigue.”

To dodge that hazard, Ehrenreich decided to go deep — like writer Upton Sinclair, whose undercover reporting in the Chicago stockyards led to reforms and his bestselling novel “The Jungle.”

Or Nellie Bly, born Elizabeth Jane Cochran, who worked undercover to expose abuses in a New York mental institution in the late 1880s.

In similar fashion, Ehrenreich worked minimum-wage jobs around the country as a waitress, hotel maid, cleaning woman and Walmart clerk, averaging about $7 an hour.

Her life became a constant struggle of making ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck and sometimes falling short in trailer parks and rundown residential motels.

Since I grew up in a working-class, factory-town family, little of the conditions she ran into struck me as new. My father was a factory worker and my mother was a cook. I, too, worked odd jobs. But since my day, the economics have changed, college is more expensive and, for younger generations, the American dream seems further off.

Upward mobility, the American dream as I knew it, has declined tragically since the early 1980s and the price of education and training after high school has greatly increased.

Perhaps most striking, Ehrenreich observed, a single low-wage job is often not enough to support one person, let alone a family.

Author and liberal evangelical theologian Jim Wallis has preached about the struggles of the low-income “Burger King mom” in whom neither party takes enough interest.

And their struggles are only getting worse, except perhaps for the relief offered by whatever legislation can make it through gridlocked Washington.

But Ehrenreich leaves a powerful legacy in her writings and actions, which include founding the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which funds and co-publishes independent journalists covering economic hardship issues in her tradition.

In a way, Ehrenreich thought all workers are “essential.” Despite all the bad news in the world, Ehrenreich cautioned young progressive-minded journalists and activists to avoid becoming too pessimistic. Ultimately, we all need to find ways to work together, she said, no matter how challenging that may seem to be.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)