Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, On Americans (Not) Getting By (Again)

[katty]

more:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175428/tomgram%20percent3A_barbara_ehrenreich%20percent2C_on_americans_%20percent28not%20percent29_getting_by_%20percent28again%20percent29/

It was at lunch with the editor of Harper’s Magazine that the subject came up: How does anyone actually live “on the wages available to the unskilled”? And then Barbara Ehrenreich said something that altered her life and resulted, improbably enough, in a bestselling book with almost two million copies in print. “Someone,” she commented, “ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism -- you know go out there and try it for themselves.” She meant, she hastened to point out on that book’s first page, “someone much younger than myself, some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands.”

That was 1998 and, somewhat to her surprise, Ehrenreich soon found herself beginning the first of a whirl of unskilled “careers” as a waitress at a “family restaurant” attached to a big discount chain hotel in Key West, Florida, at $2.43 an hour plus tips. And the rest, of course, is history. The now famous book that resulted, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, is just out in its tenth anniversary edition with a new afterword by Ehrenreich -- perfectly timed for an American era in which the book’s subtitle might have to be changed to “On (Not) Getting a Job in America.”

[pscot]

1. Someone should do it again, now

1998 is the good old days, when we had a working economy. It's a different world out there today.