Barbara Ehrenreich Interview--Life Without Safety Nets

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.

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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.