"WHEN I FINISHED THIS BOOK, I LOOKED AT IT with a sense of what I can only call…loathing," writes University of California Berkeley Economics Professor J. Bradford DeLong. Thoughtful readers across the political spectrum will agree with DeLong, although for differing reasons. But for the past nine weeks this book has been on the New York Times Bestseller List, last week at lucky Number 13. We can learn much by considering Ehrenreich’s latest screed for what it reveals about the Left in America.
When a Roman Catholic priest came to the deathbed of her Irish great-grandmother to perform Last Rites and placed a cross on her chest, writes Ehrenreich, "she sat up, with her last burst of strength, and threw it across the room. Then she lay back and died." Ehrenreich’s great-grandfather’s "earliest rebellion against religion…was to pee in the holy water before Easter service when he was a young Catholic boy in Canada."
Their spirit lives on in Ehrenreich, a proud "fourth-generation atheist," feminist, pink-diaper baby and co-founder of the Democratic Socialists of America. Turning 60 on August 26, she is among the last of a pre-Baby Boom generation that swallowed New Deal socialist snake oil. In Nickel and Dimed, her latest of nearly two dozen often-stimulating books, this freelance Leftist intellectual quotes Karl Marx affectionately, spews venom at every corporation and capitalist, and urges workers to unionize. But whether from old age or a grim recognition that her socialist God-substitute has failed, this book reflects the mental exhaustion and burned-out passion of the whole political Left.
The roots of Nickel and Dimed and of her disenchantment can be traced to a seminal event. In what may be the most important Leftist essay of the past two decades, "When Government Gets Mean: Confessions of a Recovering Statist" (The Nation, November 17, 1997), Ehrenreich vomits up her disgust. "While government does less and less for us," she wrote, "it does more and more to us." She urged her fellow Leftists to stop reflexively supporting Big and Bigger Government, which under President Clinton had betrayed the poor and was rapidly turning into a surveillance and police state.
What was the watershed event that broke her heart and turned Ehrenreich against the Democratic Party? (She had endorsed Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential bid within the party, but in 2000 she urged her fellow "Progressives" to leave the Democratic Party and vote for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader – whose 92,000+ votes in Florida almost certainly swung the presidency to George W. Bush.) It was Bill Clinton’s signing of welfare reform. Disillusioned with government, she urged Leftist readers of The Nation to follow non-governmental paths to reform. "First," she wrote, "we can support efforts to organize the 90 percent of American workers who are unorganized, including, most urgently, the former recipients of welfare." (But in Nickel and Dimed she admits that unionization is not really a panacea.)
Nickel and Dimed is about those people – many of them single or divorced women – on the fringe of welfare, trying to earn a living at or near the minimum wage. Her approach, like that used decades earlier by John Howard Griffin to explain the plight of African-Americans in his book Black Like Me, was to disguise herself as "a divorced woman re-entering the workforce" and experience this low-wage world.
In Key West, Florida, near where she apparently has been living in a $300,000+ home with a second husband who makes lots of money from coerced union dues as a Teamsters labor organizer, Ehrenreich tried waitress jobs that paid as little as $2.43 an hour plus tips. Despite using outside money to rent a car and get into housing, she found it impossible to pay her bills, even with a second job cleaning hotel rooms. Her co-workers often have too little money for food, medicine or an apartment deposit, yet many smoke. Ehrenreich says little about how they afford this costly habit. After a mental breakdown as a waitress caused by customer overload, she quits.
In The Atlantic, she and interviewer James Fallows agreed that tips are degrading and feudal. Unmentioned in either this interview or Nickel and Dimed is the unfairness of tax laws that allow me to give or receive a "gift" of up to $10,000 tax-free but that tax a waitress on every dollar in gratuities, i.e. "gifts," customers give her. The problem Leftists have in mentioning this, of course, is that it reveals government greed as the problem. If tips went untaxed, waitresses would take home much more income.
Trekking to Portland, Maine, which she chose "for its whiteness," blue-eyed Ehrenreich takes two jobs – weekends helping feed Alzheimer’s patients at a nursing home, and weekdays with a maid service cleaning the homes of the wealthy. She is outraged that the service pays maids $6.65 per hour while charging clients $25 per hour and wonders why women do not become freelance home cleaners for at least $15 per hour.
Later, when Ehrenreich drops a heavy pan and causes many hundreds of dollars of damage in a client’s home, she mentions only in passing that the company is "bonded" and regularly pays for such maid mistakes. As a socialist, Ehrenreich seems congenitally incapable of seeing from a business owner’s point of view that employee mistakes, drug use, theft, injury, and irresponsibility can cause big expenses that must be insured against – at high cost. This is why savvy clients would rather pay more to a company than less to a fly-by-night house cleaner off the street.
After depicting workers too poor to buy food in Florida, Ehrenreich scarcely mentions that both her employers in Maine provide free food for workers – something she never factors as part of the compensation these women receive. To do so might make evil employers look better, so Ehrenreich stays true to her political philosophy: if you might reveal something nice about a capitalist, it’s better to say nothing at all.
She examines books in the wealthy homes she wipes clean, snottily noting those "at the low end of the literacy spectrum… (attorney John) Grisham and (Rush) Limbaugh." The company provides "Hot Buttons" that are cleaning concerns of particular clients – "never, of course, poverty, racism, or global warming," sniffs Ehrenreich. Yeah, and her big-hearted socialist concern for workers never extends to people in Communist Cuba forced to work their lives away in sugar canes fields for 10 pesos per month getting skin cancer and shortened lives under the blazing sun but never permitted to quit or to leave the country. Why should a list of areas to be cleaned by maids include political topics?
In one prosperous home, writes Ehrenreich, "I encounter a shelf full of arrogant and, under the circumstances, insulting neoconservative encomiums to the status quo and consider using germ warfare against the owners, the weapons for which are within my apron pockets. All I would have to do is take one of the E. coli-rich rags that’s been used on the toilets and use it to ‘clean’ the kitchen counters – a plan that entertains me for an hour or more."
Shades of Seattlite Leftist Dan Savage, who tried deliberately to infect GOP presidential candidate Gary Bauer with influenza! But keep in mind, Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich studied chemistry and physics at Oregon’s Leftist Reed College and earned a Ph.D. in biology, capitalistically-enough, from Rockefeller University. She knows perfectly well that the use of E. coli infection she finds so amusing could literally kill a man, woman, or child. But that’s okay with her, because her would-be victims had unspecified "neoconservative encomiums" she found "arrogant" and "insulting." Scratch a Leftist and what you’ll find hidden inside is a Nazi plotting to unleash a "final solution" on all who refuse to bend their knee to Leftist superiority. Maybe we should call her Barbara Ehren-Third-Reich.
Butterfly-like, Ehrenreich sucked what anecdotes she could from a few weeks in Maine and flitted on to Minneapolis. She turned down a $10 per hour job in a hardware store – not a good enough example of capitalism hurting workers – and opted instead to work for a company that, unmentioned by her, has been shaped by having Hillary Clinton on its Board of Directors. At Wal-Mart, which with 825,000 workers she calls America’s biggest private employer. "Barb" refolded clothes for $7 per hour plus free donuts once a week. (Mentioned only in passing, very profitable Wal-Mart offers its employees a profit-sharing plan… but telling readers this would not have served Ehrenreich’s corporation-hating plan.) Seeing one child mess up folded clothes in her department, she thinks "abortion is wasted on the unborn." Laugh it up, folks; this is typical of the oft-liberally-praised Ehrenreich "wit."
As a "Wal-Martian," as with her other employers, Ehrenreich gripes about having to take drug tests – and in this instance uses tricks to keep the test from detecting her own slight use of marijuana. She piously claims that drug use does not correlate to "absenteeism, accidents, or turnover." Unmentioned, non-use does correlate with being law-abiding, sober, and being a reduced risk to trigger lawsuits or government asset forfeiture laws. Once again, government pressures companies to do what she dislikes – but Ehrenreich almost never blames government. She also mentions only in passing that a co-worker on her Florida job apparently was fired for using crack cocaine and stealing from the company to support his habit.
Ehrenreich is also outraged that employers use hidden cameras and purse searches to deter and detect employees who steal. But, again, two of her Florida co-workers were apparently fired for theft. Such five-finger discounts cost some stores 10 percent or more of their merchandise every year. But, as a socialist, Ehrenreich favors income redistribution, especially from the rich and corporations to others. "The truth is," she writes, "I don’t care if my fellow workers are getting high in the parking lot or even lifting the occasional retail item, and I certainly wouldn’t snitch if they did." She also complains about why things cost so much.
Ehrenreich is appalled that employers will penalize or fire workers who say inappropriate things in the workplace. Hey, Barb, who owns the workplace? The First Amendment was a restriction on government, not employers. Note that Ehrenreich voices no similar criticism of Politically Correct speech codes at state universities – which is literally the government restricting free speech. It reminds me of that final episode of the TV series "Thirty-Something" in which an "evil" employer fires an actor (hired to be the uncontroversial spokesman for a company) after he appears on TV at a controversial anti-war rally. This, the P.C. stars preach, violates rights of free speech and assembly. You Leftist twits, what if your actor had shown up at a Ku Klux Klan rally? Would you then be saying the employer violated free speech rights by firing him? Ehrenreich’s one-sided, two-faced hypocrisy throughout Nickel and Dimed is every bit this palpable.
What is this book about? Not really the workers she meets, most of whom are drawn with a few deft pen strokes as victim caricatures. We never really get to know any of them, except as Soviet Realism poster symbols for why socialism is needed. No, this book is ultimately about Ehrenreich, her impressions, ideology, and Oh Soooo Noble Compassion for the stick-figure women she sketches. Wham, Bam, thank you, Ma’am.
To be fair, she is a skilled and forthright Leftist propagandist making the most of her superficial visitations. C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb 12 years ago asked her: "Is there really a difference between the classes and if there is a difference about the way they live their lives and what they read and what they watch, what is the difference?" Ehrenreich replied: "Well, you see this is tricky ground which I decided to stay away from because once you start generalizing you start stereotyping in all kinds of ways." And she was right, as Nickel and Dimed shows. From the personal anecdotes and sufferings of a handful of unique individuals in three odd places, she has generalized the entire nature of class conflict in America.
And seeing the world through red-colored glasses, Ehrenreich lacks either the insight or honesty to see that "affordable" housing of course becomes scarce when government zoning, fees, environmental regulations, and other impediments add at least 37 percent to the cost, and years of investor uncertainty, to any new construction project. Lack of low-cost housing is just one more "cost" of having an intrusive government influenced by Left-wing nuts of the kind who swarm Minnesota, "Land of 10,000 Taxes." Only in one footnote 77 percent of the way through the book does she mention that high property taxes might be a factor in housing problems. In fact, government taxing away 53 percent of working family income is a major reason women have been forced into the workplace.
Hollywood made a famous 1979 film, Norma Rae, about a female union organizer. Its star Sally Field won the Oscar for Best Actress for playing the person on whom its story was based. The movie made many people wealthy, but not the real Norma Rae. She had been paid a measly $10,000 for her life story, and she would receive not a penny more from those enriched by exploiting her genuine risks and sacrifices. The media stifled this backstory of the film, while praising the millionaire filmmakers for their "sensitivity" towards exploited workers.
As a capitalist, I believe that Barbara Ehrenreich should keep the huge profits from her book. But Ehrenreich as a socialist claims to favor wealth redistribution and an end to exploitation. So how much has she made from this book based on the lives and suffering of others? Let’s guess. To be among the top-selling 15 books in America, pushed by Ehrenreich’s comrades at the New York Times itself and other Leftist entities such as National Public Radio, Nickel and Dimed has probably been selling 10,000 copies per week during the last nine weeks. She is likely earning 15 percent of the $23 cover price, or $3.45 per book sold, plus a typical 15 percent bonus during each week the book stays on the Times Best Seller List, boosting the take to $3.97 per copy sold. Multiply that by 90,000 copies and you get $357,075.00 (and that does not include any paperback, e-book, movie, foreign, or other sales, nor any speaking fees).
Ehrenreich denounces secrecy about what incomes people earn as "the last taboo," a secrecy that makes it easier to exploit workers. She therefore should be happy to reveal publicly how much she is earning from this book.
Please also tell us, Dr. Ehrenreich, are you going to keep most of this profit for yourself?
Or as a good socialist are you going to keep only "fair" wages – say, $20 per hour, plus expenses – for yourself while giving the rest to these poor, suffering, underpaid workers whose Norma Rae-like stories are the meat, potatoes and gravy of your best-selling book?
I would like to see documentation of what you earn and to report socialist consistency if you choose to divide a third of a million dollars among the women whose stories Nickel and Dimed so dramatically and profitably tells. America will be happy to know that you are not hypocritical and greedy, like those capitalists and corporations you have always called heartless, evil, exploitative and selfish – now that you are raking in much more than nickels and dimes.