Barbara Ehrenreich - Read Everything She Writes

Barbara Ehrenreich - About Barbara Ehrenreich:

'via Blog this'
"People sometimes ask how one can be an objective journalist as well as an activist, but most of the writing I have done has been of the opinionated variety anyway. Besides, I can’t imagine getting involved in a problem as a journalist and not wanting to do something about it, whether that means marching, picketing, leafleting, or helping build an organization for social change. Besides, a lot of my inspiration as a journalist comes from what I experience as an activist -- the people I meet on union picket lines, for example.

In 1998, I veered off from essay-writing for the reporting that led to the book Nickel and Dimed. This was a totally new experience for me as a writer, and I don’t just mean the manual labor involved in the jobs I took. I had never done much reporting before, and certainly not in the first person. But I found I loved that kind of writing, at least enough to do a second reported book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, based on my experiences as an undercover white-collar job seeker.

Each of these books changed my life in important and unexpected ways. Nickel and Dimed plunged me into the nascent living wage movement, traveling to union rallies, picket lines and organizing meetings around the country. Once terrified of public speaking, I became comfortable addressing crowds through a bull horn, with no notes at all. I got arrested at a protest with Yale workers; I joined picket lines with hotel workers in Santa Monica and janitors in Miami; I leafleted for a living wage in Charlottesville and marched with ACORN in Michigan.

Bait and Switch inspired me to do something totally new: try to build an organization for unemployed, underemployed, and anxiously employed white collar workers. My research on the book showed me that college-educated workers are extremely vulnerable to downward mobility, and often end up in the kinds of low-wage jobs I had done forNickel and Dimed. With some help from the Service Employees International Union, a group of people I met while on my book tour launched United Professionals in 2006, and we can be found atunitedprofessionals.org. We’re still small and struggling, but hoping to build a response to the “war on the middle class” that is undermining so many lives.

Meanwhile, curiosity has kept pulling me in different directions. I’ve just published Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, a scholarly book that I began many months before I started the research for Nickel and Dimed. It’s a sweeping book about festivities and ecstatic rituals: their roots in human evolution and the history of their repression by elites from ancient times to the present. I’m now researching for a book on what I call “the cult of cheerfulness,” which requires Americans to “think positively” rather than to take positive action for change."