Tichi on Ehrenreich

Tichi sees Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" as very significant in modern muckracking investigation at the start of the twenty first century. She cites documentary TV programmes which were inspired by Ehrenreich's undercover investigative stint spending a month each in low wage jobs around America. The on-going significance in her book has meant it has been read in book clubs and has inspired protest action, for instance with a group of 2001 Harvard undergraduates occupying a building for a "Justice for Janitors" campaign, which successfully won them living wage and benefit provisions. Tichi places Ehrenreich as the successor to Upton Sinclair, George Orwell and Josiah Flynt Willard's books and articles of the turn of the previous century and the 1930s Depression era, in raising awareness of the plight of low wage earners and illegal and bordering-on-illegal work practices. Although America is no longer industrialised as before, Ehrenreich exposes not so much dangerous and unsanitary processes but, in the service economy of post-industrial America, demonstrating that working all the hours possible, basic living conditions can barely be achieved, along with criminalising 'jumping through hoops' inductions and easy lay-off from jobs, while giving a veneer that the person is an important cog in the whole machine. Tichi says that Ehrenreich is part of a long history of investigative writing that speaks for those that can't, highlighting their plight and, with Ehrenreich's website nickelanddimed.net allows the type of low wage workers she worked amongst to be aware of each other and share their stories/difficulties. Tichi sees her as being on the crest of the wave of interest in the reality TV of the current media era.

Tichi, for me, highlighted or made clearer a few things about N & D that I had only half thought about. When first read, I considered the workers as just 'the poor,' but having since learnt how many Americans, who barely technically are above poverty level, see themselves as middle class I read Tichi's comment "The poor are invisible as they themselves are undercover, passing as middle class" in a different way now in terms of relating to the 'characters' in the book. On first reading I did find Ehrenreich's emotion and rage as veering on being unprofessional in trying to be serious about what she was putting across, but on reflection a tedious figure/statistic-laden report would have been tedious; to grab attention and be a bestseller you have to appeal to everyone. Tichi highlights that this occasional emotion is needed to strike a good balance between narrator and character so it is part memoir and part report. As it is, I see that Ehrenreich's science and social science background has provided enough ' serious footnoting' to back up her assessment whilst grabbing the attention of her readership, galvanising them to think with, as Tichi says, "A sense of social urgency." While I was aware that cleaners, waitresses, etc are often overlooked/invisible and when they are seen, looked down on, I was taken by Tichi's comment "It is the two Barbara's who cry 'Shame!' at the book buying readers who have the time to read Nickel and Dimed in part because they - no, we - hire others to clean our homes and serve us, wait on us." I thought this really brought it home that we are all guilty within the modern capitalist system, we all have the time to read such a book and that we all need to look to ourselves and mores to the point look to them and really see these invisible people and make a stand on their behalf.