“It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in her 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, of a tent revival she attended in Portland, Me. “But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.”

Harsh words, and maybe not the most orthodox presentation of the person of Jesus—but they are found in a book whose message has become all the more urgent for Americans to hear. Ehrenreich’s investigation of income inequalities, Nickel and Dimed, focused on her personal attempts to “see whether or not I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day.” Her conclusion will not surprise most blue-collar workers in the United States today, just as it did not a quarter-century ago: It is all but impossible to survive on minimum wage.

Between spring 1998 and summer 2000, Ehrenreich took jobs that paid minimum wage or slightly above in Florida, Maine and Minnesota. What she detailed was a world of people living on a financial razor’s edge, unable to afford healthy food or decent housing, but still holding down two and three jobs to try to make ends meet. 

It’s not just that the poor are underserved and neglected, Ehrenreich wrote; they are propping up the economic Ponzi scheme the rest of America is living in. The working poor are the “major philanthropists of our society,” she noted, giving up the care of “their own children so that the children of others will be cared for, living in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect.”

Like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or Michael Harrington’s The Other America, Ehrenreich’s book was a staple on high school and college syllabi in the years that followed. America’s editors and contributors referenced it for years in discussions of income inequality. In 2009, America editor James Martin, S.J., called it “a bravura piece of social journalism,” and in a 2001 review, Claire Schaeffer-Duffy called it “a piercingly witty and intimate exposé of life (or lack of it) on poverty-level wages in America.”

Ehrenreich, wrote Schaeffer-Duffy, approached her task “with hard-nosed realism and a conviction, nurtured in her working-class childhood, that poverty can be overcome with hard work and a can-do attitude.” She soon found out it’s not quite that easy:

Whether it’s juggling orders for four or five tables at an overcrowded restaurant in Florida or wielding a back-mounted vacuum cleaner throughout a mansion in Maine, Ehrenreich tries hard at every job she undertakes. Very hard. Nonetheless, despite her advantages—ethnicity, education, motivation, health—poverty’s plot overwhelms Ehrenreich in every setting.

Born in Butte, Mont., in 1941, Ehrenreich moved several times with her family during childhood, ending up in Los Angeles. She graduated from Reed College in 1963 with a degree in chemistry, then earned a doctorate in immunology from Rockefeller University. Over the next decade, Ehrenreich would work in public affairs and health policy and teach at SUNY Old Westbury. She also worked as a freelance writer and lectured around the country on feminism and women’s health issues.

Throughout the 1980s, Ehrenreich served as a visiting professor at various universities, including N.Y.U., and continued her work of social activism and muckraking. Though Nickel and Dimed might have thrust her into the public eye in a new way, it was part of a much larger oeuvre. Other projects over the years included Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class(1989), Bait And Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (2005) and Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2007). She published many other monographs, memoirs and essays between 1969 and 2020, and in 1993 she published a novel, Kipper’s Game.

In 2014, Ehrenreich (who often described herself as a lifelong atheist despite also writing of her mystical experiences) published an intriguing book: Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything. The memoir ​​drew extensively on journals she had saved from her teenage and young adult years. It was “not a book of faith,” David L. Ulin of the Los Angeles Times wrote. “Educated as a scientist, trained as a reporter, Ehrenreich does not believe in what she cannot see. As such, she turns to philosophy, chemistry and physics; she traces the influence of her home life, which was dysfunctional (both parents were alcoholics) but encouraged asking questions and thinking for oneself.”

Though Ehrenreich had always been involved in progressive politics, she became an increasingly prominent figure in politically leftist causes after Nickel and Dimed, including an appointment as the honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America and stints on the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws board of directors and on the editorial boards of journals ranging from The Nation to Mother Jones to The New Press to Social Policy. She was also a contributing editor at Harper’s. 

Ehrenreich died in Alexandria, Va., of a stroke on Sept. 1, 2022. She was survived by her son Ben Ehrenreich, a Los Angeles-based journalist and novelist, and her daughter Rosa Brooks, a law professor. In an obituary in the Los Angeles Times, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich called her “inimitable” for her “contributions to the labor, progressive and women’s movements, her brilliant literary journalism, and her tenacious appeals to common sense. She will be sorely missed.”

One last note: The federal minimum wage when Nickel and Dimed was published in 2001 was $5.15 per hour. A quarter-century later, it is $7.25 an hour. Even a simple yearly increase pegged to inflation would have raised it to between $10 and $12 per hour. Instead, it has not been increased for 16 years, the longest stretch since the Fair Labor Standards Act established a minimum hourly wage in 1938. 

In other words, the working poor in the United States are not better off since 2001. Their situation is far worse.

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Not upon a vasty field,” by Tom Tipton. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.