“Amazingly positive,” is how Barbara Ehrenreich describes the reaction to her best-selling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. In fact, she sounds a bit overwhelmed at the response the book has received and the attention it has gotten from the public and the media. The account of Ehrenreich’s experiences working in different low-wage jobs (waiting tables, housecleaning, working at Wal-Mart) and trying to make ends meet, certainly seems to have resonated deeply among Americans. In addition to the usual book tour, Ehrenreich reports that she has been asked to speak by any number of union and student groups and non-profit organizations and has appeared on a long list of TV talk shows. She has also given any number of press interviews.

But Nickel and Dimed has done more than attract readers and garner Ehrenreich a lot of attention, it has also already spun off both a television documentary report and a play. A&E’s series Investigative Reports produced a special two-hour edition, “Wage Slaves: Not Getting By in America,” which focused sympathetically on five different low-wage workers and their families and featured interview segments with Ehrenreich. Playwright Joan Holden has turned the book into a play that opened in July at the Intiman Theater in Seattle and is currently running at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Most recently it’s been reported that the book as been optioned for a movie.

Of course, not everyone Ehrenreich has encountered since the book came out is ready to run to the aid of low-wage workers. During her book tour, for instance, she was sometimes challenged by audience members from higher income brackets—the ones who actually employ housecleaners in their homes and other low-wage workers in their businesses. “How could I run my business,” an employer would ask, “if I have to pay higher wages?”

I asked Ehrenreich if she thought that some of the resistance to bettering the condition of low-wage workers was a continuation of the traditional undervaluing of women’s work—after all, most of the workers she describes are women. But she doesn’t really think the issue can be framed that simply now. She met plenty of men in similar situations during her research—for instance, workers in Wal-Mart in departments other than Women’s Wear, the department she was assigned to. She does think, however, that the fact that many of these jobs have historically been stereotypically female does affect employers’ assumptions about what they should have to pay in wages to get workers.

So far we’d been talking about the reactions of people who were not themselves part of the low-wage economy. What, I wondered, about reactions from the people with whom Ehrenreich worked? She has kept in touch with some of them and she says that at least one person has become a lot more militant. Bringing an outside perspective to their workplace may have helped them to look at their conditions in a new light. “You can get used to these things,” she says, and not even question your situation.

I eventually asked Ehrenreich the question that she told me was the top question put to her by her audiences: What can we do about it? She doesn’t profess to have the answer, or even to believe that there is one answer, but she does see promise in some movements. She mentioned particularly the Living Wage Campaigns going on around the country, something she has mentioned in other interviews. Students have been directly showing solidarity with workers on their own campuses, but she thinks that for most people Living Wage Campaigns are one of the best ways to directly support low-wage workers. Although living wage laws generally only apply to workers employed by companies performing services for or getting assistance from government agencies, she believes they can help to raise the bar generally by giving low-wage workers somewhere else to go, thus putting pressure on other employers.

I asked about a number of other tactics, such as campaigns at the state and local level (good for some issues, such as healthcare) and corporate campaigns (“Wal-Mart certainly deserves that attention”), and this led her to describe a current project—one dealing with an organizing approach to the problem. She is currently working with labor lawyer Thomas Geohegan on an article for The Nation, on a new approach for unions. The idea, which she credits primarily to Geohegan, is similar to the proposal in Richard Freeman’s and Joel Rogers’s recent article “A Proposal to American Labor” (The Nation, June 24, 2002), except that, where Freeman and Rogers argue that unions should begin to recognize minority unions at workplaces, the Ehrenreich-Geoghegan article will argue for allowing people to join unions as individuals. In the low-wage job market, Ehrenreich notes, people change jobs a lot. And, when they attempt to organize they go through a “trial by fire initiation when the company will do everything to fire you.” It would be better if people could join unions as individuals and have access to some kinds of training and knowledge that they can rely on when they go to a new job. If there were an easier way to become a union member, so that people could get some benefit from this connection up front, then they will be more willing to put something into building the union later.

Ehrenreich also still firmly believes in pressing for the traditional liberal agenda at the federal level: national health insurance, subsidized childcare, affordable housing, etc. There may not be much hope under the current administration, but we need to keep these issues alive for the future. As someone who has come relatively recently to organizing, I had to ask her a question that I have put to many other long-time activists: How do you keep doing it? How do you keep from getting discouraged when we seem, at the federal level at least, to be getting further away than ever from getting these programs? Her answer: “We have no choice.” These are still the programs that people need, as the stories in Nickel and Dimed show only too well.

Kathy Quinn is on DSA’s NPC and the Democratic Left Editorial Board. This interview appeared in the Labor Day 2002 issue of Democratic Left.