BarbaraEhrenreich

Hm. Well, my best job (if I put it that way): there were things I really liked about waitressing, which I'd done in real life, and even about the nursing home job, because they involve direct service for other people. The jobs that were the most hateful were Wal-Mart and the job as a housecleaner, as a maid with a housekeeping service, because physically it was the most demanding and really it was the kind of job that created injuries in very young women, which I found appalling (like early 20's women already had knee, back, etc problems) and the other thing that was painful to me was we were cleaning usually quite rich people's homes, and the women I was working with on my team for the day often weren't getting enough to eat. It made me really, really angry. Of course the people whose houses we were cleaning wouldn't offer us anything. We weren't allowed to eat or even drink water while we were in a house. I once broke that rule when a homeowner did offer me a glass of water seeing how drenched in sweat I was. Mostly the homeowners were either not home, or completely indifferent to us, as if we were invisible.

Oh, I couldn't have done it. I couldn't have done it for one big reason: that it's harder to get even the kind of jobs I worked in for Nickel & Dimed. At the time that I was doing the work, around 2000, there was a so-called labor shortage. All sorts of big companies, like big box stores, etc. had signs saying NOW HIRING or HELP WANTED so I could walk in off the street, ask for an application form, and sometimes get a job (not every time, and I had to be a little aggressive sometimes). But it's just not the same.

Yeah. I mean, with the Supreme Court decision that corporations and wealthy individuals can give as much money as they want to a political candidate, we might as well just say that we are selling these political offices to the highest bidders. It's beyond sad. At least you understand what is going on.

Well the interesting thing to me about the Occupy movement in 2011 was that it brought together so many people who are college educated, but impoverished by their student loans. And people who were or are unemployed or low-paid in their lines of work that don't require college education. So you had blue collar workers and someone with a master's degree all making common cause because they are a common cause, so I think we have to recapture that spirit.

And yes, we should have empathy for them, I think. Our social classes are not absolutely rigid. What the great recession produced was a group called the Nouveau Poor, people who had not been poor and who had no expectation of being poor and so we have people who were of the old poor, who were poor all their lives, in the same food pantries with people who have higher educations and maybe a middle class background, and now need help with things like food.

Libraries are desperately important. One or two little exceptions of time in my life, I have not had a job that's allowed me to use a library (I've not been an academic). I've been very dependent on public libraries. And I am desperately concerned about the conditions of our libraries. I was in the Cambridge Library last night, in Cambridge, Mass., where I gave a talk and signed books, and the librarian was telling me how funds had been cut so much for the library that they were way understaffed and she has ended up doing manual labor in the library because they don't have enough staff. She said "whatever it takes," because it is very important. And they are even more important for poorer people because it may be their only way to have access to computers. I've known homeless people who spend enormous amounts of time using public library computers. If you want to apply for anything, from the Affordable Care Act to a job, you have to use a computer and you hope the library is open.

I'm afraid I'll never be a professional taco eating contestant. Probably, depending on the size of the tacos and how good they are? I've had tacos from trucks in Los Angeles that I could destroy quite a few of. But the tacos at Chipotles they don't work for me. Maybe 2.