I agree Jennshark. The fact that she was able to gather and present all the pertinent facts and statistics about wages, living-standards, state of health, etc. of the minimum-wage employees was surely useful. Also, you’re going to find holes or inconsistencies in any kind of account where the writer has suddenly shifted to a totally different social environment. Ehrenreich spent years and years as an upper-middle-class woman with proper healthcare and access to information on her legal and economic rights and privileges; there’s no way she can know what it’s like to be one of her fellow middle-aged Walmarters or maids. The bits that really struck me were her details about the contemptuous way that the managers and homeowners treated them - they didn’t treat them like employees, they treated them like mentally retarded servants. This is what makes me think that she envisaged her target audience for the book as being her upper-middle-class colleagues, rather than people who are working these shitty jobs. She’s trying to target the people who have the power to either ameliorate these people’s positions, or to cause them to suffer more.
[Stewie voice]
Oh that is indeed a riot. Dumb poor people, yes, comic genius!
[/Stewie voice]
:rolleyes:
I think the premise of the book was admirable but that its execution was fatally flawed. As for Ms. Ehrenreich, I wrote an open letter to her via her publisher’s website and a well-known lefty website to which I never received her repsonse. I was far more upset with her embrace of the right wing (especially on domestic economic questions) of the Democratic Party to the point of trashing Ralph Nader and the Greens (both of whom have every intention of sticking up for the little guy) on behalf of the DNC (which has every intention of cheating the little guy with empty rhetoric) than I was with her book. She represents to me the precise problem with “liberal” intellectuals, willing to sell out America’s working poor on bread and butter issues because they don’t understand how critical they are to poorer people. They won’t demand a damn thing from the Democrats in terms of meaningful economic reforms as long as they can have their own abortions and nekkid people art in public galleries. And the poor will continue to suffer. And the Democrats will continue to lose as poorer people stay away from the polls.
Coming out of a blue collar background, first in my family to attend college, I’m especially sensitive to the elitism in the gutless identity politics that passes for liberalism these days. Babs has become my poster woman for the syndrome.
I happened to have read the book while on a small boat on Cambodia’s Tonle Sap, passing a number of extremely poor floating villages. That gives you an altogether different perspective as well…