Barbara Ehrenreich dead at 81 – Social Justice author including Nickel and Dimed deceased, son confirmed

BARBARA Ehrenreich, a social justice writer and author of the undercover journalism book Nickel and Dimed, has died at the age of 81.

Her son announced today that Ehrenreich died in Alexandria, Virginia, on Thursday morning.

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“She was, as she made clear, ready to go,” Ben tweeted.

“She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory by loving one another and fighting like hell.”

A prolific author, Ehrenreich wrote on a variety of social justice topics ranging from women’s rights, inequality, the wage gap, and inequities in the American health care system.

Her first book, Long March, Short Song, was an account of the student uprising against the Vietnam War.

In the 2001 bestseller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, she wrote about the experiences of low-wage workers in Key West, Florida.

Ehrenreich took first-person narration and worked minimum-wage jobs so she could experience firsthand the struggles of the working poor, whom she called “our society’s greatest philanthropists.”

“They neglect their own children in order to care for the children of others; they live in inferior housing so that other houses may be shiny and perfect; They endure hardship to keep inflation low and stock prices high,” she wrote.

“To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, an unnamed benefactor to all.”

The book helped spread awareness of an economy where it was necessary to work two or three jobs to survive and started the minimum wage movement.

The events in the book took place between the spring of 1998 and the summer of 2000.

She later used her name and energy to try to give low-income and other disadvantaged groups a direct voice to tell their own stories.

She founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports independent journalists to write about their lives, including in poor rural areas of the United States.