Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

“It’s humbling, this business of applying for low-wage jobs, consisting as it does of offering yourself–your energy, your smile, your real or faked lifetime of experience–to a series of people for whom this is just not a very interesting package.”

“What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re really selling is your life.”

“f you’re made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you’re paid is what you are actually worth.”

“No one ever said that you could work hard – harder even than you ever thought possible – and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.”

“Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.”

“Some economists argue that the apparent paradox rests on an illusion: there is no real ‘labor shortage,’ only a shortage of people willing to work at the wages currently being offered.”

“I haven’t been treated this way—lined up in the corridor, threatened with locker searches, peppered with carelessly aimed accusations—since at least junior high school.”

“There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs.”

″...they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth. There’ll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better off for it in the end.”

“My father had been a copper miner, uncles and grandfathers worked in the mines for the Union Pacific. So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”

″...a lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.”