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The Two Barbaras

What kind of readers find Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent books remotely edifying? How far up their own asses are these people? I have to admit that I’ve yet to read the book in which she passes for working poor, although I did read her earlier piece in Harper’s magazine that served as a teaser. The fact that some of the lowest-paid service workers have to live in motels because they can’t afford a full month’s rent on an apartment was the only revelation for me (in New York, even our motels are too expensive, so people cram dozens of bodies in small apartments). Do you want to know how the poor live? Talk to your janitor, waitress or telemarketer. The paucity of actual interviews in Ehrenreich’s books saps the story of emotional resonance and dulls her political points.

This tendency is exacerbated in “Bait and Switch,” in which our supposed heroine poses as a white collar corporate job seeker. That corporate downsizing can cause the lives of the white-collar unemployed to spiral right out of the middle class and out of control is, indeed, a story worth telling. But Barbara Ehrenreich doesn’t tell it here. Instead, by going undercover as a PR executive on the job market seeking to enter the corporate world she was never a part of, Ehrenreich gives us 237 pages of a totally misguided job hunt. Parasitic image consultants and job hunt advisors sap her of thousands of dollars over the course of a fruitless year-long search. That says more about her poor choices and lack of support network as a corporate novice. Throughout, she trips over desperate, embittered job seekers – former corporate success stories who were thrown overboard by their employers in middle age – whose plight and occasionally populist gripes about modern capitalism who would be far more fascinating subject matter, but Ehrenreich’s self-indulgent format does not allow for interviews with them.


For some reason, Barbara Ehrenreich is inextricably linked in my mind with fellow socialist and author Barbara Garson. Like Ehrenreich, Garson is a humorist who attempts to grapple with major economic issues in an accessible manner. I recently re-read one of her earliest books, “All the Livelong Day,” which I am including in the theoretical syllabus of the Labor Studies 101 class I’d like to teach one day. Spurred on by curiosity about Big Concepts like Taylorism and “alienation of labor,” Garson innocently asks, “what about the workers?”

While she, too, poses as a worker in a 9 to 5 job to write about the effects of mind-numbing routine on her psyche, this is merely one short chapter. The rest of the book is full of wonderful interviews with workers (Barbara G. is a playwright first and has a wonderful ear for dialogue and an eye for detail) about how they view themselves and their jobs and how they make the time go by. These details – like the woman who daydreams about sex while pulling red meat from white at the Bumble Bee tuna factory or the office pool secretary who amuses herself by typing in a rhythm with her coworkers – really make the text come alive and provoke the reader to think about his or her own private thoughts at work, all while illuminating fairly dense economic theory. Her books are far more deserving of best-seller status, and worth your attention.

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More On Inequality Sickness

Following up on my previous post, in case I wasn’t clear (“Are you following me?”), here is a simple graph that argues much more clearly that inequality is making us sicker:

This chart represents diabetes rates by income group (divided simply into thirds; the richest third of the population, the middle third and the poorest third) in the UK and the US. First, note that the poorer you are, the likelier you are to have diabetes. In America, this is not surprising, because our poor lack health care. In the UK, however, the poor has the same health care as the rich (or at least the middle class), and yet they are still more likely to have diabetes, although not nearly as likely as their American counterparts.

But now, compare the poorest Brits to the richest Americans. Lower rates of diabetes! Both groups receive similar quality of health care, so what accounts for it? Surely, it can’t be the average British consumption of fish and chips, lager and fags. What the research is pointing to is a surprising correlation between inequitable income distribution in any given country, and higher rates of disease and death across all income groups.

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Cinema Fascists and Other Ghouls

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a sort of gothic fairy-tale for adults and weird little kids. Like Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” and “Dark Crystal,” this beautifully shot Spanish language film from Guillermo del Toro guides a ten year old girl through a dark fantasy world full of monsters and ghouls with questionable motivations. The world of the labyrinth exists largely in the imagination of the girl, Ofelia (Ivama Baquero), who is interpreting the far more horrific real world she inhabits, in which Franco’s Fascists are exterminating the remaining rebels in the dreary spring of ’44. In a bit of a cop-out, the filmmakers allow the audience to imagine that Ofelia’s fantasy world might be real, thus dulling the impact of a surprisingly sad ending. Sergi Lopez is almost cartoonish in his villainy as the Captain, which is fine by me. Call me old-fashioned, but I like my Fascists all snarling and evil. His brutality, as well as the brutality of his well-deserved comeuppance, had me wincing in my seat, a rare and oddly enjoyable experience.

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Dr. Robin Hood

Dean Robinson’s “Health Politics and Inequality” class has taken some surprising turns. Jill Quadagno’s book, “One Nation, Uninsured” served as an efficient history of how we got the lousy system of health care that we have, so the questions of how and what kinds of alternatives we ca have were neatly dispensed with.

Basically, the “simplest” and fairest universal system would be to simply expand our already existing Medicare system to cover everyone. That would give us the Canadian “single payer” system (which, coincidentally, is also called Medicare). Of course, to fund the program, the government would have to institute a new payroll tax on employers. For employers who already pay around a quarter of an employee’s salary in insurance premiums, this would essentially replace those premiums and would probably lower their costs and improve their market position, as it would serve to “take health care out of competition” by equalizing their equalizing their costs with those of employers that do not currently provide health insurance for employees (and for whom such a payroll tax would be a new and unwelcome development). Business, being business, would likely seek to take the cost of health care off its ledger and dump it on the public in the form of tax income tax increases – which would naturally be controversial. Yes, polls show that Americans are willing to pay higher taxes for more social services. But, the millions of Americans who already receive health care through their employers do not want to pay for what they already have. This would not be a tax increase, as much as it would be a pay cut. The combination of such anti-business tax agendas with the fact that such a “Medicare For All” solution would necessarily be a frontal assault on the rich private insurance industry creates a powerful coalition of capitalist opposition to universal health care that is built in to the problem. This is to say nothing about the potential to energize the religious right over the issue of public financing of reproductive health services. Clearly, it will take a rock-solid coalition of “the good guys” if we have any chance, and the labor movement must take a leading role in forming such a coalition.

Where Dean’s class has taken an interesting turn is the presentation of Ichiro Kawachi’s research of the effects of inequality on health. The research presented in his book, “The Health of Nations: Why Inequality is Harmful to Your Health,” basically finds that the level of inequality in a given society has a direct relationship with average life expectancy, disease rates and infant mortality. Kawachi controls for income levels, access to health care and a host of other factors one might expect to explain these numbers. Holding all other things equal, a person who lives in a country that has a large gap between the rich and the poor is unhealthier than his direct counterpart in a more equitable country. This is the same for rich people as it is for the poor.

You might expect a socialist to love this report, but I find it troubling. The problem is that wealth redistribution is just so…un-American. In my past life as a teenage mutant ninja socialist, going on speaking tours and doing media interviews for the Socialist Party, I’ve always de-emphasized the Robin Hood aspect of socialism. What’s most important to talk about is, first, what we as working people need and deserve: Meaningful work at good pay; decent, affordable housing; health insurance, vacations and pensions. Second is what’s preventing so many of us from having these things: the capitalist system of production for profit and not for need. I’ve always differentiated between private property and personal property. What we want is to publicly own and control the basic companies and industries, not to share your toothbrush and wife. Taking away mansions and yachts from the rich is not crucial to the functioning of the economy, and would not be the first step of a socialist revolution. But I don’t talk about it because Americans don’t like the idea. They want to believe that anyone can “earn” such ostentatious wealth (as if the Waltons and the Hilton’s “earned” their daddies’ money!). But, if Ichiro Kawachi’s research is correct, those ostentatious displays of wealth are terrible for our health. Watching “MTV Cribs” could literally kill you (and the rich idiot with the air-conditioned display room for his hats).

In many ways this is a moralistic argument for socialism, and I hate those. I’m a materialist, and prefer to focus on jobs, peace and freedom. But, Robin Hood was right, and we need more people like him.