Industrial Workers of the World

Review Going To Extremes Notes from a Divided Nation (aka This Land Is Their Land Reports from a Divided Nation.)

Barbara Ehrenreich. Granta, 2008. ISBN 978 1 84708 065 3

In Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species’ attraction to war & violence. In Dancing in the Streets she explored the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing.

Nickle & Dimed recorded from direct experience how millions of Americans (75% of wage slaves) work for poverty-level wages. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour?

Born in Butte Montana in 1941 while a student she got involve din the anti-Vietnam war mobilisations and then social justice (better health care for poor of New York City) Having children expanded a personal interest into the her-story of women healers: witches, midwives & nurses. Nickel and Dimed plunged her into the nascent living wage movement, travelling to union rallies, picket lines and organizing meetings around the country.

“Once terrified of public speaking, I became comfortable addressing crowds through a bull horn, with no notes at all. I got arrested at a protest with Yale workers; I joined picket lines with hotel workers in Santa Monica and janitors in Miami; I leafleted for a living wage in Charlottesville and marched with ACORN in Michigan. Bait and Switch inspired me to do something totally new: try to build an organization for unemployed, underemployed, and anxiously employed white collar workers. My research on the book showed me that college-educated workers are extremely vulnerable to downward mobility, and often end up in the kinds of low-wage jobs I had done for Nickel and Dimed. With some help from the Service Employees International Union, a group of people I met while on my book tour launched United Professionals in 2006, and we can be found at

www.unitedprofessionals.org

We’re still small and struggling, but hoping to build a response to the “war on the middle class” that is undermining so many lives. I’m now researching for a book on what I call “the cult of cheerfulness,” which requires Americans to “think positively” rather than to take positive action for change.”

For four decades she has used her pen and wit to try to wise up the ignorant amongst us.

In the 2000s she used short commentaries. These collected together in Going to Extremes are divided into subjects: Chasms of Inequality; Meanness On the Rise; Strangling The Middle Class; Hell Day At Work;; Declining Health; Getting Sex Straight; & False Gods.

The collection is dedicated “to all the under-celebrated people who make books possible and available – editorial assistants, copy editors, proofreaders, publicists, print industry workers, truck drivers, and bookstore workers.”

Other Books by Barbara Ehrenreich: Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2007 Metropolitan Books); Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream (Metropolitan Books); For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts' Advice to Women (2005 Anchor); Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (2004 Metropolitan Books); Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001 Metropolitan Books); Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1998 Metropolitan Books); The Snarling Citizen: Essays (1995 Farrar Straus & Giroux); Kipper's Game (1993 Farrar Straus & Giroux); Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1990 Perennial); Worst Years of Our Lives (1990 Pantheon); For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (1989 Anchor); The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1987 Anchor); Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (1987 Anchor); Women in the Global Factory (1983 South End Press); Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (1977 Feminist Press); Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1972 Feminist Press); The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics (1971 Random House); Long March, Short Spring the Student Uprising at Home and Abroad (1969 Monthly Review Press).