"I never saw any help wanted signs for a sarcastic feminist political essayist"

Barbara Ehrenreich, workers' rights activist and author of Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting By in America spoke at UCSB last night. She devoted the majority of her talk to discussing her experience as a worker struggling to make it on "low low" wages exacerbated by the "Wal-Martization" of the U.S. economy. Ehrenreich denied that poverty is simply a natural phenomenon--it is the result of conscious policies. She condemned not only reckless domestic policies like welfare reform (which she called a "practice run" for republicans whose larger agenda aims to dismantle social security) but also the Bush administration's disastrous foreign policy, the debacle into which so much social spending has been misspent "If George W. Bush took an interest in poverty," she said, "what would he do, bomb it?!"

Ehrenreich also said sweatshop conditions don't exist solely in places where MNCs export labor around the globe. She said it's closer to home than some think, citing lawsuits over forced overtime without pay, and allegations brought against stores that locked workers in after hours. Ehrenreich channeling her anger over injustice and the plight of the poor into her own brand of sardonic humor, leveling blows at the establishment which forces low wage workers to resort to desperate measures. She called for the "end of the involuntary philanthropy of so many of America's people."

Her talk could not have come at a more appropriate time--just Monday the release of an LA Times article revealed that wages are being outstripped by inflation, and that while companies are making more money, earnings aren't being passed along to workers. Wealth is increasingly polarized, concentrated in the hands of CEOs. Ehrenreich said she'd heard a number of arguments on how poor women earning next to nothing could get by--one brilliant idea suggested women "marry up." Ehrenreich expressed her rightful disgust with this idea by recommending that to rectify the crisis she devoted so much time to studying, every CEO marry a woman earning a non-livable wage. She quickly took it back though, realizing that it'd be tough to find a CEO who was worth marrying...scandals at WorldCom, Enron, Tyco, and others have taken quite a few of these guys out of the running for most elligible bachelor.