Somebody has to grow and harvest the food in the fields. Somebody has to clean the carcasses, drive the trucks and unload the haul. Somebody has to process the food, prepare it, cook it, serve it. There's always somebody minding the register, stocking the shelves, wiping the counters, mopping the floors, scrubbing the toilets — even on workers' holidays like Labor Day. They smile at strangers, chase out troublemakers, lock the doors and wait for the bus in the dark.
America is run by the somebodies and hasn't known a day without their help. They make as little as their bosses care to pay them, but the writer Barbara Ehrenreich saw them, learned their names and had their backs. She thought it was the responsibility of white-collar workers like herself in the "professional-managerial class" — a term she helped coin in the 1970s — to recognize the struggle of blue-collar workers, and to join forces.
Ehrenreich, the bestselling author of books including "Nickel and Dimed" and an early member of the Democratic Socialists of America, died at 81 on Thursday after recently suffering a stroke. Ehrenreich departs as a sort of prophet redeemed: Her incisive work on the grinding poverty of wage laborers and the downward mobility of white-collar workers has taken on the cast of common knowledge, at least on the political left. Anybody wondering why their local Starbucks baristas are suddenly unionizing or why the White House is now canceling college debt would do well to visit her writing.
