Nickel and Dimed, 25 Years Later

A lively discussion about Barbara Ehrenreich's landmark book, low-wage, physically demanding work, and how to report on it.
About this Event

“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.”— Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed (2001)

Join us at Public Trust for Nickel and Dimed, 25 Years Later, a lively discussion on Monday, November 16, 2026, from 5:30-7:30pm about Barbara Ehrenreich's landmark book, low-wage, physically demanding work, and how to report on it. This event will feature journalists Joseph Williams, Ray Suarez, Hamilton Nolan, and Ann Larson in conversation, and will be moderated by Alissa Quart. Presented in partnership with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. Sponsored by the SNF Paideia Program.
Livestream available on publictrust.org.

About the Program

Millions of Americans work full time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job—any job—could be the ticket to a better life. Ehrenreich wondered: How does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on the federal minimum wage at the time, which was a little more than $5 an hour? In response, Ehrenreich went undercover, reporting as she worked as a housekeeper, nursing aide, a home cleaner, a waitress at Jerry’s and Hearthside restaurants, and a Walmart worker, all in her later fifties, wrestling with cleaning products, carrying huge diner orders, and sometimes living in motels.

“The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled.’” This is from Ehrenreich’s 2001 resulting masterwork Nickel and Dimed, a book that she wrote from her perspective as a journalist and investigates the impact of the 1996 welfare reform act on the working poor in the United States. As we approach the 25th anniversary of its publication, we invite you to join us at Public Trust for a discussion and celebration with writers, and collaborators and a broadcaster who knew her well. It’s hard to underestimate the effect Nickel and Dimed’s “vacuum-eye-view of what it means to work for minimum wage in this country, had on so many of us,” as her collaborator Alissa Quart has written. Ehrenreich's book helped people stop “unseeing” lower wage workers. It paved the way for the Occupy movement and Fight For 15.

And it also set the stage for Ehrenreich's final act, founding the working-class-focused media non-profit EHRP, which all of the reporters at this event have contributed to or have been fellows with. In keeping with Ehrenreich's ethos, the panelists have also all written personally on their own experiences of work—laboring in a store, being evicted, falling out of the journalistic middle class in middle age—as well as reporting on others’ work lives. This conversation will be a crucial addition to a general discussion in this country about “affordability,” the Democratic Socialists of America (Ehrenreich was the group’s first co-chair), and the place for and possibilities of journalism about social class, labor and inequality going forward.

About the Speakers

Ann Larson is the author of Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register. An activist and writer focused on economic justice, she is also the co-author of Can’t Pay Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition, cofounder of the Debt Collective, and a Fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Hamilton Nolan is a journalist who covers labor and politics. He has written for Gawker, In These Times, The Guardian and elsewhere, and he now runs his own site, How Things Work. His book about the labor movement, The Hammer, was published in 2024. He lives in Brooklyn.

Alissa Quart is the author of five books of nonfiction, including the acclaimed Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream and Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America and two volumes of poetry, including Monetized. She is the editorial director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which she created with her friend and collaborator Barbara Ehrenreich. Her awards include an Emmy and an SPJ award and a Nieman Fellowship.

Ray Suarez is host of the PBS television series, Wisdom Keepers, on air and online on PBS. He is the author of the recent book on the modern era of US immigration, We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century. Earlier in his career, Suarez was the host of the daily news program Inside Story from Al Jazeera America, Chief National Correspondent for The PBS NewsHour, and the host of Talk of the Nation from NPR.

Joseph Williams is a veteran journalist, political analyst, and essayist who has been published in a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, and US News & World Report. A California native, Williams is a graduate of the University Of Richmond and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He lives and works in metro Washington, D.C.