She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs. Perhaps the best way we can honor her memory is committing to help them. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. While I wish her legacy were no longer quite so relevant-and that the minimum wage had risen at least a few dollars since Nickel and Dimed was published-we’re lucky to have Ehrenreich’s words guiding us as organizations like Fight for $15 and the National Domestic Workers Alliance do their best to ease the outsized burden placed on service workers in this country. A successful author, Barbara Ehrenreich decides to see if she can scratch out a comfortable living in a blue-collar America obsessed with welfare 'reform'. Anyone in the educated classes who thinks otherwise ought to broaden their circle of friends.” (Why do I feel like there are some present-day writers who need to hear this?) With nearly a million copies in print, Nickel and Dimed is a modern classic that deftly portrays the plight of America's working-class poor.

Ehrenreich changed that for me, illustrating the near-impossibility of getting by on $6 or $7 an hour while taking care to note that “low-wage workers are no more homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less likely to be funny or bright. In Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich managed to communicate the fundamental unfairness of the minimum-wage worker’s predicament in a way that felt urgent I’d learned, from my parents and from my history and civics classes, that things were nowhere near fair in America, but I hadn’t really gotten the sense that there was much to be done about it.

Nickel and dimed book