Barbara Ehrenreich Class Quotations

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class. ... You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $65 billion family fortune?

in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.

Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of 'traditional values' installed. ... the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.

Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.

In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s ... [t]he peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge, with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.

Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became a major industry and the middle class bought radios to hear the ads and cars to get to the stores. ... But there is no question that the consumer culture had begun to crowd out all other cultural possibilities by the years following World War II.

Even when uttered by Democrats, "middle class" often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, "Us, and not them," where "them" includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.

There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.