 As an advocate for the poor, best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich, who delivered the Dean's Distinguished Virginia Lee Franklin Lecture at the School of Nursing on Nov. 12, encouraged health care workers to join the fight for higher wages, more affordable housing, and better access to medical care.
"I have seen many . . . health care professionals--doctors, nurses, social workers, etc.--conclude that they cannot be health care professionals without being advocates for social change," Ehrenreich said to applause from the crowded nursing school auditorium.
Ehrenreich talked about what she learned in 1998 when, prompted by the welfare-reform debate, she left her home to experience the life of the working poor. Accepting jobs such as a waitress, hotel maid, housecleaner, and Walmart sales clerk, Ehrenreich says she saw how difficult it is to survive with a low-wage occupation--and how physically and mentally demanding such work is.
"I never use the word 'unskilled' anymore to describe anybody's job," she said.
Earning an average of $7 per hour, Ehrenreich, who chronicled her experience in her book Nickled and Dimed: On "Not" Getting By in America, says she could not afford the monthly rent or deposit for an apartment. She was forced to move into a residential hotel for a weekly rate that was more than she was earning, and because the room--which was without ventilation and smelled of rodent feces--had no refrigerator or stove, she often ate at fast-food restaurants.
"It can be more expensive to live in poverty," she said. "I was not so successful at making ends meet." She added that "all this was before the current recession," which she says has had the most impact on people who were already struggling.
One way workers in low-wage jobs try to survive is to avoid health care, Ehrenreich said, and she urged people in medical fields to actively support health care reform. "People take you seriously if you are health care professionals," she said.
Ehrenreich also encouraged support of labor organizing to raise wages, and called for a "strike against paying off student loans" to address what she says is an onerous burden of debt faced by graduates of higher education. "This is crushing what should have been a whole generation of educated people in America," she said.
The Virginia Lee Franklin Lecture is an endowed lecture named after a 1954 School of Nursing alumna.
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