Barbara Ehrenreich Remembered: How She Covered Poverty & Started Economic Hardship Reporting Project

We continue to remember the life and legacy of writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, who died on September 1 at the age of 81, as we speak with her friend and colleague Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which Ehrenreich founded and which continues to support journalists who cover and embody the struggles of everyday people. “She understood that on a basic level people just needed higher wages and more money, basically, and to make this into a moral or personal vendetta against the poor was an obscenity,” says Quart. Ehrenreich was the author of more than 20 books, including her best-known, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.”