Barbara Ehrenreich - Work Quotes

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I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don't understand how she can go so long without food. "Well, I don't understand how you can go so long without a cigarette," she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself.

Barbara Ehrenreich
It's not just the work that has to be learned in each situation. Each job presents a self-contained social world, with its own personalities, hierarchy, customs, and standards.

Barbara Ehrenreich
When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — than she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made of a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.

Barbara Ehrenreich
Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else.

Barbara Ehrenreich
The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?

Barbara Ehrenreich
Whether you work outside the home or not, never tell them [your children] that being a mommy is your 'job.' Being a mommy is a relationship, not a profession.

Barbara Ehrenreich
Under the new system (aka capitalism, in this part of the world), huge numbers of people had to be convinced to work extra hard, at pitifully low wages, so that the employing class would not have to work at all. Overnight, with the help of a great number of preachers and other well-rested propagandists, work was upgraded from an indignity to an 'ethic'.

Barbara Ehrenreich
Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.

Barbara Ehrenreich