The final episode of our three-part series "Going for Broke," "Can Work Be Love?" airs this week and it brought home a truism: it’s hard to plan for an ending but sometimes it finds you anyway. The ending of the show, which moved us all as we were putting it together, was not what we imagined when we planned it many months ago.
Alissa Quart from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and I saw an arc of story about how the economy can fail us – first in terms of our housing, then mental health, and finally work—and how we can put care back into these structures. We asked Alissa’s collaborator and friend, the great author Barbara Ehrenreich to talk to us for the work episode, which she would do from her home near Washington, DC. She not only wrote "Nickel and Dimed" and other seminal books on labor, but she founded the EHRP. Her spirit had animated the series since we started.
I was in Boston in September helping my daughter move back to college and Alissa called with the news that Barbara had died. Alissa felt the loss intensely. We realized at some point after that we wanted to make a segment that was also a tribute to Barbara. A year earlier, Alissa had interviewed and recorded Barbara. I went back, and edited, and we decided to have Alissa talk the listener through their conversation. We wanted to do right by Barbara—to be full of feeling and honesty without being treacly.
I love hearing Barbara talking with Alissa about the power of people telling their own stories, in their own voices. And I hope you do, too.
–Shannon