Barbara Ehrenreich is a journalist, historian, social critic and author of fourteen books, including 2001’s million-copy best-seller Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, which became a New York Times bestseller, and has since sold over one million copies. Nickel and Dimed, a trenchant examination of working-class poverty that chronicles Ehrenreich's own attempt to live on minimum wage, is now required reading at more than 600 colleges and universities.

In 2005, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, also a New York Times bestseller, exposed the ever more prevalent phenomenon of white-collar unemployment. Bait and Switch highlights the people who’ve done everything right -- gotten college degrees, developed marketable skills, and built up impressive résumés -- yet have become repeatedly vulnerable to financial disaster, and not simply due to the vagaries of the business cycle.