Ehrenreich is the son of best-selling author Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) and psychologist John Ehrenreich, and his sister is Rosa Brooks, the Los Angeles Times columnist.
Carter returned to the stage to star in several roles in the Oklahoma City Theatre Company's production of Nickel and Dimed, a dramatization of Barbara Ehrenreich's popular non-fiction book of the same title.
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Following in the footsteps of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (2001), she published in 2003 Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain about an experimental period voluntarily living on the minimum wage, which was £4.10 per hour at the time.
While Shepard states that his story is not politically motivated, he did intend it to be a rebuttal to Barbara Ehrenreich's books Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch on a socio-economic level.