In 2006, Ehrenreich founded United Professionals, an organization described as "a nonprofit, non-partisan membership organization for white-collar workers, regardless of profession or employment status. We reach out to all unemployed, underemployed, and anxiously employed workers—people who bought the American dream that education and credentials could lead to a secure middle class life, but now find their lives disrupted by forces beyond their control." In 2009, she wrote "Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America", a book that investigates the rise of the positive thinking industry in the USA. She included her own experience after being told that she had breast cancer, as a starting point in this book.In this book, she brought to light various methods of what Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann calls 'quantum flapdoodle'.