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Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.
Essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich has always specialized in turning received wisdom on its head with intelligence, clarity, and verve. With some 12 million women being pushed into the labor market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at to an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do, she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job, and tried to make ends meet.
As a waitress in Florida, where her name is suddenly transposed to "girl," trailer trash becomes a demographic category to aspire to with rent at 5 per month. In Maine, where she ends up working as both a cleaning woman and a nursing home assistant, she must first fill out endless pre-employment tests with trick questions such as "Some people work better when they're a little bit high." In Minnesota, she works at Wal-Mart under the repressive surveillance of men and women whose job it is to monitor her behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. She even gets to experience the humiliation of the urine test.
So, do the poor have survival strategies unknown to the middle class? And did Ehrenreich feel the "bracing psychological effects of getting out of the house, as promised by the wonks who brought us welfare reform?" Nah. Even in her best-case scenario, with all the advantages of education, health, a car, and money for first month's rent, she has to work two jobs, seven days a week, and still almost winds up in a shelter. As Ehrenreich points out with her potent combination of humor and outrage, the laws of supply and demand have been reversed. Rental prices skyrocket, but wages never rise. Rather, jobs are so cheap as measured by the pay that workers are encouraged to take as many as they can. Behind those trademark Wal-Mart vests, it turns out, are the borderline homeless. With her characteristic wry wit and her unabashedly liberal bent, Ehrenreich brings the invisible poor out of hiding and, in the process, the world they inhabit--where civil liberties are often ignored and hard work fails to live up to its reputation as the ticket out of poverty. --Lesley Reed.../ Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America / furnished apartments for rent
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I really wanted to like this book but... : Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
I know my the name of my UPS delivery man--I know that he likes to play soccer, that he projects a cheerful and energetic personality, and has for the last ten years he's delivered to our office. I know the name of the woman who serves my friend and me breakfast each Friday morning at a chain restaurant. I've bought charity lotto tickets from her sons and know the story of her daughter who died when the insurance company insisted on using a cheaper lab. I know that when minimum wage increased, management cut her hours so her paycheck remained the same, but the workload increased. But I don't know anybody at the copy shop, the fast-food joints, or even the grocery store. They all merge with the background, human servants of the commercial machine upon which my life depends.
NICKEL AND DIMED: ON (NOT) GETTING BY IN AMERICA tells the story of what a privileged and articulate writer experienced when she attempted to live as an "unskilled" working class person. Barbara Ehrenreich spent time in Key West, Maine, and Minnesota holding down jobs as a waitress, nursing home aide, cleaning woman, and Wall-Mart "associate." She attempted to live on the wages these jobs paid--without drawing on her skills as a PhD, author, or lecturer.
Ehrenreich writes well. Her story engages the reader from the first page of the introduction to the final page of her "Evaluation" chapter. Her frustration leaked through the page and into me. I became enraged at the humiliating bosses and the abusive working conditions--and then I'd close the book and reflect that millions of people endure worse with no hope of writing up their notes and producing a best-seller from their experiences.
While the anecdotes of Ehrenreich's experience were at least entertaining, her evaluation of the experience became the most interesting part of the book to me. She evaluated her experience through the Liberal lense of class conflict and power dynamics. It would be interesting to read a companion volume written by a "Conservative" journalist who ventured the same experiment.
She discovered that while no job is truly "unskilled," the low wage jobs that she got made physical demands, some of which could be damaging if performed month after month--even for a physically fit person. She found few no rewards for heroic performance, that "the trick lies in figuring out how to budget your energy so there'll be some left over for the next day" (p. 195). She found that it is nearly impossible to earn enough money to survive on with just a single job, even during the tight labor market of 1999:
"Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don't need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high" (p. 199).
She examines the pressures exerted on workers to keep them subservient and from asserting their power. She challenges the idea that we are a democracy if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts to a "dictatorship" in the workplace. She also speculates on the depressive effects of the disempowerment to which the "working poor" must submit.
Ehrenreich challenges the myth of the American Dream. Even her co-workers subscribed to this myth, working hard so that someday they, too, could live affluent lifestyles, failing to evaluate the extreme unlikelihood that they would ever leave the ranks of the working poor. Our last elected president came up from poverty--so did his opponent, Ross Perot. "This is America, anybody can become a millionaire!" That is the myth--one which keeps the workers docile. Ehrenreich believes that eventually that myth will be rejected:
"Someday ... they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they're worth. There'll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption" (p. 221). Although she never actually uses the word "revolution," her book demand that it's time for the "Compassionate" Conservatives to stop telling the workers to eat cake and to pay attention to the growing inequalities in our society.
Five stars for the courage to do the research and five for writing style. I only give her conclusion four stars because I believe her experiment deserved a better epilogue, more forcefully dispelling the post-Reagan myths about poverty and upward mobility. Regardless of your political/economic beliefs, this book demands to be read. Perhaps you'll evaluate Barbara's experiences and come to different conclusions ... or perhaps you'll find that you start seeing people who had been an invisible part of your life all along. Don't avoid this book, you owe it to yourself and to the people who stock your shelves, run the cash registers, deliver food to your table & clean your hotel rooms.
(If you'd like to dialogue about this book or review, please click on the "about me" link above and drop me an email. Thanks!)
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