Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in low-wage USA
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Granta Books, 2002
221 pages, $24.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
"What am I doing here?", wondered the 50ish professional writer with a PhD in biology, Barbara Ehrenreich, as she woke up at 4am in a cold sweat in some fly-blown budget accommodation, agonising over her screw-up that day as a waiter in a "family restaurant".
"You did what, where?", is the equally incredulous reaction of her middle-class professional peers to the news that Ehrenreich spent months living the poverty-scarred life of the low-wage worker in America in 1998, as an assignment for Harper's Magazine.
Thirty per cent of the US working class earn less than US$8 per hour and Ehrenreich wanted to know how these "working poor" managed to survive. One way to find out was to put her education and class level on ice and go "undercover" as a low-wage worker.
Ehrenreich set a few rules in her favour — she always had a car and kept her real-life ATM card as back-up. She has no children in tow. (She points out: "mine are grown and no one was willing to lend me theirs for a month-long vacation in penury.") So, mobile and unencumbered, in good health, and with assets to fall back on, Ehrenreich was a well-resourced visitor to poverty and toil. But the reality of it still stunned her.
Her first stop was Key West, Florida and the twin obsessions of finding work and affordable accommodation. It is humbling to find, she discovered, that if she wants to avoid a lengthy commute, a more central trailer home is the best bet. But even these are barely within economic grasp — "it is a shock to realise that 'trailer trash' has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to".
Ehrenreich finds work as a waitress in a family restaurant, soon discovering why the job was so readily secured: high labour turnover from a relentlessly fast-paced job. The $2.43 an hour is supplemented by tips (a fact she bemoans because European tourists, "no doubt spoiled by their trade union-ridden, high-wage welfare states", do not believe in tipping).
While the manager is counting the croutons (six, and not one more, on a salad), the waiting staff feel less constrained: one dips into her own tip money for an out-of-work mechanic who has used all his money on dental surgery. Such generosity contrasts with the manager, constantly monitoring his charges for sloth, theft, drug abuse and the cardinal sin — sitting down.
Soon realising that her incomings and outgoings are not going to be joined in holy union, Ehrenreich is forced to do what eight million other working poor do — take a second job. At Ehrenreich's second restaurant, where she is "beset by customers as if by bees", the forces of destruction are massing against her, and overwhelmed by stress, exhaustion and a tray-throwing incident in the kitchen, she surrenders and calls her Florida episode to a close.
To Portland, Maine, and work as a "dietary aide" ferrying food to nursing home residents and washing the dishes. Like the restaurant business, profit-making nursing homes are chronically understaffed, the work frenetic and exhausting. Job number two becomes mandatory and Ehrenreich joins a large house-cleaning franchise, scrubbing and dusting the homes of those with "too much money and floor space".
The company charges their clients $25 an hour and pays their cleaners $6.65, which pretty neatly explains their national success story. The harried cleaners run with sweat in a world of back pain, cramps and arthritis which they are exhorted by management to "work through" — which they do, there is no sick leave for the low waged.
The Maine episode is abandoned by a tired Ehrenreich who tries Minnesota and the glories of being one of the 875,000 "associates" working for the largest retail chain in the world, Wal-Mart. Ehrenreich is warned how trade unions will destroy civilisation and she is told about other sins, like swearing and "time-theft" (which is committed by talking to other staff and bunking off).
Ehrenreich's working life at Wal-Mart has familiar elements to her other low-wage jobs — sleep-deprivation, foot-ache and leg-tiredness — as well as a constant race to re-stock, re-fold and re-hang clothes for sale. Rent, as usual, is the deal breaker. Like for many of the low-waged, motel living is her only option. Not your average tourist motel but the motels from the pits of hell. She finds a tiny, noisy, sewerage-ridden motel room that even rats down on their luck would hesitate to infest.
Wal-Mart pay is so pitiful that many of her co-workers do the rounds of the charitable agencies for food and housing subsidies (two-thirds of adults requesting emergency food aid in 2000 in the US had jobs). With her own toes dipping into the chilling charity waters as her money runs out, Ehrenreich calls an end to her odyssey and reflects on the lives of the working poor.
They survive by taking two jobs and working seven days a week, and living in overcrowded accommodation. Even so, their economic survival margin is narrow and unexpected expenses, particularly medical and dental, can topple them over into absolute poverty and the hole-strewn charity safety net. Low wages are not adequately compensated for in America by public health insurance, subsidised child care and housing, or effective public transport. The working poor are left to fend for themselves.
The result is poverty experienced as "acute distress": "the lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to faintness before the end of the shift. The 'home' that is also a car or a van. The illness or injury that must be worked through ... because the loss of one day's pay will mean no groceries for the next."
The working poor are the "untouchables", performing essential and mostly "women's work". They remain invisible to the affluent and they have disappeared from the culture at large — from its sit-coms as much as from its political rhetoric.
Is there any sign of rebellion? Ehrenreich finds very little. Perhaps this is what you get — a servile workforce — when you weed out the rebels through the pre-hiring drug and personality/attitude testing that dominates American employers. Yet, when Ehrenreich's tether is snapped and she launches into one of her "Marxist rants" by suggesting strikes or unionising around pay, rosters, unpaid overtime, health insurance and domineering managers, she generates occasional sparks, enough to suggest some hope.
The costs of agitation are high, however — the peak US trade union body (the AFL-CIO) estimates that 10,000 workers are fired every year for attempting to unionise the unorganised. It is a high risk for the low-paid, balancing on the tightrope of wages stagnating and rents heading north.
The union line starkly separates the low from the better paid workforce, not only in wages and conditions but also in the psychology of the workers. Cowed, resolutely thinking on individual not collective lines, and lacking in self-confidence, Ehrenreich's low-waged might well serve as a moral of "There, but for my union, go I".
Ehrenreich's book is touching, warm-hearted and peppered with the humour that helps her to cope with her new-found lot in life. Highly entertaining yet sadly sobering to read, it is also a recommended medicine for those who prattle about "welfare reform" (from welfare to low wage work is no path out of poverty), who tub-thump about the evils of trade unions and who loftily ignore or viciously exploit the working poor like cattle. When, in Russia in 1917, the waiters went on strike and joined the revolution, then the rich finally realised the game was up. The working poor's time will come again.
From Green Left Weekly, November 20, 2002.
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