By BILL CHAISSON
Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to reading a book. “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich is one of those books. It got a lot of attention when it was published in 2001, but I only recently bought it used and sat down to read it last week.
Ehrenreich is a well known essayist and journalist whose name appears regularly in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and Time magazine. In 1996 then-editor of Harper’s, Lewis Lapham, convinced her to engage in some participatory journalism. He and Ehrenreich were having lunch in the wake of the “welfare reforms” of the Clinton era, which forced a lot of single parents to combine child care with working full time. Ehren-reich was opining about how impossible it must be to get by on the wages available to the working class, which were $6 to $7 per hour at the time.
Lapham suggested that she go out and try to do just that: get by on the wages paid to people in the service economy. Ehrenreich was then in her late 50s and was initially daunted by the physical challenge, but she did go ahead with the project. Between 1996 and 1999 she lived in Key West, Florida, Portland, Maine, and Minneapolis, Minnesota for several months at a stretch. She admits that some of the conditions were artificial: she arrived with a nest egg to tide her over through a start-up period during which she found a job and a place to live. She was also more physically fit than most of her co-workers, having been well nourished and gotten regular exercise through her adult life. In the end, she decided her higher education level was probably not much help to her at all.
It is now over 20 years since Ehrenreich undertook this experiment, and yet the book is still entirely relevant as a record of working conditions and economics for the bottom 20 percent of American wage earners. While the writer was able to get a job as a waitress in Key West, she could not afford to live there and ended up spending a lot of time and money on gas. In Maine she could only afford to live in a motel. And she could only afford that during the off-season and by working two jobs, doing house cleaning five days a week and working in an assisted living facility on the weekends. In Minneapolis she was never able to find a stable housing situation at all. She spent her entire sojourn there living in a motel room and working in women’s wear at WalMart. In none of these situations was she able to put aside money for a deposit on an apartment. In fact, she was often barely in the black.
Ehrenreich’s father had been a copper miner in Montana, but had worked his way into the middle class. Her husband was a union organizer. She herself had gotten a Ph.D. in biology before turning to a freelance-writing career. She hadn’t worked in the service economy since she was a teenager and experienced some culture shock doing so as a middle-aged adult. She found the management of her workplaces to be oppressive and coercive. She was showered with rhetoric about team work and then encouraged to inform on her fellow employees.
Ehrenreich was touched by her co-workers devotion to their jobs and puzzled by their sometimes perverse loyalty to their supervisors, in spite of the low wages and dictatorial oversight. She found herself falling into their helpless mindset and falling prey to paranoid ideas about her managers’ intentions.
In my 40s I owned a bed and breakfast for eight years, which meant serving guests at table and cleaning their rooms and bathrooms, so I identified with Ehrenreich’s uneasiness of being reduced to servant status. Although Ehrenreich was an employee of a cleaning service and I owned my own business, the amount the condescension directed toward the server had the same sort of unexamined medieval quality.
More recently, I took a part-time job as a pizza delivery driver. I did it in part to emulate Ehrenreich, but also just to supplement my freelance writing income for a while. Having now read her book, I can attest that all of her observations about the erratic temperament of service economy managers and the odd inconsistency of the corporate message: the videos I had to watch did indeed encourage me to rat on my co-workers and strongly implied that it would help me get ahead.
In our region these service economy jobs are going unfilled because we have a labor shortage. Interestingly, we also have the same problem that Ehrenreich encountered in most acutely in Minneapolis: a complete mismatch between the rate of pay and cost of rent. Only people able to live with family or a partner could afford real housing in Minnesota or Maine, while in Key West it was warm enough to live in your car and people did.
Economic theory insists that “economic man” makes rational decisions to decide his course through life. In the late 1990s Ehrenreich noted that her coworkers could not make rational decisions because they didn’t have the necessary information to make them. They put up with shabby treatment in their workplace because if they don’t, they almost immediately become homeless and broke.
In 2001 Ehrenreich eluded to an era right around the corner in which the internet would provide information about wages, benefits, management dysfunction and other workplace details. She was, of course, correct, but my own observations have led me to believe that low-wage workers rarely have regular access to the internet and, if they do get it, don’t know how to use it as an information source, but rather use it for entertainment and shopping.
It isn’t a feel-good read — although Ehrenreich is funny and warm-hearted — but it is worthwhile knowing that not much has changed for low-wage workers in the last 20 years, no matter what happens to the stock market.
Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times and still doesn’t like to clean toilets.
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