Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books, 221 pages, $23
On the copyright page of every book there is a statement of the book’s category or categories. Those categories number in the tens of thousands, as chosen by the Library of Congress. “Nickel and Dimed” falls into three of those subject headings: minimum wage, unskilled labor and poverty. But like most of Barbara Ehrenreich’s previous 11 books, “Nickel and Dimed” is difficult to place in any Library of Congress category.
What is not difficult is to endorse “Nickel and Dimed” as a book that everyone who reads–yes, everyone–ought to read, for enjoyment, for consciousness-raising and as a call to action. Endorsing any book so fervently is dicey, because it can come across as promotional hyperbole. So it is incumbent upon a reviewer to explain the fervor.
Ehrenreich, a magazine writer, essayist and investigative reporter in her 50s, decided to temporarily abandon her comfortable existence in the Florida Keys to explore whether workers can subsist in the low-paying jobs that increasingly dominate local economies.
Like journalists who have gone undercover for more than a century, Ehrenreich understood that she could not replicate reality perfectly. After all, she knew she could return to her comfortable life any day she pleased and so would not suffer the hopelessness of so many low-income workers. She is in good health and pays health-insurance premiums if the time comes when her health deteriorates; many low-income workers must struggle with poor health without medical care. She has an automobile in working order; many low-income workers do not, which limits their job search to a small geographic area.
Wisely, Ehrenreich decided on a modest claim for her project: Could she travel to a new locale, find a job without using any connections, then pay for the bare necessities of life with her hourly wages? She began near her home (which she temporarily abandoned) in Key West, working as a waitress in a restaurant. As with all her later job applications, she provided some truthful information such as name and age:
“I described myself to interviewers as a divorced homemaker reentering the workforce after many years, which is true as far as it goes. . . . Job application forms also want to know about education, and here I figured the Ph.D. [in biology] would be no help at all, might even lead employers to suspect that I was an alcoholic washout or worse. So I confined myself to three years of college, listing my real-life alma mater.”
She never disclosed her writing career or her book project. But potential employers never did a careful background check, never asked probing questions. “When, on one occasion, an exceptionally chatty interviewer asked about hobbies, I said `writing’ and she seemed to find nothing strange about this, although the job she was offering could have been performed perfectly well by an illiterate.” So, the restaurant work began, with Ehrenreich in her new persona. Later, while still conducting research in Key West, Ehrenreich switched restaurants and took a second job as a motel housekeeper. Given that she was trying to match income and expenses, she first lived in a rental cabin about 30 miles from her employment. Later she moved to a trailer park closer in. The difficulty of finding affordable housing is one of the book’s most important themes. Almost nowhere in the U.S. is clean, safe housing affordable for workers in minimum-wage jobs, or even jobs paying several dollars per hour above minimum wage.
Ehrenreich learned that many co-workers lived in their vehicles if they could find somewhere to park that would be undisturbed by police and criminals. Other co-workers shared motel rooms or dormitories with near-strangers. Yet others shared cramped quarters with relatives.
After her Florida experiment, Ehrenreich relocated to Portland, Maine, where she worked for a home-cleaning service on weekdays, in the Alzheimer’s ward of a nursing home on weekends. She concluded her research in Minneapolis, in the women’s-clothing section of a Wal-Mart.
The results of Ehrenreich’s undercover research?
In Key West, she earned $1,039 in one month and spent $517 of that on food (buying minimal provisions at supermarkets or meal deals at quick-serve restaurants). Rent turned out to be the deal breaker. She could not find anything near her jobs for less than $600 a month.
In Maine, Ehrenreich reduced rent to about 40 percent of her $1,200-per-month income, but that was a temporary victory. With tourist season around the corner, her rent would have risen to more than $1,200 a month.
In Minneapolis, Ehrenreich would have had to find lodging for no more than $400 per month to match earnings of $7 per hour at Wal-Mart. She could not even come close to finding lodging at that amount.
Enough of pure economics. What other lessons did Ehrenreich learn–about herself, her co-workers, her employers, about microeconomics and macroeconomics? Here are just a few of them, some expressed in Ehrenreich’s delighful prose (one of her strengths is using grim humor to illustrate a depressing situation, employing language so skillfully as to make the situation seem barely bearable):
– Low-wage workers are not a homogeneous group. Some of Ehrenreich’s friends assumed she would stand out among the less-educated. “I wish I could say that some supervisor or coworker told me even once that I was special in some enviable way–more intelligent, for example, or clearly better educated than most. But this never happened, I suspect because the only thing that really made me `special’ was my inexperience. To state the proposition in reverse, low-wage workers are no more homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less likely to be funny or bright. Anyone in the educated classes who thinks otherwise ought to broaden their circle of friends.”
– Unskilled labor is a misleading concept. “Every one of the . . . jobs I entered into in the course of this project required concentration, and most demanded that I master new terms, new tools, and new skills–from placing orders on restaurant computers to wielding the backpack vacuum cleaner. None of these things came as easily to me as I would have liked; no one ever said, `Wow, you’re fast!’ or `Can you believe she just started?’ Whatever my accomplishments in the rest of my life, in the low-wage work world I was a person of average ability–capable of learning the job and also capable of screwing up.”
– Large portions of the U.S. population will continue to live in desperate straits–with all the implications that has for crime, the health-care system and overall economic prosperity–unless lawmakers and executive branch officials at all levels of government plus private employers start acting realistically. The minimum wage is inadequate. That is not a political statement. That is reality. Ehrenreich’s failure to match expenses with income is sobering. Her reminder to readers is almost gratuitous:
“Just bear in mind, when I stumble, that this is in fact the best-case scenario: a person with every advantage that ethnicity and education, health and motivation can confer attempting, in a time of exuberant prosperity, to survive in the economy’s lower depths.”
