Imagine being sick and not going to see a doctor because you don’t have health insurance. Imagine having your electricity turned off because you can’t pay your bills. Imagine buying an old clunker for $200, then driving it without car insurance.
Forget about a 401K, investment portfolio or pension plan.
Imagine turning to the Salvation Army, or your relatives, for handouts to feed your family. Imagine hanging tinsel from an avocado plant at Christmas because you can’t afford to buy a tree.
That’s what it’s like to live on the minimum wage, as Mary Ann Schaar did for more than 20 years. Although she now earns a higher salary as an Amtrak employee, Schaar, 50, has worked at a long list of low-wage jobs, including convenience store clerk, bartender, Kmart cashier, shipping clerk and waitress. None of those jobs provided benefits.
The struggle facing millions of workers like Schaar, who barely manage to get by on the minimum wage, is the subject of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” (Metropolitan Books, $23), by author, essayist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich.
On a recent visit to Chicago, Ehrenreich explained that the book was born in a setting far from the world of Schaar and her fellow workers. Ehrenreich said that in 1998 she had been dining at an upscale restaurant–enjoying her $30 lunch of salmon and field greens–with an editor from Harper’s magazine. When their talk strayed to the subject of welfare reform and requiring people to find jobs, Ehrenreich asked how anyone could be expected to live on $5 to $7 an hour. (Minimum wage today is $5.15.)
Ehrenreich said she had imagined some young, hungry journalist should wade into the world of low-paid jobs to see how the underclass lives. “Instead, the Harper’s editor suggested I do it myself,” she said.
Going undercover
To write the book, her 12th, Ehrenreich went “undercover.” For three months, she worked at several jobs typically held by women–a waitress, housecleaner, nurse’s aide and Wal-Mart clerk. Her investigation led her out of her comfortable home and into cheap accommodation in Key West, Fla.; Portland, Maine; and Minneapolis.
Presenting herself as “a divorced homemaker re-entering the work force after many years” (a slight spin on the truth, because she is the divorced mother of two grown children), Ehrenreich’s goal in each city was to find the highest-paying service job and the cheapest housing available and see if, in the first month, she could earn enough to pay her second month’s rent.
In every case, the arithmetic didn’t work: Ehrenreich found she couldn’t live on a low-wage job, even when she worked two at a time. Low-income workers are subsidizing higher-wage workers, she concluded.
“When someone works for less pay than she can live on, when for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently, then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life,” she writes. Ehrenreich believes the “working poor” are society’s true philanthropists.
“They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor to everyone else,” she writes.
Some workers, like baby-sitters and nurses’ aides, are doing work that is crucial to American society, yet they are the lowest paid, she said.
Ehrenreich herself is no stranger to hard work. She and her two siblings were raised in Butte, Mont.; her father was a mine worker. “He never thought of others as lazy or undeserving; he was compassionate and he raised us to be,” she said.
Later, she was married for 17 years to a warehouse employee and steelworker. Still, Ehrenreich, who holds a PhD in biology, said she was shocked by many of the difficulties she encountered in the low-wage workplace.
In Key West, where she worked as a waitress, she experienced what she called “the perfect storm” of restaurant work–four tables seated at the same time, all of them demanding extra drinks and extra side orders, hold the gravy, extra cheese, all the while sending back their main courses and bellowing about sticky table tops. In Maine, she found herself on her hands and knees, scrubbing the stone-like kitchen floor, “like some fanatical penitent crawling through the stations of the cross,” toiling under the watchful eye of the mistress of the house.
The jobs were physically exhausting, dangerous to her health (she developed a mysterious rash while cleaning houses in Maine), boring, degrading and stressful.
In her effort to find an affordable place to live, Ehrenreich had to settle for dank motel rooms and, outside of Key West, a one-person trailer in the midst of a thriving crack trade. Each was wildly expensive, especially considering she was paid $5 to $7 an hour.
Housing biggest hurdle
Ehrenreich said it was housing that made her want to quit her grand experiment and return to her comfortable lifestyle where she has lived–about 20 miles north of Key West–since 1994.
“I stayed in a really creepy residential motel–that was the worst. I would turn the lights off when it got dark because there was no shade on the window and I could easily be seen from the outside. For privacy, I had to undress in the dark.”
Housing, as it turned out, proved to be the “deal breaker” in each of her three locations; rent ate up to 50 percent or more of her meager earnings. Many apartment complexes required first and last month’s rent plus a damage deposit–an astronomical sum of, say, $1,200 to $1,500 and well beyond the means of the working poor.
As a result, she observed many low-wage workers paying $60 a day to live in motel rooms.
“People might stay in a motel for a week or so, then have to move on, because they couldn’t afford the steep room rates. Some crowd several people into a motel room, of course, making it more economical.”
Or, they sleep on the couches of relatives or live in their cars or share rooms in flophouses for $250 a month.
Meanwhile, as she points out, the middle and upper classes continue to enjoy their federal housing subsidies; Ehrenreich herself gets $20,000 a year in the form of a mortgage-interest deduction–a sum that could have been used by a poor family to pay for relatively sumptuous surroundings.
And while there is public housing assistance for poor families, social critics say the need far outweighs the demand.
“When the rich and the poor compete for housing on the open market, the poor don’t stand a chance,” she writes. “The rich can always outbid them, buy up their tenements or trailer parks and replace them with condos, McMansions [oversize homes], golf courses, or whatever they like.”
Dictatorial workplaces
What came as the biggest shock to Ehrenreich was the dictatorial atmosphere of most workplaces. Workers can be fired for talking or for taking unauthorized bathroom breaks.
In Maine, where she worked for a housecleaning company, she was prohibited from drinking water or eating anything, even as she sweated for eight hours to clean a 5,000-square-foot home.
As a waitress, she was told her purse could be searched at any time. Job applicants for many low-wage jobs were required to undergo hours of personality tests. For drug testing, potential employees must urinate in the presence of a security guard, to ensure there has been no tampering with the sample.
Ehrenreich writes that low-wage workplaces should post signs: “Check your civil liberties at the door.” “I felt a lot of helpless anger,” she said. “I was cleaning homes that were beyond the McMansion stage–they were like places you’d see only in magazines. Meanwhile, I was working alongside people who were really worried about every quarter, who couldn’t put together 50 cents to pay a toll.”
She watched as women ate lunches of stale hotdog buns or potato chips because that was all they could afford.
Still, with few exceptions, she didn’t hear much resentment from her fellow workers. “One woman who was training me to be a hotel housekeeper told me, `They don’t care about us, they don’t even see us, we’re nothing to them,'”she recounted.
As for solutions to this plight, Ehrenreich said she would have liked to see “more militancy” among her fellow employees. Her talk of forming a union while working in the ladies’ apparel section at Wal-Mart inspired little enthusiasm.
Ehrenreich also calls for a new federal law raising the minimum wage and for more affordable public housing.
Benjamin I. Page, professor of political science at Northwestern University and co-author of “What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality” (University of Chicago Press, 2000), agreed with Ehrenreich’s call for an increase in the minimum wage. “New economic evidence indicates that raising the minimum wage does not have negative effects on employment within a reasonable range,” he said. “Yes, if it were set enormously high, some people would not be hired because they would not be worth that wage. But we are very far from that point.”
Page also sees a need for better and cheaper child care and mass transportation.
Greg Duncan, professor of education and social policy at Northwestern,advocates “modest increases” in the minimum wage, along with expansions of the earned income tax credit for low-income workers. Duncan also calls for an expansion in the housing voucher program, which gives renters a government subsidy toward their rent in privately owned housing.
2 decades of low wages
But the experts’ proposals, and the debate about them, mean little to low-wage workers like Schaar, the Amtrak employee. She said the lack of enthusiasm for forming unions comes from the fact that most low-wage workers are too worn out trying to make ends meet to think of taking on any more struggle.
In 1979, when she was 28, Schaar’s husband left her and their two daughters, ages 5 years and 6 months. She was not granted alimony, but her children received occasional support payments from their father. Unskilled and armed with only a high school diploma, Schaar turned to full-time work outside her home.
Her first job was at Kmart, where she says she earned $3.50 an hour. An elderly neighbor watched her children for free.
Schaar said she turned over her entire paycheck to her landlord, then learned to live on “next to nothing” until she was paid again. She threw away most bills, sending a few dollars “every once in a while” to utility companies to keep the gas and electricity turned on. “When they cut off our electricity, we’d go to friends to have dinner or take a hot shower.”
After the Kmart store where she worked closed, she turned to bartending at a supper club from 4 p.m. to midnight. Her pay: minimum wage plus tips. A girlfriend cared for her children and put them to bed each night while she worked.
“Child care was always a headache,” Schaar said.
When the supper club closed, Schaar got a $6-an-hour job as a shipping-and-receiving clerk at Jewel Foods. “I was tired of working with the public and at that job I only had to deal with vendors, so I liked it,” she said.
When Jewel turned to computerization to do her job, she moved to work in convenience stores in Freeport, 45 miles north of Rockford. Her salary: $5.55 an hour.
She lived in a small house owned by a friend; often, she couldn’t pay the rent and her friend said she could “owe” it to her. “There’s got to be a place in heaven for her,” said Schaar.
When she couldn’t afford to buy propane to heat the house, she wrapped up in blankets with her children to keep warm.
Meanwhile, she ran out of money for food and turned to the Salvation Army.
When she was offered a job managing a convenience store in Orangeville, Ill., Schaar started earning $12 an hour. Still, the job included no health-care insurance, pension or savings plan.
After she was laid off, Schaar decided to move to Chicago to work for Amtrak because it offers a retirement plan. “I was just worried about being able to take care of myself when I get old. I don’t want my kids to have to,” she said.
When she first started training there in March, she was paid $9 an hour; her pay was increased to $13 an hour after three months on the job. She now works in Amtrak’s downtown train yards near Union Station, cleaning cars. The work is exhausting, hot and dirty; Schaar sometimes feels faint in the summer heat. She is on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Because she could not find a cheap apartment, Schaar lives in a YMCA in downtown Chicago. She pays $450 a month for one furnished room and a bath. She eats all her meals in restaurants. “I found a greasy hamburger joint around the corner that gives you a hamburger, fries and a chocolate shake for $5,” she said.
Even though she’s now earning $13 an hour, Schaar said there’s no money for extras. She occasionally walks to Navy Pier for entertainment and has visited only one museum in Chicago. She has no savings.
Schaar occasionally tutors other YMCA residents who are learning to read.
“I don’t do much of anything–it’s not in the budget,” she said. “People tell me I’m a survivor. But who wants to be? Wouldn’t it be better to have just a little extra and not have to worry all the time?”
ONE WOMAN’S REALITY
Dreams take a back seat to making ends meet
Sandra Johnson cleans hotel rooms in order to support herself and her three daughters.
Sandra Johnson singlehandedly cleans up to 17 hotel rooms a day. She changes bedsheets, scrubs toilets, pushes a heavy vacuum cleaner around and picks up trash.
“I’m dead beat at the end of eight hours,” she said. “I sit down and I don’t want to get up.”
Johnson, 38, has worked at a hotel near O’Hare International Airport for nine months. She earns $7.85 an hour. The job is “very hard work for not enough money.”
Her work day depends on the number of guests in the hotel; sometimes she works only 30 hours a week, which makes her pay unpredictable.
But on average, her pay, before taxes are withheld, is about $900 a month.
Johnson’s biggest expenditure is rent: $525 a month for a two-bedroom apartment–more than half her salary. She and her three daughters, ages 6, 8 and 10, recently moved in.
Johnson explained she had to pay the first and last month’s rent as well as a security deposit before signing a lease. She lived with her mother for one year to save that amount.
Heat is included in the rent; a state program covers other utilities.
Even though Johnson is entitled to receive food stamps, she explained she was “cut off” because she couldn’t keep appointments at the federal office building where she was required to complete the necessary paperwork.
“I couldn’t get there because I always had to work,” she said. “I asked for an appointment on Thursdays or Fridays, which are my days off, but they wouldn’t give me an appointment those days.”
Food is the first thing she buys for her family after she gets paid. “I get my paycheck, I go to the grocery store,” she said.
She gets help with child care from family members and from a state program. Her 6-year-old daughter is in day care at a large facility. The costs are mostly paid by the Child Care Initiative, a state program. She drops her youngest child off at the day-care center, then catches a bus to work by 8:30. Johnson spends $80 a month on bus fares.
Her two older daughters attend public school and go to after-school care there. At other times, Johnson’s mother and sister take turns watching the girls.
Her daughters’ father occasionally helps buy items they need and sometimes helps Johnson pay her rent. He makes no child support payments and Johnson hasn’t yet taken him to court.
“I have the papers I need to fill out, but I just haven’t done it yet,” she said. “It’s a lot of trouble.”
She dreams of one day getting a job as a dietitian but would have to go back to school to attend classes at a college on the West Side. Johnson said she would be able to work only part time while going to school, which isn’t a real option, because she needs a full-time salary to support her family.
Johnson has four sisters and five brothers, all living in Chicago. “If I run out of money, I can ask for a loan,” she said. “But I’m out of money right now–good thing I got a $20 tip today.”
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Barbara Ehrenreich will read from her book and answer questions at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 7 at Women & Children First bookstore, 5233 N. Clark St., Chicago. Call 773-769-9299.
