Top Quotes: “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America” — Barbara Ehrenreich
Introduction
“Twenty years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich published a book that did not describe the lived realities of working poverty so much as imprint them somewhere deep in your conscience. The daughter of a copper miner turned journalist, Ehrenreich temporarily left her normal, middle-class life to work in the low-wage labor market. The Clinton administration had recently reformed cash welfare, pushing millions of families off public aid and into the workforce. Members of both political parties were preaching work as the solution to poverty. Ehrenreich set out to see if they were right. In his journals, Nietzsche implored us to “experience the great problems with one’s body and one’s soul.” Well, here was a great problem- unacceptable levels of scarcity and hunger in one of the richest democracies in the history of the world — and Ehrenreich tossed herself into it.
She worked as a waitress in Florida ($2.43 an hour plus tips), then as a maid in Maine ($6.65 an hour), and finally as a Wal-Mart retail associate in Minnesota ($7 an hour). One of the first things Ehrenreich realized was that one job wasn’t enough to live on. She had to take on another job in each place just to afford fast food and the small mobile home or dingy motel room she rented. In Florida, she served in two restaurants, on her feet from 8:00 A.M. to 10:00 P.M. In Maine, she clocked in seven days a week, cleaning rich people’s houses on weekdays and serving food to Alzheimer’s patients on weekends. Almost all of Ehrenreich’s waking hours were spent working, but she was never able to pay all her bills, let alone save money or have the time to take night classes at a local community college. By itself, hard work was no ticket out of poverty, just as the unemployment rate by itself was not a reliable signal of how well the economy was working for scores of Americans.”
“Nearly a third of the American workforce — 41.7 million laborers — earn less than $12 an hour, according to a 2016 study.”
“Against the claim, issued from some lofty and remote perch, that in this country anyone can work their way out of poverty if they simply put in enough effort, Ehrenreich offers a clear and convincing rebuke: Try it sometime.”
“The Preamble Center for Public Policy was estimating that the odds against a typical welfare recipient’s landing a job at such a “living wage” were about 97 to 1.”
Florida
“Some restaurants, the Hearthside included, allow servers to “grat” their foreign customers, or add a tip to the bill. Since this amount is added before the customers have a chance to tip or not tip, the practice amounts to an automatic penalty for imperfect English.)”
“You might imagine, from a comfortable distance, that people who live, year in and year out, on $6 to $10 an hour have discovered some survival stratagems unknown to the middle class. But no. It’s not hard to get my coworkers talking about their living situations, because housing, in almost every case, is the principal source of disruption in their lives, the first thing they fill you in on when they arrive for their shifts. After a week, I have compiled the following survey:
Gail is sharing a room in a well-known downtown flophouse for $250 a week. Her roommate, a male friend, has begun hitting on her, driving her nuts, but the rent would be impossible alone.
Claude, the Haitian cook, is desperate to get out of the two-room apartment he shares with his girlfriend and two other, unrelated people. As far as I can determine, the other Haitian men live in similarly crowded situations.”
“There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can’t put up the two months’ rent, you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store. If you have no money for health insurance — and the Hearthside’s niggardly plan kicks in only after three months — you go without routine care or prescription drugs and end up paying the price. Gail, for example, was doing fine, healthwise anyway, until she ran out of money for estrogen pills. She is supposed to be on the company health plan by now, but they claim to have lost her application form and to be beginning the paperwork all over again. So she spends $9 a pop for pills to control the migraines she wouldn’t have, she insists, if her estrogen supplements were covered.”
“Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself. I don’t know why the antismoking crusaders have never grasped the element of defiant self-nurturance that makes the habit so endearing to its victims — as if, in the American workplace, the only thing people have to call their own is the tumors they are nourishing and the spare moments they devote to feeding them.”
“My project is to teach George English. “How are you today, George?” I say at the start of each shift. “I am good, and how are you today, Barbara?” I learn that he is not paid by Jerry’s but by the “agent” who shipped him over — $5 an hour, with the agent getting the dollar or so difference between that and what Jerry’s pays dishwashers. I learn also that he shares an apartment with a crowd of other Czech “dishers,” as he calls them, and that he cannot sleep until one of them goes off for his shift, leaving vacant bed.”
“By reputation, the Overseas park is a nest of crime and crack, and I am hoping at least for some vibrant multicultural street life. But desolation rules night and day, except for a thin stream of pedestrians heading for their jobs at the Sheraton or the 7-Eleven. There are not exactly people here but what amounts to canned labor, being preserved between shifts from the heat.”
“I am enormously relieved when Carlie announces a half-hour meal break, but my appetite fades when I see that the bag of hot dog rolls she has been carrying around on our cart is not trash salvaged from a checkout but what she has brought for her lunch.”
“This is, of course, a considerable step up from the situation described in J. G. Ballard’s harrowing novel Concrete Island, in which the hero crashes onto a median island and finds himself marooned by the traffic, forced to live off the contents of his car and whatever food items he can scrounge from the debris left by motorists.”
Maine
“They can spy on us, for example. When I ask a teammate why the rule against cursing in houses, she says that owners have been known to leave tape recorders going while we work. Video cameras are another part of the lore, positioned near valuables to catch a cleaner in an act of theft. Whether any of this is true or not, Ted encourages us to imagine that we are under surveillance at all times in each house.
Other owners set traps for us. In one house, I am reprimanded by the team leader for failing to vacuum far enough under the Persian rugs scattered around on the hardwood floors, because this owner likes to leave little mounds of dirt there just so she can see if they’re still there when we’re done.”
“Why does anyone put up with this when there are so many other jobs available? In fact, one woman does leave for what she insists is a better job — working the counter at a Dunkin’ Donuts. But there are some practical reasons for sticking with The Maids: changing jobs means a week and possibly more without a paycheck; plus there’s the attraction of the so-called “mothers’ hours, although in practice we often end up working till five. The other, less tangible factor is the lure of Ted’s approval. This, perhaps as much as the money, is what keeps Holly going through nausea and pain, and even some of the livelier, bolder women seem inordinately sensitive to how he’s feeling about them. Getting “reamed out” by Ted can ruin their whole day; a morsel of praise will be savored for weeks. I see the power of his approval most clearly on Pauline’s last day. She is sixty-seven and has been on the job longer than anyone — two years — enough to rate her a mention in the newsletter published by corporate headquarters. Her back has long since given out but she’s leaving now because she’s scheduled for knee surgery in a couple of weeks, the result, she says, of too much floor scrubbing. Still, Ted makes no mention of her departure at the morning meeting of her last day, nor does he thank her privately or wish her well at the end of the day. I know this because I offer her a ride home that day when it appears that her usual one isn’t going to show up. As we drive through the rainy streets of South Portland, she talks about the surgery and the weeks of recovery that will follow it, and then the need to go out and find another job, preferably one that doesn’t involve so much bending and lifting and crouching. But mostly she talks about Ted and her feeling of hurt. “He’s never liked me since I had to stop vacuuming because of my back,” she says. “I’ve asked him why I get paid less than anyone” — anyone at her level of seniority is, I think, what she means — “and he says, “ Well, if you could just vacuum.” There’s no bitterness in her voice, just the mortal sadness of look- ing ahead, toward the end of one’s life, at the gray streets and the rain.
The big question is why Ted’s approval means so much. As far as I can figure, my coworkers’ neediness — because that’s what it is — stems from chronic deprivation. The home owners aren’t going to thank us for a job well done, and God knows, people on the street aren’t going to hail us as heroines of proletarian labor. No one will know that the counter on which he slices the evening’s baguette only recently supported a fainting woman — and decide to reward her with a medal for bravery. No one is going to say, after I vacuum ten rooms and still have time to scrub a kitchen floor, “Goddamn, Barb, you’re good!” Work is supposed to save you from being an “outcast,” as Pete puts it, but what we do is an outcast’s work, invisible and even disgusting. Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditchdiggers, changers of adult diapers — these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society. Hence the undeserved charisma of a man like Ted. He may be greedy and offhandedly cruel, but at The Maids he is the only living representative of that better world where people go to college and wear civilian clothes to work and shop on the weekends for fun. If for some reason there’s a shortage of houses to clean, he’ll keep a team busy by sending them out to clean his own home, which, I am told, is “real nice.””
Minnesota
“Roberta introduces me to “what Wal-Mart is all about.” She personally read Sam Walton’s book (his autobiography, Made in America) before starting to work here and found that the three pillars of Wal-Mart philosophy precisely fit her own, and these are service, excellence (or something like that), and she can’t remember the third. Service, that’s the key, helping people, solving their problems, helping them shop — and how do I feel about that? I testify to a powerful altruism in retail-related matters and even find myself getting a bit misty-eyed over this bond that I share with Roberta. All I have to do now is pass a drug test, which she schedules me to take at the beginning of next week.”
“The guests? These must be the customers, and I’m glad to have learned the term in advance so I won’t wince or gag in front of management.”
“The old guy who is being hired as a people greeter wants to know, “What is time theft?” Answer: Doing anything other than working during company time, anything at all. Theft of our time is not, however, an issue.”
“Tonight I find the new sensation, Survivor, on CBS, where “real people” are struggling to light a fire on their desert island. Who are these nutcases who would volunteer for an artificially daunting situation in order to entertain millions of strangers with their half-assed efforts to survive?
Then I remember where I am and why I am here.”
“When I tell her I’m working at Wal-Mart and what I earn, she suggests I move into a shelter so I can save up enough money for a first month’s rent and deposit, then she sends me to another office where she says I can apply for a housing subsidy and get help finding an apartment. But this other office offers only a photocopied list of affordable apartments, which is updated weekly and is already out of date. Back at the first office, my interviewer asks if I can use some emergency food aid and I explain, once again, that I don’t have a refrigerator. She’ll find something, she says, and comes back with a box containing a bar of soap, a deodorant, and a bunch of fairly useless food items, from my point of view — lots of candy and cookies and a one-pound can of ham, which, without a refrigerator, I would have to eat all in one sitting.” (The next day I take the whole box, untouched, to another agency serving the poor, so I won’t appear ungrateful and the food won’t be wasted.)
Only when I’m driving away with my sugary loot do I realize the importance of what I’ve learned in this encounter. At one point toward the end of the interview, the CAP lady had apologized for forgetting almost everything I said about myself — that I had a car, lived in a motel, etc.”
Conclusion
“Standards are another tricky issue. To be “good to work with” yourself, you need to be fast and thorough, but not so fast and thorough that you end up making things tougher for everyone else. There was seldom any danger of my raising the bar, but at the Hearthside Annette once upbraided me for freshening up the display desserts: “They’ll expect us all to start doing that!” So I desisted, just as I would have slowed down to an arthritic pace in any job, in the event that a manager showed up to do a time-and-motion study. Similarly, at Wal-Mart, a coworker once advised me that, although I had a lot to learn, it was also important not to “know too much,” or at least never to reveal one’s full abilities to management, because “the more they think you can do, the more they’ll use you and abuse you.” My mentors in these matters were not lazy; they just understood that there are few or no rewards for heroic performance. The trick lies in figuring out how to budget your energy so there’ll be some left over for the next day.”
“Expenditures on public housing have fallen since the 1980s, and the expansion of public rental subsidies came to a halt in the mid-1990s. At the same time, housing subsidies for homeowners — who tend to be far more affluent than renters — have remained at their usual munificent levels. It did not escape my attention, as a temporarily low-income person, that the housing subsidy I normally receive in my real life — over $20,000 a year in the form of a mortgage-interest deduction — would have allowed a truly low-income family to live in relative splendor. Had this amount been available to me in monthly installments in Minneapolis, I could have moved into one of those “executive” condos with sauna, health club, and pool.”
“As Louis Uchitelle has reported in the New York Times, many employers will offer almost anything — free meals, subsidized transportation, store discounts — rather than raise wages. The reason for this, in the words of one employer, is that such extras “can be shed more easily” than wage increases when changes in the market seem to make them unnecessary.”
“They urge shoppers to “Compare Our Prices!” but they’re not eager to have workers do the same with wages. I have mentioned the way the hiring process seems designed, in some cases, to prevent any discussion or even disclosure of wages whisking the applicant from interview to orientation before the crass subject of money can be raised. Some employers go further, instead of relying on the informal “money taboo” to keep workers from discussing and comparing wages, they specifically enjoin workers from doing so. The New York Times recently reported on several lawsuits brought by employees who had allegedly been fired for breaking this rule — a woman, for example, who asked for higher pay after learning from her male coworkers that she was being paid considerably less than they were for the very same work. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 makes it illegal to punish people for revealing their wages to one another, but the practice is likely to persist until rooted out by lawsuits, company by company.”
“If low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace — and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well — you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world’s preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.
Any dictatorship takes a psychological toll on its subjects. If you are treated as an untrustworthy person — a potential slacker, drug addict, or thief — you may begin to feel less trustworthy yourself. If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules, you begin to accept that unfortunate status. To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals — rats and monkeys, for example — that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming “depressed” in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains. And — what is especially relevant here — they avoid fighting even in self-defense.
Humans are, of course, vastly more complicated; even in situations of extreme subordination, we can pump up our self-esteem with thoughts of our families, our religion, our hopes for the future. But as much as any other social animal, and more so than many, we depend for our self-image on the humans immediately around us — to the point of altering our perceptions of the world so as to fit in with theirs. My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers — the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being “reamed out” by managers — are part of what keeps wages low. If you’re made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you’re paid is what you are actually worth.
It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism. Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a halt. That is not my impression. While I encountered some cynics and plenty of people who had learned to budget their energy, I never met an actual slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief. On the contrary, I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or in recognition. Often, in fact, these people experienced management as an obstacle to getting the job done as it should be done. Waitresses chafed at managers’ stinginess toward the customers; housecleaners resented the time constraints that sometimes made them cut corners; retail workers wanted the floor to be beautiful, not cluttered with excess stock as management required. Left to themselves, they devised systems of cooperation and work sharing; when there was a crisis, they rose to it. In fact, it was often hard to see what the function of management was, other than to exact obeisance.
There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class — and often racial — prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing. But these things cost money — $20,000 or more a year for a manager, $100 a pop for a drug test, and so on — and the high cost of repression results in ever more pressure to hold wages down. The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the “social wage,’ while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops. And in the larger society, too, the cost of repression becomes another factor weighing against the expansion or restoration of needed services. It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever deeper inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves.”
“For millions of Americans, that $10 or even $8 or $6 hourly wage is all there is.
It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition — austere, perhaps, but they get by somehow, don’t they? They are “always with us.” What is harder for the non-poor to see is poverty 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,” with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick pay or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next. These experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment. They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations. And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans — as a state of emergency.”
“The working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society, 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. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, “you give and you give.
Someday, of course — and I will make no predictions as to exactly when — 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. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better off for it in the end.”
