Jandos Rothstein
According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a living wage is one that allows people to meet the minimum standard of living in their region. A living wage should provide enough income to cover all basic expenses including food, child care, health, housing, transportation, taxes, and other necessities. In Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich, the issue of low-wage workers not earning living wages is heavily highlighted. As a low-wage worker, Ehrenreich’s income could not cover all her expenses, so she was often unable to make ends meet.
Ehrenreich was making approximately $7 an hour in all her low-wage jobs. When adjusted for inflation 20 years later, her wage would be around $10, $2 less than the living wage in all the states that she worked in. Because of this deficit, basic needs could not be met. For example, Ehrenreich personally couldn’t afford a $7 shirt to wear at her job. Gail, her co-worker at the Hearthside in Florida, couldn’t afford estrogen pills for her migraines. Holly, Ehrenreich’s co-worker at The Maids in Maine, couldn’t afford to tend to a serious ankle injury because doing so would mean losing out on a day’s pay, and her wage was already too low. A living wage should be able to cover expenses like clothing and medication, yet the wages these workers were earning did not.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich
So how do we address this issue of low-wage workers not making a living wage? One way is to raise their wages. By paying low-wage workers more, their income will rise and be able to cover more basic necessary expenses, becoming a living wage by definition.
Low-wage workers also deserve higher wages. The jobs that Ehrenreich worked required skill and grit, whether it was carrying heavy equipment while working as a maid or going multiple shifts without eating a single meal. She and her co-workers frequently took painkillers such as Advil because of the strenuous nature of their jobs. On one occasion, Ehrenreich had to care for an entire senior living facility by herself. If she had accidentally served someone the wrong meal containing an allergen, a senior citizen’s life could have been lost. The stakes were often high like this. Low-wage workers do difficult tasks and work in jobs that are essential to the running of our economy, all things that warrant a raise.
Raising low-wage workers’ wages could be done in several ways. Increasing the federal minimum wage is one. Even though some states have their own minimum wage, others like New Hampshire still have the federal baseline of $7.25. This is far below the living wage for a single adult in that state, which is around $12. Unions are another effective way of getting low-wage workers paid more. Employees unionizing would give them collective-bargaining power to demand higher wages. Both of these methods would help low-wage workers start to earn a living wage.
That being said, raising the pay for low-wage workers has its challenges. Businesses are unlikely to raise workers’ pay on their own because, according to Ehrenreich, paying low-wage workers a living wage translates to losses in their eyes. Also, only one employee that Ehrenreich talked to while working at Walmart was on board with unionizing. This was because Walmart claims that unions take away the workers’ voice and put their jobs in jeopardy. Labor experts and other employees say these claims are simply untrue, but low-wage workers are still persuaded or scared into not unionizing by these large corporations. Walmart also has a strict policy on time theft, the act of doing anything other than work on company time, which purposely keeps employees busy to stop them from discussing or organizing a union together. Despite these obstacles, getting low-wage workers higher wages is still very much worth pursuing.
Along with raising wages, another way to get low-wage workers a living wage is to reduce their expenses. This way, even a fairly low income will be able to cover all basic necessary expenses. And out of all the costs that make up their expenses, decreasing the largest one will have the biggest impact. In Ehrenreich’s case, the largest cost was housing.
Wherever she went to work, Ehrenreich’s struggles to find a place to live made it clear that affordable housing was hard to come by. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 30 percent of income or less should be spent on housing for it to be considered affordable. However, this was not feasible for Ehrenreich. In Key West, her rent alone, without utilities, ended up being a whopping 60 percent of her income. And in Minnesota, her weekly housing fee at a motel was actually more than 100 percent of her after-tax income. This lack of affordable housing is a common issue, as 12 million Americans still spend more than 50 percent of their pay on housing, far more than the affordable limit of 30 percent.
A solution to this issue is for the government to build affordable-housing centers that are accessible to all low-wage workers. Affordable-housing centers are simply apartments or houses that provide low-cost shelter. In more metropolitan areas such as New York City, these centers may already exist, but they are not established everywhere. For example, Ehrenreich could not find any housing in Minnesota that was affordable to her. By building affordable-housing centers in places where they are also needed but not available, a smaller fraction of low-wage workers’ paychecks can go to housing. This lessens their total expenses and creates room in the budget for other costs, turning even a low-wage income into more of a living one.
To fund the construction and maintenance of these centers, multimillion-dollar corporations and the ultra-wealthy who benefit off the cheap labor of low-wage workers should have to contribute more. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, companies like Amazon, Aramark, and MGM Resorts International, all of which employ low-wage workers, had negative effective tax rates in 2018. Instead of giving these corporations tax breaks, they should pay more taxes to help fund affordable housing. After all, large corporations with more than 100 employees employ the majority of low-wage workers in America, and higher taxes would help compensate in a way for the workers’ underpaid hours.
Throughout Nickel and Dimed, there is a recurring notion: The poor are often forgotten. Ehrenreich’s co-workers say that they are nothing to the wealthy, and she acknowledges this as well. The rich are lionized, but the poor are disregarded. Many people don’t know that low-wage workers’ incomes cannot cover even basic necessary expenses because their wages are too low and their costs too high. That is why this book received reviews with words like “illuminating.” Change and support must come for the betterment of low-wage workers’ lives, whether it be through raises, affordable housing, or anything else. But first, we as a society must realize that low-wage workers are human too, and they deserve to make a living wage.
