Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 221 pages, $23.00.
Women's work in America can be an ugly business--hard, repetitive labor,usually for low wages and male bosses. There is the pink-collar ghetto of retailand office jobs, and then there is worse: employment in sweatshops and fast-foodrestaurants and domestic service. For uneducated women, for women withoutchoices who are leaving welfare or leaving home, this is often what work entails.
Recently the "living wage" movement has been addressing the economic issue,pressing successfully for wages of $9 an hour or more in cities such asBaltimore, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. This surge in concern for the workingpoor makes Barbara Ehrenreich's latest book, Nickel and Dimed, particularly salient, even if it is sometimes a bit too much about Ehrenreich herself.
Nickel and Dimed owes its origins to a lunch with Harper's editor Lewis Lapham. Thinking about the prospect of drastic changes in welfare rules, Ehrenreich and Lapham wondered what sort of world women would be entering when kicked off the dole. Jason DeParle has since covered this territory for TheNew York Times, producing finely etched portraits of women in transition from welfare (and addiction and abuse and poverty) to work (and more poverty). Ken Loach's current feature film Bread and Roses offers a fictionalized account of the union struggles of Los Angeles's janitors, many of them immigrant women. In her article for Harper's and the subsequent book, Ehrenreich takes a different tack. Instead of interviewing working women or using them as the starting point for a labor drama, she tries, in effect, to become one of them--even if the transformation can never be more than temporary or incomplete.
As it happens, Ehrenreich is not too far removed from her own blue-collarroots. Her father had been a copper miner, her husband a warehouse worker, andher sister a low-wage employee in a series of dead-end jobs. This makes the wholeenterprise more psychologically risky, even though the author sets reassuringlimits: She will always have a car; she will never go homeless or hungry. Vowingto take the best "unskilled" job and cheapest safe housing she can find,Ehrenreich sets off on a picaresque journey through the world of residentialmotels, budget-hotel restaurants, and rich women's kitchens.
The Ehrenreich model is not quite muckraking or social observation, though itcontains elements of both. Instead, Ehrenreich, trained as a biologist, convincesherself that she will conduct her research "in the spirit of science." Such anundertaking might well seem superfluous. After all, to determine whether marketrents can be paid out of rock-bottom wages hardly requires three months ofbackbreaking labor; it's a mathematical calculation. Ehrenreich admits as much,but says she wonders whether she can find stratagems to make the money stretchfurther. What she uncovers instead is her own indignation on behalf of thisparticular American underclass. "Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditchdiggers,changers of adult diapers--these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-freeand democratic society," she writes.
For her experiment, Ehrenreich selects three locales: Key West, Florida;Portland, Maine; and Minneapolis, Minnesota. She presumably uses her own name(though she changes many others in the book, to protect both the guilty and theinnocent). But she invents a résumé: She becomes a displacedhomemaker with just three years of college. Even at that, she is overqualifiedfor every job she holds, though, interestingly, no one ever tells her so. Infact, when she "comes out" as a writer to selected co-workers before eachleave-taking, no one is particularly shocked or impressed. Her favorite responseis: "Does this mean you're not going to be back on the evening shift next week?"Her conclusion is that her charade has been a success, making her observationsall the more trustworthy. But the obliviousness of her erstwhile colleagues alsosignals their cultural isolation, a noteworthy phenomenon in itself.
Ehrenreich begins in Key West, near her real home. She works as a server,successively, in two different hotel restaurants, making an hourly pittance plustips, and briefly adds on a hotel housekeeping job. Her first rental is a "sweetlittle place" for $500 a month, but it is 30 miles away from town, a killercommute. Eventually, she moves closer in, to a desolate trailer park. Her fellowwaitresses in this tourist mecca also struggle with housing, pairing up withroommates, living in cars, or paying expensive day rates at nearby motels becausethey have neither transportation nor a security deposit. "There are no secreteconomies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of specialcosts," Ehrenreich discovers, from out-of-pocket medical expenses to fast foodfor the kitchenless.
Even as a waitress, Ehrenreich cannot escape Ehrenreich. She finds that it'snot good enough to be minimally competent. Her lifelong habit of perfectionismhaunts her. One night, she awakens prematurely, in a cold sweat, anxious over abungled order. Proud and perhaps conscious of her working-class background, shebridles at every management slight; one of the book's themes is how poorly thepoorly paid are treated by their immediate superiors. She is befriended by awaitress, and befriends a dishwasher in turn. Finally, out of exhaustion anddisgust, she simply walks out, feeling not vindication but failure. The actresshas merged with her role.
Then it's on to Portland, with Ehrenreich toting her indispensable laptopto an apartment motel. "I chose Maine for its whiteness," to ease herinfiltration of the low-wage workforce, she says. There she navigates a barrageof psychological tests, apparently designed to catch potential thieves, and takeson two more jobs: one as a $6.65-an-hour maid for a cleaning service and anotheras a dietary aide in a nursing home. Ehrenreich's stint as a maid elicits some ofher most passionate writing. At one point, she takes offense at a lavish housefilled with "neoconservative encomiums to the status quo" and considers "usinggerm warfare against the owners, the weapons for which are within my apronpockets." When one of her fellow maids falls and hurts herself but refuses to goto a hospital emergency room, Ehrenreich writes: "It's not easy focusing on throwrugs when all I can see is this grass fire raging in the back of my eyes,white-hot and devouring house after house as it burns."
Ehrenreich's weekend job as an aide isn't much better, and theseven-day-a-week regimen is brutal. "If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plusdays a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?"Ehrenreich asks. "I don't know and I don't intend to find out, but I can guessthat one of the symptoms is a bad case of tunnel vision. Work fills thelandscape; coworkers swell to the size of family members or serious foes. Slightsloom large, and a reprimand can reverberate into the night." But can she be sure?Most of the women Ehrenreich meets do have lives outside of work--socialnetworks that provide some nurturing and financial support, as well as childrenwho absorb their energies.
When Ehrenreich flies to Minneapolis, she hopes a tight labor market andreasonable rents will make for a "soft landing." With the help ofover-the-counter detoxifying drugs (she's been indulging in a little pot on theside), she passes a drug test. She also finds a very dirty, scary place to live,a residential motel with "thin little towels, which, even when clean, containembedded hairs and smell like cooking grease." She turns down an 11-hour-a-dayjob at a housewares store that may pay as much as $10 an hour--a bad decision,she later concludes--and winds up as a retail clerk at Wal-Mart, endlesslyredistributing clothes from shoppers' carts. Aghast at the paternalistic regimeand rigid work rules, she fantasizes about organizing a union. Meanwhile, at $7an hour, she can't locate affordable housing and ends up burning through hermoney at a Comfort Inn.
In the end, what has she accomplished? It's no shock that the dollars don'tadd up; that affordable housing is hard, if not impossible, to find; and thattaking a second job is a virtual necessity for many of the working poor.Ehrenreich is too busy scrubbing floors to give us more than a passing glimpse ofthe people in that world. Nor can she really transform herself into just anotherwaitress or maid. She is both a prickly, self-confident woman and the possessorof a righteous, ideologically informed outrage at America's class system that canturn patronizing at times.
Still, Nickel and Dimed is a compelling and timely book whose insights sometimes do transcend the obvious. It's important to know, for instance, that low-wage workers, while often taking pride in their jobs, are routinely subjected to an authoritarian regime that ranges from demeaning drug tests to bans on "gossip" with other employees. The result, Ehrenreich argues, is "not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality." And our most appropriate response, as members of the well-meaning middle-class? Not guilt, she tells us, but shame, for relying on the underpaid labor of others--a habit the living-wage movement is now trying to help us break.