The Pandemic Soul

Not sure where I found this book, but somehow it came into my hands. “Nickel and Dimed,” by Barbara Ehrenreich, is a book about working in blue-collar jobs, and how difficult it can be for the average low-income worker.

From the start I was quite interested in what Barbara had to say. I have worked many a low-paying job over the past ten years, through high school and college. My first job was busing tables at a coffee shop. Then McDonald’s. In college it was a coffee shop. Two stints at Walt Disney World. A year and a half as a bartender at a small, ritzy restaurant. Not to mention my two weeks at a landscaping company in the sweltering heat of an Arkansas summer (my dad forced me to — until I was fired). So, I know what it feels like to be underpaid and underappreciated.

Bottom line: I’d recommend the book to anyone who considers themselves to be middle or upper-class. For anyone who hasn’t worked a low-paying job, this is definitely an eye opener. For those of us who have worked these jobs and found a way out, it’s a reminder of the humiliation, and people, we’ve left behind.

The author’s intent before writing the book was to investigate low paying jobs in a handfull of cities and basically, see if it was really as bad as it was. The research was done over the course of two years, 1999-2000, and then published in 2001.

Ehrenreich starts in Key West, looking for housing and a job. She is, of course, a well-paid writer, but intends to live off only what she can make at the highest paid jobs she can get hired at, giving her background as a divorced empty-nester who does not have a college education. She starts as a waitress in two restaurants and is forced to live in a small mobile home in someone’s back yard, far from where she is working. Repeated stresses at the waitressing jobs forces her to quit.

She then leaves for Portland, Maine, going through much of the same routine but this time working at a “Merry Maids”-type cleaning franchise, as well as a nursing home. While she finds the nursing home position (only on weekends) to be adequate, in that it provides a meal while she’s at work and is not entirely too difficult, it’s not enough to keep her sustained. The maid position, however, is the epitome of degredation and difficulty. Having to mop the floors on her hands and knees, she is told that she cannot drink anything while at a client’s home. The work is exceedingly difficult, especially for a woman in her 50s, and she soon finds that she cannot sustain herself here, either, despite working two jobs.

Finally, in Minneapolis, she is hired at Wal-Mart, where she works in the woman’s department folding clothes. She finds the job to be monotonous, but mostly troublesome for the lack of any real respect she gets from the company itself. Further complicating matters is the fact that Minneapolis is completely devoid of any affordable housing.

In the end, Barbara finds that the wages are simply too low for anyone to realistically sustain themselves, let alone children, with a normal lifestyle. She ruminates in an essay at the end of the book that the “too lazy to work” idea that most have about low-paid workers is simply not true. Indeed, most of the people she worked with tended to work quite a bit harder that her own colleagues at her “regular life.” Faced with termination in a situation where they are “too lazy to work,” most are dedicated and persistant. Similarly, Ehrenreich dismisses the ideal that good, honest, hard-work will eventually deliver anyone to success.

Criticisms of the book are few, but sometimes valid. For example, Ehrenreich could have chosen to live with a roommate to share the costs, but instead lived alone throughout her investigation. She also avoided any religious or private charities.

Despite this, the book is a lesson to all about the sorry state of our economy. Indeed, while the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Just recently I wrote about how much minimum-wage earners would make in a 40 hour week. How anyone could believe that this is a “living wage” is beyond me, and as this book demonstrates, beyond reality.

Perhaps one of the best arguments Ehrenreich makes in the final essay of her book is that which illuminates why the current “free market” is simply not working. In a best-case scenario, wages would rise on their own as workers migrate from job-to-job looking for better pay. But in reality, the cost of leaving is simply too high. For most of the low-wage earners, leaving their job would simply cost too much in time-lost to be worth it. Herein lies the problem with out minimum wage system — if the market will not pay our lowest-paid workers enough to simply live, then we simply cannot expect to see poverty levels go down.

Unfortunately, I don’t sympathize with those who would argue that the cost of raising the minimum wage to a livable standard would drive some companies out of business or force them to lay off workers. The fact of the matter is that most companies are already working at lower than normal workforces as it is. While productivity and efficiency rises, the workforce gets smaller — fewer people are needed to do the jobs that more people used to do at one time. Similarly, the salary and benefits reaped by the highest paid workers at the majority of America’s large companies is many, many millions beyond what the lowest paid workers earn, for work that is both more gruelling and requires longer hours.

I do not object to those with education or influence and connections makeing more money. But I do object to our country failing to see that there is a disparity so large here that it is detrimental to country’s future. Simply put, we can all benefit when everyone makes more money. Both small and large companies must begin to rationally budget for higher wages and more appropriate benefits or we can never expect to make poverty history.