Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA (25 page)

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 nonpoor 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.

In the summer of 2000 I returned—permanently, I have every reason to hope—to my customary place in the socioeconomic spectrum. I go to restaurants, often far finer ones than the places where I worked, and sit down at a table. I sleep in hotel rooms that someone else has cleaned and shop in stores that others will tidy when I leave. To go from the bottom 20 percent to the top 20 percent is to enter a magical world where needs are met, problems are solved, almost without any intermediate effort. If you want to get somewhere fast, you hail a cab. If your aged parents have grown tiresome or incontinent, you put them away where others will deal with their dirty diapers and dementia. If you are part of the upper-middle-class majority that employs a maid or maid service, you return from work to find the house miraculously restored to order—the toilet bowls shit-free and gleaming, the socks that you left on the floor levitated back to their normal dwelling place. Here, sweat is a metaphor for hard work, but seldom its consequence. Hundreds of little things get done, reliably and routinely every day, without anyone's seeming to do them.

The top 20 percent routinely exercises other, far more consequential forms
of power in the world. This stratum, which contains what I have termed in an
earlier book the “professional-managerial class,” is the home of our decision
makers, opinion shapers, culture creators—our professors, lawyers, executives,
entertainers, politicians, judges, writers, producers, and editors.
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When they speak, they are listened to. When they complain, someone usually scurries
to correct the problem and apologize for it. If they complain often enough,
someone far below them in wealth and influence may be chastised or even fired.
Political power, too, is concentrated within the top 20 percent, since its members
are far more likely than the poor—or even the middle class—to discern the
all-too-tiny distinctions between candidates that can make it seem worthwhile
to contribute, participate, and vote. In all these ways, the affluent exert
inordinate power over the lives of the less affluent, and especially over the
lives of the poor, determining what public services will be available, if any,
what minimum wage, what laws governing the treatment of labor.

So it is alarming, upon returning to the upper middle class from a sojourn, however artificial and temporary, among the poor, to find the rabbit hole close so suddenly and completely behind me. You were where, doing what? Some odd optical property of our highly polarized and unequal society makes the poor almost invisible to their economic superiors. The poor can see the affluent easily enough—on television, for example, or on the covers of magazines. But the affluent rarely see the poor or, if they do catch sight of them in some public space, rarely know what they're seeing, since—thanks to consignment stores and, yes, Wal-Mart—the poor are usually able to disguise themselves as members of the more comfortable classes. Forty years ago the hot journalistic topic was the “discovery of the poor” in their inner-city and Appalachian “pockets of poverty.” Today you are more likely to find commentary on their “disappearance,” either as a supposed demographic reality or as a shortcoming of the middle-class imagination.

In a 2000 article on the “disappearing poor,” journalist James Fallows reports
that, from the vantage point of the Internet's nouveaux riches, it is “hard
to understand people for whom a million dollars would be a fortune. . . not to
mention those for whom $246 is a full week's earnings.”
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Among the reasons he and others have cited for the blindness of the affluent
is the fact that they are less and less likely to share spaces and services
with the poor. As public schools and other public services deteriorate, those
who can afford to do so send their children to private schools and spend their
off-hours in private spaces—health clubs, for example, instead of the local
park. They don't ride on public buses and subways. They withdraw from mixed
neighborhoods into distant suburbs, gated communities, or guarded apartment
towers; they shop in stores that, in line with the prevailing “market segmentation,”
are designed to appeal to the affluent alone. Even the affluent young are increasingly
unlikely to spend their summers learning how the “other half” lives, as lifeguards,
waitresses, or housekeepers at resort hotels. The New York Times reports that
they now prefer career-relevant activities like summer school or interning in
an appropriate professional setting to the “sweaty, low-paid and mind-numbing
slots that have long been their lot.”
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Then, too, the particular political moment favors what almost looks like a
“conspiracy of silence” on the subject of poverty and the poor. The Democrats
are not eager to find flaws in the period of “unprecedented prosperity” they
take credit for; the Republicans have lost interest in the poor now that “welfare-as-we-know-it”
has ended. Welfare reform itself is a factor weighing against any close investigation
of the conditions of the poor. Both parties heartily endorsed it, and to acknowledge
that low-wage work doesn't lift people out of poverty would be to admit that
it may have been, in human terms, a catastrophic mistake. In fact, very little
is known about the fate of former welfare recipients because the 1996 welfare
reform legislation blithely failed to include any provision for monitoring their
postwelfare economic condition. Media accounts persistently bright-side the
situation, highlighting the occasional success stories and downplaying the acknowledged
increase in hunger.
[50]
And sometimes
there seems to be almost deliberate deception. In June 2000, the press rushed
to hail a study supposedly showing that Minnesota's welfare-to-work program
had sharply reduced poverty and was, as Time magazine put it, a “winner.”
[51]
Overlooked in these reports was the fact that the program in question was a
pilot project that offered far more generous child care and other subsidies
than Minnesota's actual welfare reform program. Perhaps the error can be forgiven—the
pilot project, which ended in 1997, had the same name, Minnesota Family Investment
Program, as Minnesota's much larger, ongoing welfare reform program.
[52]

You would have to read a great many newspapers very carefully, cover to cover,
to see the signs of distress. You would find, for example, that in 1999 Massachusetts
food pantries reported a 72 percent increase in the demand for their services
over the previous year, that Texas food banks were “scrounging” for food, despite
donations at or above 1998 levels, as were those in Atlanta.
[53]
You might learn that in San Diego the Catholic Church could no longer, as of
January 2000, accept homeless families at its shelter, which happens to be the
city's largest, because it was already operating at twice its normal capacity.
[54]
You would come across news of a study showing that the percentage of Wisconsin
food-stamp families in “extreme poverty”—defined as less than 50 percent of
the federal poverty line—has tripled in the last decade to more than 30 percent.
[55]
You might discover that, nationwide, America's food banks are experiencing “a
torrent of need which [they] cannot meet” and that, according to a survey conducted
by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 67 percent of the adults requesting emergency
food aid are people with jobs.
[56]

One reason nobody bothers to pull all these stories together and announce a
widespread state of emergency may be that Americans of the newspaper-reading
professional middle class are used to thinking of poverty as a consequence of
unemployment. During the heyday of downsizing in the Reagan years, it very often
was, and it still is for many inner-city residents who have no way of getting
to the proliferating entry-level jobs on urban peripheries. When unemployment
causes poverty, we know how to state the problem—typically, “the economy isn't
growing fast enough”—and we know what the traditional liberal solution is—“full
employment.” But when we have full or nearly full employment, when jobs are
available to any job seeker who can get to them, then the problem goes deeper
and begins to cut into that web of expectations that make up the “social contract.”
According to a recent poll conducted by jobs for the Future, a Boston-based
employment research firm, 94 percent of Americans agree that “people who work
fulltime should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.”
[57]
I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that “hard work” was
the secret of success: “Work hard and you'll get ahead” or “It's hard work that
got us where we are.” No one ever said that you could work hard—harder even
than you ever thought possible—and still find yourself sinking ever deeper
into poverty and debt.

When poor single mothers had the option of remaining out of the labor force on welfare, the middle and upper middle class tended to view them with a certain impatience, if not disgust. The welfare poor were excoriated for their laziness, their persistence in reproducing in unfavorable circumstances, their presumed addictions, and above all for their “dependency.” Here they were, content to live off “government handouts” instead of seeking “self-sufficiency,” like everyone else, through a job. They needed to get their act together, learn how to wind an alarm clock, get out there and get to work. But now that government has largely withdrawn its “handouts,” now that the overwhelming majority of the poor are out there toiling in Wal-Mart or Wendy's—well, what are we to think of them? Disapproval and condescension no longer apply, so what outlook makes sense?

Guilt, you may be thinking warily. Isn't that what we're supposed to feel? But guilt doesn't go anywhere near far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame—shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. 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. 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.

With thanks for all kinds of help to Michael Berman, Sara Bershtel, Chauna Brocht, Kristine Dahl, Frank Herd and Sarah Bourassa, Kristine Jacobs, Clara Jeffery, Tom Engelhardt, Deb Konechne, Marc Linder, John Newton, Frances Fox Piven, Peter Rachleff, Bill Sokal, David Wagner, Jennifer Wheeler, and Patti.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of Blood Rites; The Worst Years of Our Lives (a New York Times bestseller); Fear of Falling, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and eight other books. A frequent contributor to Time, Harper's, The New Republic, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine, she lives near Key West, Florida.

No matter which tax bracket you're in, you have a stake in the issues raised by Barbara Ehrenreich. A book that has changed assumptions about American prosperity and hardship, Nickel and Dimed makes an especially compelling selection for reading groups. The questions that follow are designed to enhance your personal understanding or group discussion of this provocative, heartfelt—and funny—account of life in the low-wage trenches.

1. In the wake of recent welfare reform measures, millions of women entering the workforce can expect to face struggles like the ones Ehrenreich confronted in Nickel and Dimed. Have you ever been homeless, unemployed, without health insurance, or held down two jobs? What is the lowest-paying job you ever held and what kind of help—if any—did you need to improve your situation?

2. Were your perceptions of blue-collar Americans transformed or reinforced by Nickel and Dimed? Have your notions of poverty and prosperity changed since reading the book? What about your own treatment of waiters, maids, and salespeople?

3. How do booming national and international chains—restaurants, hotels, retail outlets, cleaning services, and elder-care facilities—affect the treatment and aspirations of low-wage workers? Consider how market competition and the push for profits drive the nickel-and-diming of America's lowest-paid.

4. Housing costs pose the greatest obstacle for low-wage workers. Why does our society seem to resist rectifying this situation? Do you believe that there are realistic solutions to the lack of affordable housing?