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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books
221 pp $23

When a colleague of mine found out what Nickel and Dimed is about -- author Barbara Ehrenreich's experiment at surviving on the salary of a minimum-wage worker -- she wondered why anyone would bother. Isn't it obvious, she said, that someone flipping burgers can't possibly support herself -- let alone her children? Of course it is. But to truly understand what workers at the bottom rungs are going through, you have to be paying attention. Unfortunately, many of us are not.

It's true that Ehrenreich's basic premise can be deciphered with a pocket calculator. But it's her undercover reporting -- and unsuccessful attempt at living as an unskilled worker, with all of its exhausting obstacles -- that brings to life what many an arm-chair liberal already knows: The legions of women booted off welfare in the late 1990s aren't getting by at all.

Most of us wouldn't rate it a success to be working as a restaurant hostess but living in your car. Or doing the hard manual labor of cleaning houses five days a week but being able to afford no more than a bag of chips for lunch. As hard as she tried, in five different jobs, usually working seven days a week and drawing on every survival skill she could muster, Ehrenreich couldn't stay afloat for the long term. In Minneapolis, where she worked her final job, as a Wal-Mart sales "associate," she was forced by ridiculously high rents to abandon her sociological petri dish and go back to her comfortable middle-class life in Key West, Florida.

But, as she points out, workers who aren't going incognito as sales clerks for the cause of journalism don't have that option.

"It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition -- austere, perhaps, but they get by somehow, don't they?" she writes. "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... 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 assignment came to Ehrenreich when she mentioned to Harper's magazine editor Lewis Lapham -- over a lovely lunch of salmon and field greens -- that some journalist ought to try living as a low-wage worker. Not her, of course, someone younger and hungrier for the juicy story.

Lapham was convinced that Ehrenreich, in her 50s, was the woman for the job. To her credit, it was an assignment many reporters would have refused. For some of us it's easier imagining being dispatched to war-torn Afghanistan than it is to contemplate leaving your home, your friends and family, your professional connections, ATM card, and health insurance and moving clear across the country with nothing but a 30-year-old waitressing credential.

In each of three cities, Ehrenreich posed for a month as an unskilled worker reentering the workforce after raising a family. She tried to take whatever job paid the most and always sought the cheapest housing she could find, short of being in imminent danger.

In Key West, where Ehrenreich actually lives, she held down two jobs as a waitress at the same time living in a $500-a-month ramshackle cabin. In Portland, Maine, she worked seven days a week, also at two jobs -- housecleaner and dietary aide in a nursing home. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, she kept the women's clothing organized at Wal-Mart and never found the elusive second job that would conform to her schedule and make it possible to make ends meet.

For her first job, Ehrenreich was hoping to avoid waitressing, because even at age 18 it left her "bone tired," and, she writes, "I'm decades of varicosities and back pain beyond that now." She'd much rather be a hotel housekeeper. But despite 20 applications, waitressing is the job she gets, and she immediately finds that what she misses most from her old life is competence.

In the years since she was 18 she's forgotten many of the survival skills needed for the job. Her customers seem like bees swarming around her, but for the most part she wants to make them happy. To this end, she distributes forbidden extra rolls and croutons. Much to her surprise, she finds she cares deeply about doing a good job. She realizes she's not portraying a waitress. For this moment in time, she is a waitress, all the while making sociological notations in her head. At once, she is both the experiment and the scientist.

Much of her experience is downright bleak, such as the time she ends up in a dubious motel with curtains so sheer she must undress in the dark. Or when she breaks out in an unbearable and inexplicable rash, either from her living conditions or from chemicals used in her work as a housecleaner. Or when she's so broke she has to track down free food from a social service agency. "If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?" she wonders.

Yet the book is never maudlin, and the reader is always carried along by Ehrenreich's clear eye and dark humor. Ehrenreich, a lecturer and author or coauthor of 11 other books, is often grimly funny as she describes her struggles with such indignities as urine tests -- a requirement for most low-level jobs -- and video instructions on the proper way to vacuum. As a housecleaner, she describes at some length the different forms of excrement -- not her word -- found in the average rich person's toilet bowl.

Borrowing from Jesus and Buddha, she constructs a philosophy of "glorious nonattachment" to carry her through the taxing hours of housecleaning. As she scrubs on her knees as ordered, she is buoyed by the memory of a monastery in northern California where middle-class people go to purify themselves by cleaning up other people's messes. "Now the image of dot-com moguls scrubbing for the good of their souls presents itself as a psychic flotation device," she writes. "I am not working for a maid service; rather I have joined a mystic order dedicated to performing the most despised of tasks, cheerfully and virtually for free..."

In the midst of all the difficulties involved in stretching her funds to eat and pay the rent, she found that she cared about her coworkers and about doing a good job. She was considered a good worker, too, and as the daughter of a copper miner, she's genuinely proud of that. Had she been able to keep from organizing a union and getting fired, she speculates she might have eventually made it up to $7.50 an hour at Wal-Mart.

But it wouldn't have been enough. In Minneapolis, she brought home $1,120 a month from Wal-Mart before taxes. At those wages, she figured she needed an apartment for $400 a month or less. Instead, she ended up using every dime she had for fleabag motel rooms while she waited for a cheap rental to become available. She met plenty of others in the same boat, who burned through all of their meager income at seedy but high-priced motels because they could never put together first and last month's rent. With no kitchens, these folks, like Ehrenreich, subsisted on fast food. Despite many desperate attempts, the apartment she needed never materialized.

She notes that something is "very wrong" when a single person in good health with a working car can "barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don't need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents are too high."

So as not to be accused of being a dilettante (in response to her efforts, one writer wondered where were the books written by real waitresses) she's careful to make the book as little about her as possible. She tries instead to cast herself as a sort of low-wage American everywoman and report only what's relevant to that. But as a writer and reporter imagining myself in her place, I often wished she'd written more about her feelings -- whether she felt lonely or angry (especially at Lapham for getting her into this mess). Only occasionally as her alter ego "Barb," the reentry homemaker, does she allow herself some public outrage.

Ehrenreich started the project with a long history of advocacy for blue-collar and low-wage workers, and her grand social experiment has succeeded in raising our national consciousness. Whether that translates into conscience is up to all of us.

-- Elaine Herscher, a former reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, is a senior editor at Consumer Health Interactive.

Last updated March 30, 2009
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive

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