|
Scraping
By
Barbara
Ehrenreich slips into the dark and murky world of minimum wage.
By
Tamara Straus
Why should Americans care about the poor? This is a question that
was asked rarely during the boom '90s, presumably because low unemployment and the
rising stock market had lifted most boats. Also common is the belief -- exemplified
by the 1996 welfare reform -- that if you can't make it in these flush times, you
don't really deserve to make it at all.
But statistical research tells another story. The Preamble Center
for Public Policy, for example, estimated at the height of the boom the odds against
a typical welfare recipient landing a job that would provide decent housing and a
"living wage" were 97 to 1. The same year, 1998, the Washington-based Economic
Policy Institute reported that 30 percent of the workforce toiled for under $8 an
hour; in other words, at a wage that would barely guarantee subsistence.
 |
|
Barbara Ehrenreich.
. |
|
So why does the rosy picture of mass economic prosperity persist?
One place to look for an answer is Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Nickel and Dimed:
On (Not) Getting By in Boom-time America. It makes real what the above statistics
do not, for Ehrenreich spent two years and six jobs investigating how close of an
equation could be made between a minimum-wage job and a life of poverty.
At the urging of her editor at Harper's magazine, Ehrenreich
went "undercover" in 1998 to figure out "How does anyone," as
she put it, "live on the wages available to the unskilled? And how, in particular,
were the 12 million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform
going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?"
Her plan was simple. She presented herself as "divorced homemaker
re-entering the workforce after many years" and quickly landed jobs as a waitress
in Key West, a housecleaner in Portland, Maine, a Wal-Mart "associate"
in Minneapolis. But she found that, thanks largely to the lack of affordable housing,
she could barely get by.
Ehrenreich's book of investigative essays, and particularly her
concluding "Evaluation," should be required reading for anyone who abides
by the all-boats-rise theory of economic prosperity. Her co-workers lack health insurance;
they have no savings; they certainly do not own their homes, yet they seem to be
working all the time.
And when trouble strikes -- in the form of a sick relative, a pregnancy
or a work injury -- there is often nowhere to turn. Social service agencies provide
inadequate resources. Food kitchens are in crisis. Employers do not come to the rescue,
nor does the government in the form of extended sick pay, affordable childcare or
adequate low-income housing. One of her co-workers lived in her car; another was
pregnant but withering away from lack of food. Many held two jobs.
Dictatorial Bosses
Just as disturbing for those foreign to low-income work
are the labor conditions Ehrenreich describes. And the words she uses are not subtle:
they are "authoritarian," "dictatorial" and other adjectives
usually associated with life under communism. Ehrenreich is shocked to find that
her employers freely search her belongings, chastise her for "gossiping,"
submit her to personality tests, do not allow bathroom breaks and generally treat
her as if she were in high school. She reports that Wal-Mart, the nation's largest
private employer, frustrates attempts at unionizing or job negotiating, advocating
instead a philosophy to "respect the individual, exceed customers' expectations
and strive for excellence."
"You have relative freedom when you're not at work,"
Ehrenreich said in a telephone interview. "When you're not at work you are a
citizen of a democracy and a bill of rights applies to you. But when you enter the
workplace, especially in low-wage jobs, you check your civil rights at the door."
This may seem ludicrous to those with job benefits and negotiating
power, but Ehrenreich argues that work conditions for low-wage laborers often violate
the First and Third Amendments of freedom of speech and right to privacy. "You
can be fired at the whim of employers," said Ehrenreich, "because there's
no protection [from constitutional infringements] unless you have a union contract."
New Economy Blinders
Why this story has gone under-reported is no mystery to
Ehrenreich. She chalks up the absence of poverty coverage to a series of New Economy
blinders. Blinder number one might be called The State of the Media. "So many
media outlets are pitched to affluent consumers," Ehrenreich said. "They
really do not want low-income viewers and readers because it harms their demographics.
Rather, they want to tell advertisers how wealthy their audience is." One editor
of a national news magazine gave her the green light to write a piece on women and
poverty only if she "made it upscale."
Blinder number two, according to Ehrenreich, stems from class bias
and ignorance. "Editors and media decision makers," she said, "are
often from a fairly insular world. I remember pitching a story to an editor -- actually
at a quite liberal magazine -- about how the so-called man shortage could be solved
if women dated blue-collar men, and her response was, 'But can they talk?'"
Redefining Poverty
Nickel and Dimed offers no economic proscriptions, no blueprint
for a fairer labor market. Yet embedded in the descriptions of low-wage life is a
call for the reevalution of the government's definition of poverty, which since 1960
has been based largely on food costs.
A family of four with an income above the current poverty line,
$17,229, is still very poor, according to Ehrenreich's assessment. "Today's
definition of poverty doesn't take into account rent inflation and things like health
care," she said. The other major problem in assessing poverty, argued Ehenreich,
is the long-held idea that full employment is the chief solution to poverty. It is
an idea she calls a "liberal myth."
Ehrenreich ends her book on an upbeat note, predicting that low-wage
workers "are bound to tire of getting so little in return, and demand to be
paid what they're worth." But during the interview, she admitted, "I'm
not sitting around feeling smug and happy about the prospect [of significant change]
until it happens. The guys in Washington are very scary and I'm waiting for resistance
on all fronts."
Whether that resistance will come from the working poor or the
outraged elite is far from clear. Ehrenreich said she takes heart in the demonstrations
against corporate influence in politics that have taken place in Los Angeles and,
more recently, Quebec City, even though it seems the bulk of the participants are
college students. In the end, she is not surprised that so many low-income workers
-- and those more economically fortunate -- have tuned out: "Politics seems
very remote when you don't see a candidate working for you."
A Personal Book
With Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich has written 11
books in between reams of op-eds and investigative articles for magazines ranging
from The Progressive to Time magazine. Her book-length subjects have
explored the sexual politics of sickness, the inner life of the middle class, the
origins of war and the flight from commitment by American men. And she even has written
a novel, Kipper's Game, based loosely on her early years as a scientist (Ehrenreich
earned a Ph.D. in biology before becoming a journalist).
But Nickel and Dimed is her most personal book. Throughout
it, she connects to her low-wage co-earners by summoning her late father, who worked
himself out of the copper mines of the Union Pacific into a middle-class life. "In
my own family," writes Ehrenreich, "the low-wage way of life had never
been many degrees of separation away -- So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not
only a privilege, but a duty: Something I owe to all those people in my life, living
and dead, who've had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear."
Ignoring Inequality
This sense of responsibility and good fortune has led Ehrenreich
to what she calls "a question-driven life driven in part by a commitment to
social justice." It also has led her to a sustained outrage against the suffering
that comes from inequality. Asked to describe the most striking experience during
her low-wage investigation, she responded:
"What sticks out the most was how much pain we choose not
to see everyday, we who are middle- and upper-middle-class people; how much discomfort,
actual suffering there is behind what we take for granted."
Ehrenreich said this was made very vivid during the time she worked
for The Maids cleaning franchise in Maine. "I was working next to sick women
polishing up some McMansion," she said. "And the people who would return
would have no idea that during the day there were tears shed while their butcher-block
counters were being cleaned."
But would those people, even if they were to read Ehrenreich's
book, care? Is poverty -- always with us, constantly avoided out of guilt and pain
-- just part of human experience? To that question, Ehrenreich responded that living
in a sharply divided world hurts well-off people just as much as the poor. It frightens
us all.
But then she took a deep breath, as if confronted by her own demons.
"Well, I guess I would drag out the Bible," she said. "Though I'm
not a religious person, the Bible makes it pretty clear that you turn away from the
poor at your own moral danger. I didn't say that. They did."
Tamara Straus is senior writer for AlterNet in San Francisco.
Table of Contents
| News | Views | Arts & Entertainment
Classifieds | Personals
| EW
Archive
|