Books I Should Have Already Read, Volume 5
Nickle and Dimed
By Barbara Ehrenreich
This is one of those "Ithaca" books that felt like everyone back there had read and discussed. Other examples of such books included Fast Food Nation; Eat, Pray, and Love; State of Denial; A People's History of the United States, and anything by Michael Pollan. What I am trying to say is that I heard a lot about this book and already understood the basic gist of it.
And the subject is one hell of a pitch. Barbara Ehrenreich decided (at the suggestion of her editor) to try and make it as a member of the working poor. She would leave her persona and profession behind to find housing and sustenance on $7 to $8 dollars an hour. She worked as a waitress in Key West, FL; a home cleaner in Maine; and a Wal-Mart store associate in Minneapolis, MN. There are other odd jobs in between (hotel maid, food service worker, etc.) and failed attempts for some others.
Ehrenreich's writing is strong and the narrative is compelling. She distills the ins and outs of job applications to their mind boggling details. As someone who has taken a slew of those Unicru Assessment Tests, (I can tell you that I "Strongly agree" that "It is infuriating when the court lets guilty criminals go free" and "Most people can be trusted.") it was wonderful to read how those tests are just filler. Instead of assessing your personality, the tests are meant to squeeze out your loyalty. And you are not even working for them yet! Would you get any job at all if you put anything but a big fat zero in the "How many dollars of company materials have you stolen in the past year?"
The book's central challenge isn't to any one employer, but the idea of the American Dream. The idea that if you work very hard you can have a piece of the pie and rise up from the bottom rung. This idea is core to our Master Narrative and Ehrenreich's questioning of it makes for a prickly book. Understandably, the book sends the Right into a fit. Ehrenreich does herself no favors when she plays right into the "liberal academic snob" that pundits love to hate. She is able to deduce that a household with books by John Grisham and Rush Limbaugh (Literature she describes as on the "low-end" of the literary spectrum) isn't filled with the brightest bulbs. She attends a church revival in Maine, in hopes of finding some entertainment in a small town, and finds it all quite silly. On the revival, "But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpses; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christinaity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth."
Yeeesh. Did I just stumble into Christopher Hitchen's God is Not Great? Cause that is one is still on my "to be read" pile. I am no fan of Limbaugh and an atheist, but did she really need to say those things? I understand that in a book about the poor, it might be wise to mention Jesus since he was all about helping the poor. He was poor himself. But, this is the only mention of him in the whole book! I would have prefered something like, "Hey, it would be great if Rick Warren and Pat Roberston really stumped for the poor and calm down a bit about this whole gay marriage bit."
People were having fun at that revival. It would not be my kind of fun, but they can go nuts. I find writing for free on a blog nobody reads plenty of fun! I am sure those folks would not. Did she met the people in that house and actually have a conversation with them? When I used to live in Ithaca, fellow progressive/left-leaning/hippie/whatever folks, would often judge me by the media I view. "My God, Garik! You watch prime time television!?"
People were having fun at that revival. It would not be my kind of fun, but they can go nuts. I find writing for free on a blog nobody reads plenty of fun! I am sure those folks would not. Did she met the people in that house and actually have a conversation with them? When I used to live in Ithaca, fellow progressive/left-leaning/hippie/whatever folks, would often judge me by the media I view. "My God, Garik! You watch prime time television!?"
"Hell, yeah! The Office is on and then we can watch Lost!"
Such arguments do the movement no favor. I have ranted about this before, so feel free to browse the archives. Please, browse the archives! PLEASE!!!
Ehrenreich makes some sharper observations when she turns the lens to the working poor's situation. If we expect the "lower class" to cook our fast food meals and stock our Big Box shelves then they need to drive out to the suburbs. Or they find housing in the suburbs. And once the wealthier class gets nervous about having those folks in their neighborhoods, they move further out and continue the cycle. I am new to my little Cleveland inner-ring suburb (Lakewood*), but I often hear how Section 8 housing has ruined it. Lakewood is a nice place to live if you end up cleaning houses in Bay Village or selling Halloween costumes in Rocky River. It is close enough to the outer suburbs and relatively cheap enough to live in.
She challenges assumptions that her jobs were "dumb" jobs filled by "dumb" people. She frames this in light of her academic experience and PhD. It was still hard to learn how to master the backpack vacuum cleaner and register! I understand her viewpoint, but nothing except experience on the actual machine itself will prepare you to handle it. I think what Ehrenreich was trying to do was portray herself as someone considered "smart" by society in "dumb" jobs. An honest analogy, but an awkward presentation that can come off as snobby.
Regardless, these are not dumb jobs. Every job and workplace has policies, politics, and a culture that you need to adjust to. When I am faced with a new register at a new job, I don't think back to my degree. I do that for my writing gigs. In this gig, I am begging the senior staff to walk me through the process.
She budgets down her earnings to demonstrate how difficult it is to get by on $7 an hour.This provides the greatest challenge to the American Dream of working hard and getting that house in the suburbs However, the book is filled with people that bust their ass everyday doing the repetitive work and still can not rise up. If something was supposed to happen, if something was supposed to "trickle-down," then why hasn't it yet?
All these discussions reveal a inherent conundrum in the book. Most of the debates around poverty, welfare, and the working poor are based on anecdotal evidence. Ehrenreich's book is a great read, but it only represent relatively isolated cases. Her writing is great and you feel for these people,but for every (insert name) she met, someone probably has the opposite example. My parents grew up damn poor and worked hard so that they could prepare me for all this blogging. Oh, and life too. Thanks to the efficiency of Puerto Rican social services, my grandmother (who was in her late sixties when she recently passed) collected WIC and the PR equivalent of food vouchers. I remember her once telling me to run down to the store and use the EBT card to buy groceries. In a moment that would make Ronald Regan** proud, I refused to use the card and instead paid for the groceries (I think it was some rice and Vienna sausages) with a twenty dollars I have saved up from my lunch money. It felt wrong to use that money when I knew we were not lacking. Of course, I also deduced that the cashier would wonder why a fifteen year old was whipping out a welfare EBT card. I got this one, granny. No jail time for me***.
So there are people that abuse the system. Go on the Cleveland.com message board to find supposed proof of these moochers. The rants you read up there are part of that anecdotal evidence. Personal responsibility is a big part of the equation. If you cannot afford something then it is simple economics that you should not buy or have it. Then again, such statements ignore the realities faced by some of the working poor. Hell, I am working poor. Not to dive too much into a sob story, but I have and still do work in similar jobs and situations. It would be great if I owned a car since I have actually been rejected from jobs for not having one. A car would open up a whole other side of town for me. Financing one would be risky, so I am left to sorting out jobs based on their criteria and proximity to a bus line. Ultimately, I am responsible for this, but it speaks well to Ehrenreichs comments on how it can be hard, almost impossible, to break out of poverty. Worse of are those workers that want to climb up and go to school, but have no time. A single working mother might dream of bettering herself, but cannot consider taking a break between her current job and her children.
She challenges the idea that poverty stems from joblessness. All her co-workers are (duh!) employed, but they often work two to three jobs, still struggling to make ends meet. She does not dwell much into her co-workers personal lives (Another quip I had with the book is that it presented everyone but Enhereich as utterly defeated. It seemed no one had hobbies except being a loser and dreaming about going to Dairy Queen), but it seems that most of their money gets spent on necessities. Again, their is plenty of anecdotal evidence that people can waste away their paychecks of vices and unnecessary luxury items. Then there is the argument of what are necessities. Is a car a necessity? Well, no, I guess, but don't we live in a car culture? Is Internet a necessity in today's world? My job searches would be render impotent if I stuck to newspaper classifieds. When does a specific food item become a luxury?
She does mention how all her co-workers either share an apartment house with roommates, friends, or families. Enhereich approaches every situation alone and that takes a bit of the bite out of her argument. Few people end up with absolutely no support groups like a friend to borrow some money from or family member's couch to crash on for a night. I read some critiques online that said this dismissed her entire thesis. I understand that it is rare to find people in such situations as Enhenreich, but this was an experiment and that was a variable she choose to control. Being as she mentions how all her co-workers double up on housing and job (One in Key West actually lives in a van down by the river!), I don't consider this a glaring flaw. She probably chose this condition, including an aversion to social help, particulalry religious charities, to concentrate the impact of her experience. Albeit, these are not conditions you should impose if you find yourself in a similar bind.
She does mention how all her co-workers either share an apartment house with roommates, friends, or families. Enhereich approaches every situation alone and that takes a bit of the bite out of her argument. Few people end up with absolutely no support groups like a friend to borrow some money from or family member's couch to crash on for a night. I read some critiques online that said this dismissed her entire thesis. I understand that it is rare to find people in such situations as Enhenreich, but this was an experiment and that was a variable she choose to control. Being as she mentions how all her co-workers double up on housing and job (One in Key West actually lives in a van down by the river!), I don't consider this a glaring flaw. She probably chose this condition, including an aversion to social help, particulalry religious charities, to concentrate the impact of her experience. Albeit, these are not conditions you should impose if you find yourself in a similar bind.
The book deserves to be widely read. I mean, it has already, but if there was a book I would have everyone read then it would be this one. It instantly creates discussion and debate because everyone makes (or tries to) make ends meet. The constant back and forth about the "working poor" even with anecdotal evidence demonstrates how it hits across all social spheres. A well off person might not necessarily care about the poor's condition, but they would have something to say about it. Nickle and Dimed obviously wants the reader to agree with Ehrenreich's conclusion that the working poor are screwed by the "owner class." At the very end she even mentions a sort of workers revolution where the poor will realize they are getting the Reganomics shuffle. I don't know if that will ever happen, but Ehrenreich chronicled and wrote about these experiences during the tail of end of the 90s and into the early part of this current decade. It is sobering to read this book in light of the recent mortgage crisis and sour economy. During her Key West sojourn, Ehrenreich mentions how the $5 a day for gas are really eating into her budget. Could it have been conceivable that we would hit a day when people making the same wages as Ehrenreich struggled with $4-a-gallon gas? What about everyone affected by the mortgage crisis? Getting back into the murky waters of anecdotal evidence, what do we say to families that tried to finance a house and had the rug pulled out from under them?
Regardless, the book offers an engaging read about an often forgotten sector of the economy. You can read it and be angry and the companies or the workers, but it will get your mind thinking and ideas churning. And if our economy moves towards a post-industrial one, dominated by innovation and service/hospitality, then you will see even more and more of these jobs in the headlines. There are some other issues with her analysis. She could have always returned to her regular life, if things got dicey. It would be an experimental failure, but security. Few people have such safety valves. But, the heart of the book remains solid. There are many obstacles to "making" it in America and the American Dream from the Master Narrative does not factor any of those. Some of these obstacles are personal and require that an individual prioritize what is important to them. Some of these are economic, racial, social, and gender based. Some can be cured with a quick "Suck it up an deal with it!" Others might need a "Hey, do you need some help?" Nickle and Dimed tells us that this is all very complex and that it deserves our attention.
Peace!
Regardless, the book offers an engaging read about an often forgotten sector of the economy. You can read it and be angry and the companies or the workers, but it will get your mind thinking and ideas churning. And if our economy moves towards a post-industrial one, dominated by innovation and service/hospitality, then you will see even more and more of these jobs in the headlines. There are some other issues with her analysis. She could have always returned to her regular life, if things got dicey. It would be an experimental failure, but security. Few people have such safety valves. But, the heart of the book remains solid. There are many obstacles to "making" it in America and the American Dream from the Master Narrative does not factor any of those. Some of these obstacles are personal and require that an individual prioritize what is important to them. Some of these are economic, racial, social, and gender based. Some can be cured with a quick "Suck it up an deal with it!" Others might need a "Hey, do you need some help?" Nickle and Dimed tells us that this is all very complex and that it deserves our attention.
Peace!
*In all actuality, I love living in Lakewood and do not see much to these arguments. Again, anecdotal evidence. Maybe I live in the "good" part of town. I find the mix of people and classes engaging when compared to the angry hippie echo chamber of Ithaca.
**Not that I was trying to impress him or anything. Ronald Regan gives me the willies!
***My grandma could fill up an entire series of blog posts. About a year before she passed, she got worried that the PR government, in a stunning act of doing something, would bust her for these welfare shenanigans. To make herself appear needy, she proposed sending my sister and I each a sum of some $10,000 to hide. You know, while things settled down and the tax man left. Yes, my grandmother wanted to turn me into an offshore tax shelter. And don't blame this on old age. She was nuttier than pistachio ice cream, but always lucid. The transaction never happened. This was great considering how I would need my own real tax shelter to explain that to the IRS.
