Twenty years ago Barbara Ehrenreich wrote the book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a ground-breaking book about income inequality in the United States. She described how people are trapped in poverty, and that lesson is just as true today as it was in 2000.
After welfare reform was passed by Congress in 1996, Ehrenreich, an author of nonfiction books and magazine articles, and her editor speculated about whether someone could live on the wages earned in an entry level job. Harper’s Magazine contracted with her to go undercover and find out. She took jobs in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota; working as a waitress, hotel maid, nursing home assistant, cleaner, and sales clerk.
First stop Florida. Ehrenreich submitted applications all over Key West and waited for three days to be called for an interview. She finally realized that most places didn’t really have job openings. They just had high turnover rates, so they never took the signs down or the ads out of the newspapers. Employers all required urine tests and psychological interviews, and most kept your first paycheck until you’d been there a certain length of time. She figured she could make it if she could find a job for $7 an hour and rent a place for $500 a month (1998 amounts). However, the only efficiency apartments that rented for that amount were 45 minutes away from any jobs.
She landed work as a waitress at a restaurant attached to a cheap chain hotel. Both then and now restaurants only have to pay wait staff $2.13 an hour, plus tips. However, the tips earned must be high enough that the average pay is above minimum wage ($9.00 an hour in Nebraska). During slow times Ehrenreich wiped tables, mopped floors, stocked prep tables – earning $2.13 an hour. The only time she could sit was when wrapping silverware.
The stunning lessons Ehrenreich learned in Florida were from her co-workers. Some lived in their cars. Several lived with family members or roommates. One lived in a room with her boyfriend in the attached hotel. (The ones who lived in their cars got to shower in her hotel room.) The sharply dressed restaurant hostess who she thought had money lived in her car and bought used clothes at thrift stores. Her co-workers offered her sofas to sleep on, sandwiches to eat; when she had complaints they did what they could to help.
Ehrenreich soon learned that she was earning $5.15 an hour, minimum wage then, and she would not be able to pay her rent. She got a second job as a waitress at another restaurant, working the breakfast/lunch shift at one and heading to the other to work 2-10. She had to buy her own uniforms which had to be laundered every day. After a month she quit one of the waitress jobs and got a position as a maid in the hotel attached to the restaurant where she was still employed. One day she had a perfect storm of everything going wrong at both jobs, so she walked out, deciding it was time to move to another state and try again.
Maine. Here Ehrenreich landed a weekend job in a nursing home Alzheimer’s unit, and then with one of the Maids housecleaning services. Apparently women who work as cleaners are the lowest caste in our society, and they have to suffer whatever indignities are hurled at them. Work off the clock. You cannot respond to calls from your kids’ schools. You cannot report injuries or call in sick or you’ll be fired. A day without pay means no groceries for the week. Food banks aren’t open when you’re off work. And there is no time or energy left to look for a better job.
Finally, Minnesota. Ehrenreich got a job working in women’s clothing at Wal-Mart, her primary duty being to re-hang or fold clothes and return them to the proper place on the sales floor. The big lesson here was skyrocketing housing prices. The only lodging Ehrenreich could find was in dive motel rooms that rented by the week, not safe and hardly affordable on her wages. Many workers had the additional constraint of having to ride bicycles or buses to jobs, further limiting where they could live.
Ehrenreich is the first to admit that she wasn’t really experiencing the same thing as her coworkers. She didn’t have to find day care for children or get them to school. As part of her agreement with Harpers Magazine, she had the money needed to pay all deposits and first and last month’s rent up front. She had transportation. And she knew she could walk away any time this experiment was too overwhelming. This is not the reality for most who live in poverty. She saw their despair and knew most people could never comprehend how trapped they were.
“There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can’t put up the two months’ rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room with a hot plate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. If you have no money for health insurance, you go without routine care or prescription drugs and end up paying the price. (p. 27)”
What did Ehrenreich learn from her experiment? No job is truly “unskilled.” Each one required mental and physical effort and was exhausting. Too tired to cook, junk food diets become the norm. Poor people always help you out, because they’ve “been there.”