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News & Letters, June 2001
Workers (not) making it in America
Review: NICKEL AND DIMED: ON (NOT) GETTING BY IN AMERICA, by Barbara
Ehrenreich, Henry Holt and Company, 2001
This book corrects people who believe that if you have a job and work hard,
you can "make it" in America. Ehrenreich tried in three different U.S.
locations to live on low-wage jobs. But in spite of being white, a native
English speaker, childless and in much better health than most of the
working poor, "making it" in entry-level jobs proved almost impossible. In
addition, Ehrenreich could be cheerful and upbeat because she knew she
wasn't trapped in a bleak future with more of the same.
Ehrenreich worked as a waitress in Florida, a house cleaner and weekend
nursing-home attendant in Maine and a Wal-Mart floor person in Minnesota.
Her experiences are rendered with poignancy and humor in these pages. There
was George the cook, a Czech immigrant who shared a flop-house bed with a
person of different shift; he was accused in English (thus unable to defend
himself) of stealing food (he was probably hungry). There was Maddy, who
was constantly in a paroxysm of worry over her child's poor-quality
daycare. And there was pregnant Holly, whose husband abused her and who was
undernourished and without funds for food (as were most house cleaners
Ehrenreich worked with).
Reading Ehrenreich's experiences looking for housing, jobs and food gives
one a window to the exhaustion and fear of poverty. At the end of the day,
the week, the months all the additions and subtractions of incomes and
expenses resulted in negative sums. She couldn't scramble fast enough for
one month to pay the second month's rent-even working two jobs, putting car
expenses on her credit card and having a small stipend that she allowed
herself to get started. After a monumental struggle to find affordable
housing in Minneapolis-St. Paul, she read that prosperity had shrunk the
number of low-cost units nationwide and commented, "I'm a victim not of
poverty, but of prosperity."
Ehrenreich's weekend job in Maine was to help to feed an Alzheimer's ward
in a nursing home. She was alone on a day that was bedeviled by a series of
administrative snafus. She managed well, including all feeding times. She
was proud of this; yet the nagging question remained-why was an unknown,
relatively untested person alone with all those patients for a whole shift
and at such low pay?
Time after time, really terrific books like Ehrenreich's end weakly. The
contradictions hang out at the end like a tree-top cradle in a strong wind.
Ehrenreich calls for forming unions, which though important in the
capitalistic system, can only be temporary, because unionizing, as we have
seen, can become its opposite in the untrustworthy and mercenary union
leader that collaborates with the bosses. How many times does that have to
happen before we catch on?
In her last paragraph Ehrenreich expressed a kind of certainty that
"someday, of course" the working poor will demand what they are worth. But
paying workers less than their worth is the warp and woof of capitalism.
Economic systems should serve us; however, the efforts of Ehrenreich's
co-workers in NICKEL AND DIMED were commodified so that the owners of their
time (their lives) could make a big profit.
But we want a new society that never requires a person to sacrifice her
basic needs, work hard with treatable illnesses or raise children with
blighted lives-one where the bottom line is expressed, not in money, but in
the life-quality of each individual, what that person needs to become
educated in her own personality.
--January B.
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