Dollars and Sense
Understanding America With Barbara Ehrenreich

In early 1998, journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich posed the following questions to an editor at Harper's Magazine: How does anyone 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?

Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. And in 1998, Ehrenreich joined them. The result was an unprecedented and illuminating work of immersion journalism, a hair-raising and darkly funny odyssey through the underside of the working world. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America recounts Ehrenreich’s adventures as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide and a Wal-Mart sales clerk.

Her story lends a human face to the workers sustaining our economy as she discovers that no job is truly “unskilled,” that even the lowliest occupations take an enormous mental and physical toll, and that one low-wage job is not enough to keep a roof over your head and food on the table.

In her most recent book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, Ehrenreich skillfully castigates corporate culture's focus on "the power of the individual will" and how it deters its employees from organizing against the very market trends that are disenfranchising them.

Ehrenreich will be honored this month at LAANE’s annual Women for a New Los Angeles Luncheon (see Events and Actions). Following are excerpts from Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch:

Bait and Switch

Something, evidently, is going seriously wrong with a socioeconomic group I had indeed neglected as too comfortable and too powerful to merit my concern. Where I had imagined comfort, there is now growing distress, and I determined to investigate. I chose the same strategy I had employed in Nickel and Dimed: to enter this new world myself, as an undercover reporter, and see what I could learn about the problems firsthand. Were people being driven out of their corporate jobs? What did it take to find a new one? And, if things were as bad as some reports suggested, why was there so little protest?

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Today, white-collar job insecurity is no longer a function of the business cycle—rising as the stock market falls and declining again when the numbers improve. Nor is it confined to a few volatile sectors like telecommunications or technology, or a few regions of the country like the rust belt or Silicon Valley. The economy may be looking up, the company may be raking in cash, and still the layoffs continue, like a perverse form of natural selection, weeding out the talented and successful as well as the mediocre. Since the midnineties, this perpetual winnowing process has been institutionalized under various euphemisms such as “downsizing,” “right-sizing,” “smart-sizing,” “restructuring,” and “de-layering”—to which we can now add the outsourcing of white-collar functions to cheaper labor markets overseas.

Nickel and Dimed

But whatever keeps wages low…the result is that many people earn far less than they need to live on. How much is that? The Economic Policy Institute recently reviewed dozens of studies of what constitutes a “living wage” and came up with an average figure of $30,000 a year for a family of one adult and two children, which amounts to a wage of $14 an hour…. The shocking thing is that the majority of American workers, about 60 percent, earn less than $14 an hour.

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Employers, of course, do little to encourage the economic literacy of their workers. They may exhort potential customers to “Compare Our Prices!” but they’re not eager to have workers do the same with wages.

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But the real question is not how well I did at work but how well I did at life in general, which includes eating and having a place to stay. The fact that these are two separate questions needs to be underscored right away. In the rhetorical buildup to welfare reform, it was uniformly assumed that a job was the ticket out of poverty and that the only thing holding back welfare recipients was their reluctance to get out and get one. I got one and sometimes more than one, but my track record in the survival department is far less admirable than my performance as a jobholder.