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CHRISTINE KELLY teaches political science at William Paterson University and is the author of Tangled Up in Red, White and Blue: New Social Movements in America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
"A BRAIN, A HOME, A HEART, THE NERVE . . . " -- or so goes the wish-list of the famous four sojourners in The Wizard of Oz. If Barbara Ehrenreich had been along for the trip to the Emerald City, she would have certainly tacked on something like "and some laughs" to the refrain. And lucky for us, for it is in Ehrenreich's signature and savvy wit that her readers will find comfort as she walks them through the lives of those employed in the low-paying service sector. In Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich's humor eases the reader along as she goes undercover through the otherwise painful, frequently depressing and all too often starkly undignified worlds of "low-wage" workers in the United States. Indeed, one of Ehrenreich's greatest insights in this book is that terms like "low-wage" -- in conjunction with a host of corporate-aphorisms like "associate" or "team-member" -- do not convey what really is at stake in the life of someone who makes six to seven dollars an hour in the U.S.
What is at stake, Ehrenreich demonstrates to us by journey's end, is that in today's economy you can " . . . work hard -- harder even than you ever thought possible -- and still find yourself sinking deeper into poverty and debt." The "boom," for those who hadn't noticed, has been a bust for millions long before the latent official declarations of a recession. And what the recent torrent of job losses bodes for millions of America's "unskilled" workers who gross $280 a week (or less) and already live in poverty, may in fact be the next great social disaster to catch the nation off-guard. While the Congress debates the federalization of airport security jobs, the newly received wisdom that people who are paid a living wage are bound to perform jobs more consistently brings little comfort to those last-hired and now first fired -- among them scores of welfare-to-work mothers for whom no bail-out plans are being considered. Nickel and Dimed is an eerily prescient primer for how bad things are about to become for the bottom 20 percent of American wage earners.
It takes a journalist and social critic as committed and as audacious as Ehrenreich to go into the trenches. Ehrenreich's project originated, she tell us in the introduction, with a question: How does anyone " . . . make it on $6 or $7 an hour?" Her query inspired a decision to do "some old-fashioned journalism" in which she turns herself into, respectively, a waitress, a nursing-home worker, a maid, and finally a retail employee (or more endearingly a "Wal-Martian" as she puts it). In each case, she tries to live on what she makes. And in each case, despite exceedingly valiant efforts, she finds herself strapped, stressed and simply unable to make the most frugal ends meet. This kind of journalism, sensitive to hardship and injustice, investigative -- even undercover -- in pursuit of the hard-to-get-to-truths, fits well into the tradition of American muckraking. Political muckrakers of the last "turn of the century," appalled by the ravages of industrial capitalism, employed journalism, and sometimes fiction, in the cause of socialism and progressive reforms.
Among the great muckrakers of the early 20th century was writer and social critic Upton Sinclair who reported on and fictionalized the deplorable condition of industrial workers in such precise and painstaking detail that his readers simply could not turn away -- and they did not. Indeed, Sinclair's most well- remembered book, The Jungle, though fictional, gripped the masses with the graphic realities he recorded while working undercover in the meat-packing industry in Chicago. The Jungle exposed the filth and dangers of the meat industry in 1906 and so appalled readers that reaction won the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of that year. Even though it was Sinclair's intention to bring the plight of the workers (and indeed, the cause of socialism) into focus, and he instead gave the cause of sanitary food a boost, it was still a victory in making more visible the hidden, and often horrific, conditions of "unskilled" labor. A century later, Barbara Ehrenreich sets her radar on the lives of service workers in the era of globalization, in the wealthiest nation on earth, during what turns out to be the final days of its biggest boom period ever. Politically speaking, the two contexts bear some comparison, though some crucial differences, I worry, will end up snatching from Ehrenreich the satisfaction that Sinclair must have felt when his work spurred an outraged public to action.
What the two centuries' turns have in common is that each testifies to new patterns of capital accumulation premised on the utter disregard for workers rights. Each is a period in which public debates on poverty are gendered and racially and ethnically charged, and the poor are depicted as in need of discipline, simple English, moral straightening, and sexual/reproductive control. Each is also an era, though in oddly incongruent directions, in which federal commitment to poor-relief is either non-existent or paper-thin. Each evidences, in different degree, electoral instability brought on by voter threats around which third parties hold allure. But this time, those not directly affected by the ravages of the new economy seem relatively oblivious -- even the paternalism of middle-class Progressivism, aiming to protect the pitiful masses, is preferable to today's upper middle-classers' "denial" of their self-interested dependence on the personal services Ehrenreich's subjects provide at subsistence wages. Today, the middle class, in all its precarious glory, shrinks from political stances in defense of low-wage workers, and the poor generally, on the unspoken understanding that so much of what low-wage workers do and sell makes middle-class consumption cheaper. Housekeeping services, nursing care for the elderly, child care for the young, and affordable cloths and fast food for every age in between distract busy buyers from seeing the corporate profiteering and labor shake-downs along the way -- because a bargain is a bargain is a bargain. After all, its not contaminated beef and tubercular pork we're talking about anymore.
Perhaps, though, the most crucial difference between the eras is that low-wage workers' consciousness today, caught as it is in the cogs of the "service" economy, is less politicized, more integrated, definitely more monitored and, seemingly, more insecure than those factory and railroad workers -- immigrant, black and so-called "native" -- who fueled the great strikes at the beginning of the last century. And this time, the labor movement is less articulated (work itself more segmented, flexible and dis-aggregate) and unions less radical. In other words, the political position of low- wage workers is weaker, and therefore their need for serious allies more pronounced. And while Ehrenreich's book is a courageous look at why a job in the low-paying service sector today cannot guarantee a roof over workers' heads, threatens their health, undernourishes them and leaves their children hungry and at risk, the book's success will depend on an engaged and caring readership willing to support unionization, electoral reform and, not incidentally, a true safety-net. For her part, Ehrenreich has provided an important mirror for those in the nation who are otherwise oblivious to the worker who "goes hungry, so you can eat more cheaply and conveniently." This is the lesson that globalized production processes can teach Americans -- though in a necessarily international context. Ehrenreich's hunch, I'm guessing, is that if Americans can't care about other Americans, why will they care about women and children sweating out blouses and rugs in Ecuador or Pakistan? Nickel and Dimed is more than muckraking in the low-wage world -- Ehrenreich is muckraking the conscience of the comfortable in America. I hope they buy her book.
DESPITE EHRENREICH'S HUMOR, THIS IS A PAINFUL SOJOURN. For anyone who has worked these jobs and seen up close how waitresses, elder-care workers, house cleaners, child care workers and even those in retail exert themselves without receiving the recognition, fair compensation or economic stability hard word is supposed to bring, it is particularly poignant. What she discovers is that the sometimes cowed, often depressed, occasionally enraged and, at times, astonishingly generous and conscientious workers she meets are not merely earning low-wages; they are struggling to survive -- and the strategies, tactics and pitfalls of survival is the story. Over the course of her three-months, she unsentimentally and unapologetically reports on six low-wage jobs in three states -- Florida, Maine and Minnesota. Ehrenreich honestly admits that she is playing poor -- she knows that she has an out at any time and that she brings to the low-wage world certain assets that already privilege her -- she is white, she has a car, she has no dependents, and she starts each new job search with approximately $1,300 in hand. It is perhaps this $1,300 that gives her the greatest single advantage over many low- wage workers (though I would suggest that the lack of children and her race play a close second and third) and she acknowledges this. Her "reserves" provide the capital that can serve as a security deposit and save a worker from the kinds of dire living arrangements that permeate the lives of Ehrenreich's co-workers and chain many of them to the poverty trap of roadside motels or the alternative -- sleeping in their cars. In fact it is housing, and housing costs, which account for the majority of stress weighing on Ehrenreich's co-workers and, in fact, on Ehrenreich herself.
Twice during her mission, housing costs force Ehrenreich into working two-jobs (she is not alone: in 1996, she reports, 7.8 million Americans worked two jobs with two- thirds of them holding one full-time job and one part-time). But working two jobs is not always possible -- it almost always requires reliable transportation and a degree of time flexibility that, for example, mothers of small children, simply do not have. These kinds of bad choices -- or the lack thereof -- haunt Ehrenreich's co-workers not for weeks as in Ehrenreich's case, but for years, and maybe for an interminable future if they are "lucky" enough to remain employed. As for her co-workers without spouses or live-in boyfriends/girlfriends, Ehrenreich discovers them living everywhere from their cars and vans, to motels rooms with 3-6 roommates, who sometimes sleep in shifts. Those without others to share costs are unable, from Florida to Minnesota, to get housing on one $7-an-hour job. Even those "households" with two wage earners in the service sector struggle to make trailer park rent -- a task made infinitely less possible with dependents in tow -- from children to ailing parents. The inevitable human drama resulting from such constraints pepper the limited conversation Ehrenreich seems able to steal or squeeze into the break time permitted at work. These are real people and Ehrenreich brings them to us in stark, if not wounding, detail.
Their realness is not easy to walk away from. Like Gail, the fiftyish and competent Key West waitress who, we learn, shares a room with a male friend in a "well-known flophouse for $250 a week." He's begun hitting on her but she can't leave because she can't afford the rent on her own. But when it's finally time for Ehrenreich to leave Key West (though at times Ehrenreich seems so completely overwhelmed trying to budget her meager wages that she appears to forget she will indeed be moving on) she finds she cannot go without bequeathing Gail her trailer-park security deposit and key. The states change, the jobs change and the names change, but what remains the same difficult hurdle for Ehrenreich and her co-workers is matching low-wages to some kind of housing.
As a straightforward explanation of why one can work a full-time job and still not have enough for rent, food and gas/transportation (not counting clothes, movies, car insurance and repairs, medicine or any other cost of getting sick with no insurance) the relationship between wages and rising housing costs goes a long way. In the 1960's housing took up 29 percent of the average family income. In 1999, it took up 37 percent. Of course, if you are lucky enough to own a home, a generous mortgage- interest deduction comes your way at tax-time. But for Gail, who spends closer to 50 percent of her income on housing, there is no subsidy. What's more, all of this is concealed by a poverty rate that has remained mysteriously steady at 13 percent. Ehrenreich explains:
The reason for the disconnect between the actual housing nightmare of the poor and "poverty" as officially defined, is simple: the official poverty level is still calculated by the archaic method of taking the bare-bones cost of food for a family of a given size and multiplying this number by three. Yet food is relatively inflation-proof, at least compared with rent. (p. 200)
This is not to suggest that there are no problems for low-wage workers getting food. On two occasions, Ehrenreich is forced to search out food-pantries while waiting out the obligatory two-week delay for first paychecks. But the hurdle now harder to clear is the cost of housing. Besides rising housing costs, wages for the worst off workers have actually declined. The big surprise in the service sector during the boom years was that the conventional wisdom which suggested low unemployment leads to a rise in wages never really materialized for lowest-wage workers. More jobs appeared (now evaporating just as quickly) but not the predicted higher wages -- the rise in wages between 1996 and 1999 was about 55 cents/hour for the lowest 20 percent. This, Ehrenreich concedes, is celebrated by some economists but is more than paltry when compared with higher income Americans who really did see their wages rise substantially. More pointedly, when current wages are compared with 1973 in real dollars, we discover that real wages for the lowest 10 percent of wage earners have actually declined 9 percent. For the lowest-wage earners in America today, they make less in real dollars and pay a higher percentage of their shrinking income on housing than they did in 1973. Unemployment down, poverty up -- that's globalization's dirty little secret and Ehrenreich exposes it in the nation that offers its best-case scenario.
BESIDES HOUSING COSTS, TWO ADDITIONAL THEMES EMERGE in Ehrenreich's narrative that captures the dynamics of the poverty-end of the service sector: gender and privacy-busting management policies. Caught between the pressure of meeting rising housing costs with shrinking wages, and the seemingly omnipresent reach of personal tests and surveillance in the digital age, we discover a low-paid service worker who is most likely female -- both in Ehrenreich's world and empirically. One of the most striking aspects of Ehrenreich's experiences is the way that gender expresses itself -- both in relation to the wages of jobholders and the types of jobs clustered at the low-paying end. Job growth in the service-sector has been most rapid in areas like food service, eldercare, child-care, housecleaning, and clothing retail sales. All of these "services" reflect a revamping, under the conditions of globalization, of the marketization of services traditionally provided in the home by women's unpaid labor.
In the endless search for new markets and cheap labor, global capital accumulation strategies exploit the "service" shortfall for middle and upper-middle class families where greater numbers of women are working out of the home. Corporate purveyors of the service economy score high profits by meeting these needs with the purchase of the labor of poverty-line women at below-subsistence rates. They then sell that labor back to middle-class consumers at "affordable" rates. The lowest conceivable wage is made possible by a more vulnerable female labor-pool resulting from the federal withdrawal of welfare guarantees since 1996. With a vengeance, the new "service" sector, as Ehrenreich's work vividly demonstrates, has reinvented the structural utility of gender (in combination with race and ethnicity) as a demarcator of "unskilled" and as a justification for low-wages. Indeed, the femaleness of poverty in the low-wage service sector signals a return, however disguised, of the old "woman's wage" that was debated in the Progressive era. There employers rationalized lower wages for women by relying on gendered needs'- based arguments. As conveyed by late-nineteenth century economist William Smart, women's lower wages were justified " . . . because she does not require a high wage, whether it be because her father partly supports her, or because her maintenance does not cost so much."1 Today, employers do not publicly argue that women require less sustenance -- nor do they (currently) upbraid women for being in the labor market as full-time earners past the "marrying-age" on the mythological assumption that marriage and their husband's wage is all they will ever need. Instead, they recoil from needs-based arguments entirely (after all, the needs-based "living wage" demand is the tack of organized labor) and simply slap the more male mythology of homo- economicus onto the simultaneously real and prejudicial constraints of working-class women's lives. It is the desperation of poor women, and particularly those who are heads of households, that permits service-sector employers to successfully label these traditionally female services of the low-wage economy "unskilled" and deny both the needs and value of women workers at the same time. Otherwise how could all those tentatively middle-classers afford the services, food and clothes? It is a 21st century corporate make-over of the exploitation of women's skill and value under patriarchal family arrangements.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Ehrenreich's chapter titled "Scrubbing in Maine." Actually, Ehrenreich is doing more than scrubbing in Maine -- she takes on two jobs to make her $120.00 per week rent (requiring a low $100.00 security) for a tiny efficiency at the Blue Haven Motel near Portland. During her month-long stint, Ehrenreich will work seven days per week -- she works weekends as a "dietary aid" on the Alzheimer's ward in a nursing home for $7.00 an hour and full-time at the corporate housecleaning chain "Merry Maids." At Merry Maids, a forty-hour week of what Ehrenreich calls "heavy labor with a high risk of repetitive stress injuries" grosses $266. Her co-workers women in various stages of life who are hard, hard workers, and seem painfully covetous of the homes and incomes of those whose toilets they clean. At the same time, they remain resentful of the actual customers (especially the stay-at-home mom who follows them from room to room). Whom they surprisingly do not resent is their boss -- Ted, the franchise owner -- or better yet the corporate chain who pays them $6.25 an hour while customers are charged $25 per hour per "maid." Ehrenreich reports that close to 20 percent of American households are buying these services, with the percentage of households purchasing cleaning services up 53 percent between 1995 and 1999. This "booming" category of service, she contends, is controlled by national and even international chains -- among them Merry Maids, Molly Maids, Mini Maids, Maid Brigade and The Maids International.2 The bizarre relationship between women's mass entry into the workforce largely assisted by the efforts of the women's liberation movement, and the exploitation of women in the service sector is not lost on one chain-owner, who, Ehrenreich tells us " . . . closes 30-35 percent of his sales by making follow-up calls Saturday between 9:00 and 11:00 am -- which is prime time for arguing over the fact that the house is a mess.'" Another owner brags "We save marriages." But whose marriages?
Certainly not the postponed marriage of single-mom Maddy, who leaves her child with an untrustworthy relative-of-sorts because she can't afford anything else. And then there is Holly who is " twenty-three, has been married for almost a year, and manages to feed her husband, herself and an elderly relative on $30-50 a week" (pp. 96-97). Thin, pale and always unable to buy lunch at lunch break, Holly is discovered one day by Ehrenreich slumped over a sink in a house they are cleaning; the problem: she had a fight with her husband -- she's nauseous, probably pregnant, and terrified the boss will find out before she can find another, less taxing, $6-an-hour job.
MUCH OF WHAT EHRENREICH RECORDS IS NOT NEW, but appears more pernicious, widespread and deeply concealed by the uneven prosperity of recent years. What helps to conceal the exacting constraints on the working-poor is the intrusiveness of management "screening" and monitoring techniques. After all, management figures, when you are only paying $6 an hour, you cannot be too careful about who you are hiring. But the gate-keeping is more than a hiring device; employer possession of knowledge of the most intimate sort creates an atmosphere of compliance evident in the workers Ehrenreich meets in Florida, Maine and definitely in Minnesota where she is employed by the monstrous retail chain, Wal- Mart.
Like most management "techniques," the culture of personal surveillance and tracking lauded by service sector employers aims for a more compliant workforce in the face of labor violations. Widespread employer use of technologies aimed at gathering privacy data (including drug testing, personality tests, credit reports and video surveillance) further individuates work identity and consciousness and undermines the basis for any political rights -- and certainly unionization rights -- at work. As Ehrenreich puts it:
When you enter the low-wage workplace -- and many of the medium- wage workplaces as well -- you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. (p. 210)
It is precisely this atmosphere which has prompted the AFL-CIO under the Sweeney administration to initiate the Voices@Work Campaign to increase workers civil liberties on the job -- including speech rights about unions.
From Florida to Maine to Minnesota, and from Winn-Dixie to Merry Maids to Wal- Mart, service-sector employers want to test your personality. They do so with those curiously conceived pre-employment tests, which Ehrenreich seems certain that anyone " . . . who has ever encountered the principles of hierarchy and subordination" can pass, though about 15 years ago I myself failed one applying for a waitressing job at a restaurant called "Stuff Yer Face," no less. It was the tricky way they force you to lie about things like drugs and alcohol. I must have taken the same one Ehrenreich passed to get the Merry Maids job but with less acumen:
Among the propositions I am asked to opine about are "Some people work better when they're a little bit high," "Everyone tries marijuana," and bafflingly, "Marijuana is the same as a drink." Hmm, what kind of drink? I want to ask. "The same" how -- chemically or morally? Or should I write in something flippant like "I wouldn't know because I don't drink?" (pp. 58-59)
Ehrenreich is correct, I think, to conclude that the real function of these tests is to make workers feel owned. She suggests the real message to workers is "You will have no secrets from us. We don't want your muscles and that portion of your brain that is directly connected to them, we want your innermost self." (p. 59) This too is the effect of the entire Wal-Mart hiring process. For a Wal-Mart job not only are you subjected to the personality test, but you have to pee. Ehrenreich, who applies to two jobs that require urine tests, has to complete two in one day. Though one procedure (the one for Wal-Mart) would have been easy to beat with a little advanced planning, the other was more stringent and included leaving her purse with the stranger administering the test. Just in case the drug testing process -- which Ehrenreich concludes is really designed to wear down workers' money, time and gasoline -- does not completely cow prospective employees, certainly the Wal-Mart orientation will. What eventually follows a clean pee-test is an eight-hour orientation fueled by Wal-Mart videos celebrating the cult of Sam Walton, warning of "time theft," vanquishing "unions" and praising the Wal- Mart family with double-speak like "associate" for worker, and, unbelievably, "servant leader" for managers.
The privacy-data on workers, now owned by the employers, is buttressed by the use of video cameras -- this is made clear to Wal-Mart workers during orientation when a produced video integrates clips from an in-store camera catching an employee stealing from the drawer. Perhaps it is more the suggestion, than the consistent use, of the technology of surveillance that effectively disciplines workers. In either case, the effects are, as Ehrenreich finds, battalions of workers who are incredibly worried about losing their jobs for even talking to other workers while on the floor. Fearful, perhaps more than "integrated" is the best term to describe workers' consciousness in the low- wage world.
With the belt tightening that chastens the current economic climate, workers' fears will have to turn to anger before it might receive political expression. But more immediately, the interests of these workers demands political support from other quarters -- this might certainly provide some fortification for their hypothetical battle. Or perhaps, if their survival and rights as Americans are considered expendable by the many others living more comfortably, then they may simply be forgotten in the months ahead. If this is the case, then the giants of globalization will have succeeded in paving the future for new, lower definitions of fairness and new standards of poverty. Ehrenreich's work here reveals the pressing dilemmas facing America's working-poor. Ultimately, her exposé poignantly reposes the traditional labor query: Which side are you on?