Friday, August 03, 2001
Ehrenreich shows how we take advantage of the working poor
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Barbara Ehrenreich, a 50-something sociologist living near Key West, a PhD in biology with a dozen books to her credit, in 1998 embarked on a 2-year odyssey, to test how women - unmarried, married, and single parents - survive while working at poverty-level jobs. She left her home and traveled through Florida, Maine and Minnesota, pretending to be a homemaker returning to the work force, and taking jobs paying $6 and $7 an hour ($12,400 to $14,560 a year), as a waitress, office and home cleaner, nursing home attendant and a Wal-Mart sales clerk, drawing observations about her co-workers, employers and environment. She was particularly interested in determining how the four million women pushed into the labor market by welfare reform would fare, earning a minimum wage at $5.15 an hour ($2.13 in jobs with tips). The result is a thought-provoking book ,"Nickel and Dimed; on (Not) Getting by in America" (Metropolitan Books, N.Y. 2001).
How well do I remember "Down and out in Paris and London," George Orwell’s descent into the 1930s underworld of dishwashing and other poverty jobs open to the unskilled and pitiful. Bad as the US equivalent is, by comparison we are living in a world of progress and almost-care.
For one, there are low-scale jobs available, and we have a minimum wage law. The middle class needs underpaid minions to cater to their amenities, whether they are the Mexican illegals who keep the prices of vegetables down, or the Asian and Latin American non-union street and building repair workers, or the women Ehrenreich knows. Survival is possible, although not with dignity.
The author is particularly offended by the employment process. Job applications at Winn-Dixie and Wal-Mart ask trick questions: "Do you think the safety on the job is management’s responsibility?" and "Would you turn in a fellow employee if you caught him stealing?" and want the prospect’s opinion on such statements as "Some people work better when they are a little high," and "Marijuana is the same as drink." In the poverty job market the turnover is high (people get tired of the job, are fired, drift, suffer injuries), and employers will collect applications without a job in sight, in the expectation that one will come soon. The process is undignified, the applicants often have to take supervised urine tests to catch marijuana users (traces of cocaine, speed and heroin dissipate fast). Job seekers waste a lot of time running from one interview to the next. .
As for the money, the author soon found out that in Key West, earning $1,039 a month, she was spending $517 for food, and could not find living quarters near her work for less than $675 a month In Portland, Maine living was easier, of her $1,200 a month earnings she spent $480 on rent. In both places she had part-time second jobs. In Minneapolis, earning $1,120 a month at a Wal-Mart, she could have survived with an additional weekend job, staying at a$19 a night dormitory.
The living quarters were bad, mostly motels with the specter of addicts and thieves as neighbors, "trailer trash had become a demographic category to aspire to." Her nutrition was unhealthy, after a long day’s exhausting work junk food was the easiest to get. A restaurant employer offered $2 burgers and BLT sandwiches to waitresses, a good deal (and you thought food servers ate for free!), although by night-time hunger often struck. A hot plate in her room was the solution, for cooking up huge lentil stews, to be frozen for the week ahead (this required $30 invested at the Kmart in cookware).But she was amazed at the kindness and compassion shown by the poor women she worked with - a waitress would dip into her tip money to buy a meal for a hard-up mechanic, fresh out of surgery (health insurance was non-existent, or limited, and would kick in after three or so months of employment), another co-worker would offer to put the author up with her family
Ehrenreich survived, because she was healthy, had allocated $1,300 as startup money, good for rent deposits (an impossible luxury for most hand-to-mouth living people, who had to pay weekly rates), and a junk rental car, allowing her to live less expensively, thirty minutes away from the job sit. On the way she could listen to Marianne Faithfull and Enigma on her car’s tape player. In the room she would have a midnight snack of Wheat Thins, Monterey Jack and cheap white wine on ice, and listen to Public Radio..
What are Ehrenreich’s conclusions? To begin with, housing costs have risen too high (29 percent of the average income in 1960s vs. 37 now; while food dropped from 24 percent to 16). Further, while the poverty level of family income is $17,230, .with the good news that only 13 percent of Americans are living below that, for the bottom decile (10 percent) of workers the wages are below 1973 level, at 91 percent, although they have risen from $5.49 to $6.05 an hour in 1996-99. The eighth decile ($20/hour) is up to 106.6 percent since 1973, although productivity has risen much faster. Third, employers resist wage increases, unfairly. Poor people differ from the "economic man," having limited mobility (e.g. they are dependent on car lifts and public transportation), and limited information (ah, the dumbing down of America, not mentioned by Ehrenreich). Keeping one’s income figures private, specified by the NLRA (1935) enforced by all employers, for obvious reasons, fuzzes the inequities over..
What income level is adequate? Ehrenreich quotes the Economic Policy Institute, which currently defines a "living wage" as $30,000 a year for a family of one adult and two children, roughly $14/hour. Some 60 percent of Americans live below that level. The author realistically admits that upping the minimum wages radically would drive employers into bankruptcy (parenthetically, not so the Naderite Greens, who advocate $12 an hour), but would like the nation to recognize that we are facing a state of emergency for the poor, blissfully or deliberately ignored by all (a "conspiracy of silence," per Ehrenreich).
Ehrenreich is rightfully bringing unpleasant truths to the nation’s attention. How is it that Americans manage to cope, realistically? Having observed the lives of the rural poor for 20 years, I have some personal experiences to impart. The families upstate, my neighbors, have typically two or more jobs, one at low pay, to earn health insurance (government, Post Office, railroad, manufacturing, some Wal-Mart type retail), another with better income but seasonal (construction). Owning or inheriting homes, or living with the family, albeit temporarily, deals with the housing cost dilemma, although population growth dooms us all. And then there are the trailer parks, $675/month for furnished, or $400/month for space to put down your own single- or double-width. Most men here know how to build a simple house, pour cement, frame it, bring in friends to help raise the walls. Professionals are needed only to install electricity and heating and dig the well. Two minimum income jobs ($21,424/year) in the family are often deemed adequate, when the housing is not the killer cost. Farm workers eke out a living with free board, home grown food and deer hunting. These are the costs of living close to nature, away from the maddening crowd. Regrettable, this idyllic form of existence does not help the welfare mother, nor the city dweller paying for three rooms through the nose, with his lifeblood. But don’t let me depress you, you can tune in to any number of politicians who have positive answers to the problems you and I and Barbara Ehrenreich are struggling with.
Barbara Ehrenreich, a 50-something sociologist living near Key West, a PhD in biology with a dozen books to her credit, in 1998 embarked on a 2-year odyssey, to test how women - unmarried, married, and single parents - survive while working at poverty-level jobs. She left her home and traveled through Florida, Maine and Minnesota, pretending to be a homemaker returning to the work force, and taking jobs paying $6 and $7 an hour ($12,400 to $14,560 a year), as a waitress, office and home cleaner, nursing home attendant and a Wal-Mart sales clerk, drawing observations about her co-workers, employers and environment. She was particularly interested in determining how the four million women pushed into the labor market by welfare reform would fare, earning a minimum wage at $5.15 an hour ($2.13 in jobs with tips). The result is a thought-provoking book ,"Nickel and Dimed; on (Not) Getting by in America" (Metropolitan Books, N.Y. 2001).
How well do I remember "Down and out in Paris and London," George Orwell’s descent into the 1930s underworld of dishwashing and other poverty jobs open to the unskilled and pitiful. Bad as the US equivalent is, by comparison we are living in a world of progress and almost-care.
For one, there are low-scale jobs available, and we have a minimum wage law. The middle class needs underpaid minions to cater to their amenities, whether they are the Mexican illegals who keep the prices of vegetables down, or the Asian and Latin American non-union street and building repair workers, or the women Ehrenreich knows. Survival is possible, although not with dignity.
The author is particularly offended by the employment process. Job applications at Winn-Dixie and Wal-Mart ask trick questions: "Do you think the safety on the job is management’s responsibility?" and "Would you turn in a fellow employee if you caught him stealing?" and want the prospect’s opinion on such statements as "Some people work better when they are a little high," and "Marijuana is the same as drink." In the poverty job market the turnover is high (people get tired of the job, are fired, drift, suffer injuries), and employers will collect applications without a job in sight, in the expectation that one will come soon. The process is undignified, the applicants often have to take supervised urine tests to catch marijuana users (traces of cocaine, speed and heroin dissipate fast). Job seekers waste a lot of time running from one interview to the next. .
As for the money, the author soon found out that in Key West, earning $1,039 a month, she was spending $517 for food, and could not find living quarters near her work for less than $675 a month In Portland, Maine living was easier, of her $1,200 a month earnings she spent $480 on rent. In both places she had part-time second jobs. In Minneapolis, earning $1,120 a month at a Wal-Mart, she could have survived with an additional weekend job, staying at a$19 a night dormitory.
The living quarters were bad, mostly motels with the specter of addicts and thieves as neighbors, "trailer trash had become a demographic category to aspire to." Her nutrition was unhealthy, after a long day’s exhausting work junk food was the easiest to get. A restaurant employer offered $2 burgers and BLT sandwiches to waitresses, a good deal (and you thought food servers ate for free!), although by night-time hunger often struck. A hot plate in her room was the solution, for cooking up huge lentil stews, to be frozen for the week ahead (this required $30 invested at the Kmart in cookware).But she was amazed at the kindness and compassion shown by the poor women she worked with - a waitress would dip into her tip money to buy a meal for a hard-up mechanic, fresh out of surgery (health insurance was non-existent, or limited, and would kick in after three or so months of employment), another co-worker would offer to put the author up with her family
Ehrenreich survived, because she was healthy, had allocated $1,300 as startup money, good for rent deposits (an impossible luxury for most hand-to-mouth living people, who had to pay weekly rates), and a junk rental car, allowing her to live less expensively, thirty minutes away from the job sit. On the way she could listen to Marianne Faithfull and Enigma on her car’s tape player. In the room she would have a midnight snack of Wheat Thins, Monterey Jack and cheap white wine on ice, and listen to Public Radio..
What are Ehrenreich’s conclusions? To begin with, housing costs have risen too high (29 percent of the average income in 1960s vs. 37 now; while food dropped from 24 percent to 16). Further, while the poverty level of family income is $17,230, .with the good news that only 13 percent of Americans are living below that, for the bottom decile (10 percent) of workers the wages are below 1973 level, at 91 percent, although they have risen from $5.49 to $6.05 an hour in 1996-99. The eighth decile ($20/hour) is up to 106.6 percent since 1973, although productivity has risen much faster. Third, employers resist wage increases, unfairly. Poor people differ from the "economic man," having limited mobility (e.g. they are dependent on car lifts and public transportation), and limited information (ah, the dumbing down of America, not mentioned by Ehrenreich). Keeping one’s income figures private, specified by the NLRA (1935) enforced by all employers, for obvious reasons, fuzzes the inequities over..
What income level is adequate? Ehrenreich quotes the Economic Policy Institute, which currently defines a "living wage" as $30,000 a year for a family of one adult and two children, roughly $14/hour. Some 60 percent of Americans live below that level. The author realistically admits that upping the minimum wages radically would drive employers into bankruptcy (parenthetically, not so the Naderite Greens, who advocate $12 an hour), but would like the nation to recognize that we are facing a state of emergency for the poor, blissfully or deliberately ignored by all (a "conspiracy of silence," per Ehrenreich).
Ehrenreich is rightfully bringing unpleasant truths to the nation’s attention. How is it that Americans manage to cope, realistically? Having observed the lives of the rural poor for 20 years, I have some personal experiences to impart. The families upstate, my neighbors, have typically two or more jobs, one at low pay, to earn health insurance (government, Post Office, railroad, manufacturing, some Wal-Mart type retail), another with better income but seasonal (construction). Owning or inheriting homes, or living with the family, albeit temporarily, deals with the housing cost dilemma, although population growth dooms us all. And then there are the trailer parks, $675/month for furnished, or $400/month for space to put down your own single- or double-width. Most men here know how to build a simple house, pour cement, frame it, bring in friends to help raise the walls. Professionals are needed only to install electricity and heating and dig the well. Two minimum income jobs ($21,424/year) in the family are often deemed adequate, when the housing is not the killer cost. Farm workers eke out a living with free board, home grown food and deer hunting. These are the costs of living close to nature, away from the maddening crowd. Regrettable, this idyllic form of existence does not help the welfare mother, nor the city dweller paying for three rooms through the nose, with his lifeblood. But don’t let me depress you, you can tune in to any number of politicians who have positive answers to the problems you and I and Barbara Ehrenreich are struggling with.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 3:22 AM 
