May 13, 2001
Making Ends Meet
Barbara Ehrenreich travels across America to learn how people live on a minimum wage.
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Audio: An Interview With Barbara Ehrenreich
First Chapter: 'Nickel and Dimed'
By DOROTHY GALLAGHER
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NICKEL AND DIMED
On (Not) Getting By in America.
By Barbara Ehrenreich.
221 pp. New York:
Metropolitan Books/
Henry Holt & Company. $23.
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n the good times of 1998, with the clock on welfare benefits running out, Barbara Ehrenreich had a question: How, she wondered, would the four million women (most with children) soon to be pushed off the rolls and into the labor market make their way on wages of $6 or $7 an hour -- an amount that it was universally agreed was not a living wage?
Ehrenreich, who has a dozen books behind her dealing with the social and political hallmarks of our economic system, has here, with ''Nickel and Dimed,'' followed in an honored journalistic tradition and written a valuable and illuminating book. Presenting herself as an unskilled worker, a homemaker needing to earn a living after divorce, she entered the low end of the labor market and spent one month in each of three different sections of the country. She looked for the best-paying unskilled job she could get, and hoped to earn enough money at it to pay her rent for a second month. ''So,'' she writes, ''this is not a story of some death-defying 'undercover' adventure. Almost anyone could do what I did -- look for jobs, work those jobs, try to make ends meet. In fact, millions of Americans do it every day, and with a lot less fanfare and dithering.''
Ehrenreich's first stop was her hometown of Key West. She figured that with a $7-an-hour job, and a place to rent costing no more than $500 a month, she would have $400 to $500 a month remaining to spend for food and gas. There were lots of want ads for service jobs in this resort area. Ehrenreich filled out about 20 applications for jobs at supermarkets and hotels. No one called her. So her first revelation was that the vaunted abundance of ads is not a reliable measure of available jobs but serves employers as an insurance policy against the high turnover in the low-wage work force.
Ehrenreich finally got a job as a waitress at an inexpensive family restaurant. Her shift ran from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. Salary: $2.43 an hour plus tips. To find an affordable rent she had to move 30 miles out of town, a 45-minute commute on a crowded two-lane highway. How did her co-workers manage housing? One waitress shared a room in a $250-a-week flophouse; a cook shared a two-room apartment with three others; another worker lived in a van parked behind a shopping center.
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"There was this one young woman . . . who would have a small bag of Doritos . . . and that would be it for lunch. . . . She wasn't dieting. She didn't have any money. . . . We would stop at a convenient store for quote 'lunch' and people just didn't have money in their pockets. By money, I mean, two bucks. That's when I realized that people . . . were not eating because they couldn't afford to. And I asked this one girl . . . 'How do you get through a whole day without eating?' And she said, 'Oh, I get faint by the end of it, I feel dizzy.' So, that's no good."
-- Barbara Ehrenreich, in an audio interview, May 8, 2001.
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''There are no secret economies that nourish the poor,'' Ehrenreich writes. ''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 lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved at a convenience store.'' Without health insurance you risk a small cut becoming infected because you can afford neither a visit to the doctor nor antibiotics.
In the summer tourist slump, Ehrenreich found that her income -- salary plus tips -- dropped from about $7 an hour to $5.15. At that rate the only way to pay her rent was to get a second job. So for a while she worked an 8 a.m.-to-2 p.m. shift at a second restaurant, then rushed to her regular shift at the first -- a 14-hour day of brutal physical work, as anyone who has waitressed for a living knows. With such a schedule she could not, of course, keep her decent housing so far from town. Ehrenreich's new home was an eight-foot-wide trailer parked among others in ''a nest of crime and crack'' where ''desolation rules night and day. . . . There are not exactly people here but what amounts to canned labor, being preserved between shifts from the heat.''
So much for waitressing in Florida. On to Maine and scrubbing floors. Despite plentiful ads for jobs, Portland turned out to be ''just another $6-$7-an-hour town.'' Ehrenreich again took two jobs to make ends meet -- a weekend job in the Alzheimer's ward of a nursing home and a full-time job with a housecleaning service.
At the Merry Maids, the economics were as follows: the customer pays $25 an hour per cleaning person to the service; the service pays $6.65 an hour to each cleaner. ''How poor are they, my co-workers?'' Ehrenreich asks. Half bags of corn chips for lunch; dizziness from malnutrition; an impacted wisdom tooth requiring frantic calls to find a free dental clinic; worries about makeshift child-care arrangements because a licensed day care center at $90 a week is beyond any cleaner's budget; no actual homelessness, no one sleeping in a car, but everyone crowded into housing with far too many others, family and strangers: signs ''of real difficulty if not actual misery.''
And soon, even with two jobs and no children to support, Ehrenreich starts having money trouble. Housing is the killer. She foresees a weekend without food unless she can find charitable help. More than an hour on the phone with various charitable agencies (cost of calls, $2.80) nets her a severely restricted food voucher -- no fresh fruits or vegetables, chicken or cheese -- worth $7.02.
Minneapolis is Ehrenreich's last stop. In this city, as in the other two, finding affordable housing was a major problem. Across the nation the supply of apartments for low-income families is decreasing: 36 units available for every 100 families in need. Like many of the poor, Ehrenreich is reduced to an overpriced motel, more like a flophouse in terms of cleanliness and safety. Borderline homelessness is how she describes it. The old rule that one should pay no more than 30 percent of income for rent has become inoperative; for most poor renters, the figure is now more than 50 percent.
In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where the ''living wage'' for a single parent and one child was calculated to be $11.77 an hour, Ehrenreich has a job at Wal-Mart paying $7 an hour. Many of her fellow workers, even those with working spouses, hold two jobs.
In this way three months went by, and Ehrenreich's investigation was finished. What does she conclude? No surprises here. Even for a worker holding two jobs, wages are too low, housing costs too high for minimally decent survival. ''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.'' But if a living wage for one adult and two children is, according to the Economic Policy Institute, $30,000 a year, a total calculated to include no luxuries unless health insurance and licensed child care are considered luxuries, this amount will never be provided by the private sector to entry-level workers.
''Most civilized nations,'' Ehrenreich writes, ''compensate for the inadequacy of wages by providing relatively generous public services such as health insurance, free or subsidized child care, subsidized housing and effective public transportation.'' So what should we think about the fact that in America we are sending the poor out to make it on their own on little more than a quarter of a living wage? Shame, Ehrenreich suggests, might be an appropriate response.
Ehrenreich's picture of the working poor was taken during the best of times. Yet the comforting economic clichés offered by our pundits failed even under those boom conditions: a rising tide does not lift all boats; trickledown economics stops just south of the middle class. So much for tall theories. Now we have entered a downward slide, with all economic indicators pointing to the toilet.
We have Barbara Ehrenreich to thank for bringing us the news of America's working poor so clearly and directly, and conveying with it a deep moral outrage and a finely textured sense of lives as lived. As Michael Harrington was, she is now our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism.
Dorothy Gallagher's most recent book is ''How I Came Into My Inheritance: And Other True Stories.''
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