Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
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Book Summary Information
Author: Barbara EhrenreichEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-05-01
ISBN: 0805063897
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
Book Review: The result of a social war against millions of workers!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is a rich, sometimes moving, sometimes enraging trip to a land that more and more millions of people in the US inhabit. The world where you work minimum wage or little better jobs, with no benefits, often no vacations, no union representation, and often no respect for your personal dignity. Scores of millions of people work these jobs. And everywhere else from Universities to coal mines, management is trying to push workers with more rights, pay and benefits back into the conditions of these workers.
Ehrenreich's gift here is that she focuses as much on how this effects the hearts and spirits of the workers she meets and lives among, as she does the economics, or the physical difficulties. She is very honest about what was rough and what was too rough for her to take.
It is an inditement of the culture of this country, that this excellent book is one of the only ways you can learn about this life. No one should miss this. Moreover, instead using condemning these workers as immigrants who should not be here, unintelligent, or shiftless folks, we should read this book to see how the same difficulties and more were the lot of this Ph. D and powerful intellectual in great physical shape for her age.
It is not some kind of ignorance that makes the lives of these workers so miserable, but corporate policies designed to continue their exploitation as well as the complicty of the big business controled government.
Ehrenreich's visit to minimum wage world has its limitations, but those limitations emphasize how much more difficult this world is to live in, than the bleak picture she paints in this wonderful book.
Ehrenreich isn't permanently anchored to the jobs she works unlike scores of millions of workers in this this country. She can always get back to her life. She take lengthy breaks to return to her life as a well-paid lecturer, writer, and general social democratic whiz. She relys on her regular personal network of friends and family and a distant boy-friend for emotional support. She worked too short in jobs and quit several times when things got to be too much for her.
The real world she explores is permanent for tens of millions of workers in this country. The same trends are taking place in the industrialized countries of Western Europe and Japan, in some places quicker than here, and some places slower.
Most people outside of the working class are ignorant of this world and its divisions. Someone here thinks the UPS workers are in this world. But, No one in the low wage, or even high paid working class, would confuse UPS workers with low wage unorganized workers that Ehrenreich talks about. UPS workers are protected by one of the best Teamster contracts other than MasterFreight--a contract earned by a hard-fought and successful strike several years ago. UPS workers probably start at around 15 or 16 bucks an hour with full medical and dental benefits and regular vacations and sick time.
I have a good friend who was in an awful auto accident who was flat out told by his doctors that had he not been protected by the full medical benefits that the Teamsters had won for him, that they could not have brought him back to being able to walk and function on his own. That's the essential thing. None of these workers in the places Ehrenreich works are unionized, one of the key factors that Ehrenreich rightly points to in creating these problems.
Ehrenreich illustrates what the job market is for many if not most workers without skills, particularly if you are older, particularly if you are not hooked up with family, friends, or if your friends or family are in the same or worse condition you are. She also shows the basic crisis that exists in regard to housing which yields not only homelessness, but the floating working homeless who live in cars or run down motels.
Her point isn't how to avoid this. Ehrenreich has already done this by gaining a Ph. D. in biology and becoming one of the country's top writers on social issues. Her goal is to show how a larger and larger percentage of workers live and are exploited and oppressed.
She's not talking about anything exceptional but what is becoming the rule in employment. After all, one of her worst examples is when she worked for Walmart,THE LARGEST EMPLOYER IN THE UNITED STATES IF NOT THE WORLD. She also wrote in a time of economic boom and labor shortage. In fact, she sought out areas where there was a job shortage and where living conditions were supposed to be more affordable than elsewhere.
She's not talking about making 6 bucks an hour in 1978, but in the late 90s. I can remember working in a now-defunct department store where other employees envied the fact that I made $4.50 an hour. Like Ehrenreich, I couldn't imagine what the single mothers working throughout the store did to make ends meet, though they were doing the kind of work Ehrenreich did at Walmart. Every Thursday when the hours for employees were posted around the time clock, I would see some of these women begging and even crying to the supervisor for more time for more hours, because nobody in the store except the automechanics made 40 hours a week.
Ehrenreich's book also gives a face to how many occupations once done by professionals or even owners of their own business are now industrialized, done by national, and international corporations who study how to reduce the work force to its most atomised, hard worked, and least paid. Gone is the neighborhood store owned by someone from the neighborhood, and who but the very well off does their shopping any more in stores that can afford to have professional sales people who make a decent living who have time to learn something about the products they sell to wait on you. Gone for the most part are the mom and pop restaurants and diners operated by a family.
They are replaced by operations where everything an employee does is timed, controlled, and disciplined with one thought in mind, maximizing profits and minimizing the rights and dignity and independence of the work force.
Yet, this is no natural process of modernization like the car replacing the horse and buggy. It is part of a bipartisan social war, the same social war that has resulted in the greatest concentration of wealth in the hands of the big business owners in the history of this country, the same bipartisan social war that has reduced the minimal social benefits that once existed. In a series of industries like the airlines, Western coal, and meat packing, a constant campaign has been waged to change the status of workers, their pay, their benefits, and to oust unions.
If workers think that their vaunted skills are what keeps their wages high, they should look at the airlines. Despite the highly-skilled techinically demanding nature of airline jobs, management is constant drive to push back unionization, pay, and benefits in the airlines. The airlines have even tried to end end the professional status of pilots. As it is today they are shunting more and more flights onto non-union affiliates where pilots receive lower wages.
Even in college teaching, which I do part-time, the same process has taken place in the past 20 years. At most universities and colleges, you are very lucky if an undergraduate student gets taught by an actual tenured professor who has job security, benefits, and a professional salary. They are more likely to be taught by graduate assistants who get paid not much more than the people Ehrenreich describes and who have to have extra jobs to live or by adjunct professors (which I do). An Adjunct is just a fancy word for a temp with no job security, no benefits, and no hope of ever getting a permanent teaching job. What professors did twenty years ago to become heads of their departments, or even deans at their universities, are now being attempted by newly minted Ph. Ds and MFAs in the often vain hope of getting a starter job. Indeed, most full-time professors I know at the college I teach at take on extra classes at our college or others to make ends meet.
The real question involved is unionization and political action. Working people have to fight back against the social and economic war against us. Whether a job pays well has nothing to do with the amount of skill involved. Ehrenreich shows that most low paid jobs she worked require significant skills.
Good paying jobs with benefits are a result of unionization. Truck drivers before the great Teamster organization drives of the 1930s, Autoworkers before the UAW organized the big three in the 1930s and 1940s, and railroad workers before the great organizing drives led by Eugene V Debs at the end of the 19th Century used to be considered low-paid jobs done by dumb workers who didn't deserve benefits or consideration. People who worked in stores or restaurants like Ehrenreich did in her book were then considered of higher status and pay.
Things are different now, only because of unionization. For those liberals who think that this is all due to some satanic evil embodied in Bush, I remind you that Ehrenreich's experience took place during the Clinton "boom."
Of course, the Teamsters, the autoworkers, and the rail workers weren't unionized by the kind of business unionism most unions practice today. They didn't organize themselves by depending on the Democratic and Republican politicians or by trying to "get along" with management.
They were organized by mobilizing the masses of working people in and out of these industries for political, economic, and sometimes physical battle with the corporations and the police and government that stood behind them. They were organized by reaching out to the unemployed, to immigrants, to minorities, to farmers, to young people outside of these industries and showing that the fight for the union advanced their cause.
This is what we need today.
Summary of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
The New York Times bestseller, and one of the most talked about books of the year, Nickel and Dimed has already become a classic of undercover reportage.
Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate strategies for survival. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way America perceives its working poor.
Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.
Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate strategies for survival. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way America perceives its working poor.
Essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich has always specialized in turning received wisdom on its head with intelligence, clarity, and verve. With some 12 million women being pushed into the labor market by welfare reform, she decided to do some good old-fashioned journalism and find out just how they were going to survive on the wages of the unskilled--at $6 to $7 an hour, only half of what is considered a living wage. So she did what millions of Americans do, she looked for a job and a place to live, worked that job, and tried to make ends meet.
As a waitress in Florida, where her name is suddenly transposed to "girl," trailer trash becomes a demographic category to aspire to with rent at $675 per month. In Maine, where she ends up working as both a cleaning woman and a nursing home assistant, she must first fill out endless pre-employment tests with trick questions such as "Some people work better when they're a little bit high." In Minnesota, she works at Wal-Mart under the repressive surveillance of men and women whose job it is to monitor her behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. She even gets to experience the humiliation of the urine test.
So, do the poor have survival strategies unknown to the middle class? And did Ehrenreich feel the "bracing psychological effects of getting out of the house, as promised by the wonks who brought us welfare reform?" Nah. Even in her best-case scenario, with all the advantages of education, health, a car, and money for first month's rent, she has to work two jobs, seven days a week, and still almost winds up in a shelter. As Ehrenreich points out with her potent combination of humor and outrage, the laws of supply and demand have been reversed. Rental prices skyrocket, but wages never rise. Rather, jobs are so cheap as measured by the pay that workers are encouraged to take as many as they can. Behind those trademark Wal-Mart vests, it turns out, are the borderline homeless. With her characteristic wry wit and her unabashedly liberal bent, Ehrenreich brings the invisible poor out of hiding and, in the process, the world they inhabit--where civil liberties are often ignored and hard work fails to live up to its reputation as the ticket out of poverty. --Lesley Reed
Economics Books
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