Nickle & Dimed

Sometimes I think that I am too frugal.  I could just buy the thing I don’t need, take the trip beyond what I can afford, and stay out late with friends at spendy night joints.  Instead I cook my meals in, pay my bills every month, and take lots of walks for entertainment.  Still, this is nothing like trying to support myself on minimum wage.  Barbara Ehrenreich wrote the, now rather old, journalistic book Nickel and Dimed in 2001, which I’ve only just read.

Ehrenreich goes undercover and works as a waitress, maid, and store clerk in a variety of US cities.  She is a middle-aged, doctorate-holding career woman.  Nobody blinks as she enters each town and job.  Nobody gives her a break as she tries to get a meal from food banks or find affordable housing.  In fact, she fits in just a little too well for comfort.  Every day Ehrenreich works hard at her tasks and comes away realizing that she can’t do this work and be the same woman as before.  She has entered the realm of those whose work is unvalued.  She has felt the correlation of discovering herself to be unvalued.

So would you or I. 

Ten years later, I believe that the only real difference in American life is the lack of easily acquired work.  Unskilled workers, which Ehrenreich correctly defines as workers skilled in physical capacities, perhaps learned while working, may still find jobs.  Should they exist, I do not believe that the jobs are better paid, better hours, or even sufficiently houred. 

Doubtless, Ehrenreich could have lived her study differently.  She made finite forays into cities, not the country-side.  She had few ideas or connections in the areas she chose.  She stumbled into a couple of unexpected drawbacks.  She didn’t use any government programs.  Maybe certain changes would have completely transformed her experience.  For example, maybe she could earn a living by applying to higher level jobs with her actual resume.

Reading this social documentary a decade later and finding no particular ease on the subject, even though the piece is still one that gets mentioned and noticed, is unsettling.  Although we can see many issues that have arrived in the last half century, this particular issue has existed during prior eras in America.  Is it in fact, universally present? 

What Ehrenreich hasn’t discovered, and I really want to know, is why has America allowed unlivable wages for work?  How do we resolve the situation of the woman working every day whose aspiration is to be able to take a day off work, if she had to, and still be able to buy groceries for the next day?

Although Ehrenreich and I have lived different lives, in different times, and with different values, on this issue we are united.  There is hard work to be done, and many people have more things piled against them than they know, but when one person’s sweat doesn’t even buy enough bread, how well has our affluent society exercised the ideal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?