Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

You ever have one of those crazy bosses?

She would blast ecological sounds so loudly we had to ask her to turn it down (our jobs included listening to actors read lines). Another time, she called in sick because she was "wafting vapors." She always brought up her education in conversation. She never seemed to actually do any work, but instead worked on her novel, using company resources to write it. And she was strangely preoccupied with "ganja" to the point that she used it as her password, a fact she was only too happy to share. "Wafting vapors" indeed.

After I finished reading Nickel and Dimed, I was convinced Ehrenreich was my former boss. A highly-educated journalist with an arch tone, she blesses us all with her insights by going undercover as a poor person and trying to get by. Which is a bit like the scene from Aladdin when the princess slips out into the real world.

You see, Ehrenreich wants to help people. She really does, and she views things in a sort of black and white, my way or the highway sort of charitable aggressiveness. She's an ideological bully, the kind that is impossible to argue with because she cloaks herself with the cause of the underdog.

And that's a shame, because Ehrenreich's absolutely right in what she uncovers: that the poor can't get by on minimum wage salaries in the year 2000. The only way to survive is to have a partner, she concludes, but with that comes the baggage of living with another person, possibly children, and all that entails. And yet, Ehrenreich's experiment lacks precisely that - when she is given the opportunity o move in with a friend, she turns it down.

Ehrenreich isn't a poor person. In fact, she is so NOT poor that she secretly feels she should be treated differently because she's better educated, or because she's a journalist, or because she's trying to help people when clearly bosses are greedy and poor people are too weak to fend for themselves.

In my first job, I worked in a factory. I've come a long way from that factory job, but it taught me a lot as a high school student. And what's missing most from Ehrenreich's tour in Poor People Land is that these people aren't characters in her book; they're real people. Ehrenreich never seems to detach herself from her upbringing, although she would have us believe otherwise. The signs, if you read carefully, are there.

The one that really turned me off was the fact that Ehrenreich, due to an "indiscretion," smokes pot when she knows she'll be going on job interviews. Now either Ehrenreich didn't know job interviews required drug testing, which speaks poorly to her journalistic abilities, or she has a fondness for pot she fails to disclose as part of who she is. From there it's railing against the system of drug testing, a charge that becomes shrill when she beats the test and sees that as further evidence that drug testing is dumb. There are lots of hard working poor folks who aren't smoking pot before job interviews, and Ehrenreich isn't doing the underrepresented poor any favors by succumbing to the stereotype.

The other hypocrisy is that Ehrenreich bristles at psychological tests. I agree with her, I hated those tests too. She objects to the tone of the questions and their underlying agenda, but the back of the book contains a "reader's guide" that asks such loaded questions as, "have you ever been homeless, unemployed, without health insurance, or held down two jobs? What is the lowest-paying job you ever held and what kind of help--if any--did you need to improve your situation?" The lack of self-awareness rife throughout the book is breathtaking.

The final indignity is when Ehrenreich, the educated white woman who knows better, decides on a lark to start a union at Wal-Mart. Heedless of what the consequences might be, she just skips right out of that final job into her conclusions. Never mind that Ehrenreich was intentionally rabble-rousing workers who, if they had decided to try to form a union, could have all lost their jobs. And where would that leave them, while Ehrenreich went back to her comfortable house?

But if you can look past that, and I'm sure a lot of people can't, the book's messages are sound. The end result of a capitalist system in America is ultimately hostile to itself. The rich need the poor to work as cheaply and inexpensively as possible, and this form of human labor market ultimately degrades the bottom ranks until they rebel. Ehrenreich doesn't have any answers as to why the poor haven't rebelled already and instead concludes with navel-gazing reader's guide.

Nickel and Dimed should be required reading for CEOs everywhere who are often responsible for the fates of thousands of peoples' livelihoods. I just wish Ehrenreich hadn't written it.