Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (Owl Books, 2002)Reviewed by Kya Ogyn

Published in off our backs January-February 2005

Can you live on it? Barbara couldn't. Barbara Ehrenreich, a well-known writer with a feminist and leftist perspective, spent three non-consecutive months between 1998 and 2000 working at the jobs she could get without using her educational and professional history. Presenting herself as a recently divorced homemaker, her stated intent was to see if she could support herself on the wages likely to be offered to "the four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform."

Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, for a maid service, as a dietary aide and as a Wal-Mart employee, often working more than one job at a time. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is the story of these months.

Ehrenreich perceived what she was doing as an experiment that had rules. She ruled out going hungry or homeless, and she would always have a car, which would be paid for with her "real life" credit card. She would take the best-paid job she could get and do her best to keep it--“no Marxist rants or sneaking off to the ladies' room to read novels." She would "take the cheapest accommodations I could find, at least the cheapest that offered an acceptable level of safety and privacy, though my standards in this regard were hazy and, as it turned out, prone to deterioration over time."

So what is the point of this experiment? Ehrenreich clearly understood that she was not going to come out of it knowing what it was like to be a member of the working poor. "With all the real-life assets I've built up in middle age--bank account, IRA, health insurance, multiroom home--waiting indulgently in the background, there was no way I was going to `experience poverty'." She also knew going in that it was highly unlikely that she would succeed at her goal of matching income to expenses. In the introduction to the book she cites these statistics: In 1998, an hourly wage of $8.89 was needed to afford a onebedroom apartment; the odds were about 97 to 1 of a typical welfare recipient getting such a job, and almost 30% of the American workforce worked for $8 an hour or less. If her purpose was to publicize life among the poorest 20% of Americans, then a book based on interviews with people who actually live it would have had a stronger base in reality. The interview she did with Caroline, "someone doing in real life what I am doing only in the service of journalism," is one of the most effective parts of the book.

I think the actual purpose of Ehrenreich's experiment becomes clear when identifying the intended audience. What we have is a successful, affluent writer addressing members of her own class. Her intent is to tell people who have never experienced it something of what it is like to work at jobs that do not pay enough to live on. Even more importantly, her intent is to say that her experience "is the best-case scenario: a person with every advantage that ethnicity and education, health and motivation can confer attempting, in a time of exuberant prosperity, to survive in the economy's lower depths."

How did this best-case scenario play out? Take the second of her months, the one she considered to be the most successful. In Portland, Maine, a largely white city she chose in order to remove racism as a factor in her experiment, she worked seven days a week earning "approximately $300 a week after taxes and paying $480 a month rent." The cost of the motel room she rented, not the cheapest available (which she declined because the shared kitchen was also an unknown man's sleeping place), would have skyrocketed to $390 per week during the summer tourist season. This meant she would have had to save enough for a deposit and first month's rent, and with efficiency apartments "running well over $500" would have been paying close to 50% of her wages. Ehrenreich identifies the lack of affordable housing (housing costing less than 30% of income) as a primary problem for the working poor. In addition to this, her jobs--full time for a residential cleaning company and, on weekends, as a dietary aide--were physically demanding, and the cleaning job was often demeaning. Employees of "The Maids" were not allowed to drink even a glass of water while in a client's home and were required to scrub floors on hands and knees. So while income equaled expenses during the one month, in order for that to continue both Ehrenreich and her car would have had to stay healthy and she would have had to sustain the seven-day-a-week work schedule.

Nickel and Dimed is a needed work--engaging, well-researched and written in a directly personal style. Ehrenreich succeeds beautifully in conveying to her middle-class audience that she is just like them and that since she could not support herself, never mind a family, on the jobs available to her, the problem lies in the system of low-paid work, not in the workers. However, beyond my regret that Ehrenreich was perhaps correct in considering her authoritative, middle-class voice necessary to make this point, I have two problems with this book. One is that, although she writes, "low-wage workers are no more homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less likely to be funny or bright," she comes to the conclusion that Barb, who works for Wal-Mart, is "meaner and slyer" than Barbara the writer, and "more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I'd hoped." Although poverty can have a brutalizing effect on some people, there are demonstrably grudge-holders among the rich and powerful who are not very smart.

My second problem lies with Ehrenreich's attitudes toward fat people. The book contains numerous disdainful comments and one very disturbing rant--"We live in fear of being crushed by some wide-body as she hurtles through the narrow passage from Faded Glory to woman size, lost in fantasies involving svelte Kathie Lee sheaths." It is unfortunate that a political writer of her caliber has not only not examined fat hatred, but has contributed to it.

While writing this, I watched President Bush introduce Carlos Gutierrez, his nominee for Secretary of Commerce. Bush presented Gutierrez as an embodiment of the American dream, one who rose from immigrant poverty by way of an entry-level job in a large corporation to CEO of that Fortune 500 company--a person, Bush said, who understands the importance of job creation. This is the heart of the capitalist myth that the answer to poverty is a job, any job, and that a society where an individual may rise to wealth is a successful one. This is not just untrue--it is a damn lying reversal. Instead, the jobs held by the "working poor," the ones no one can live on, are a major contributor to the vast wealth enjoyed by the owner class and the relative wealth of the professional-managerial class.

As Ehrenreich writes. "The 'working poor' are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor to everyone else."

In a successful society every person would have enough good food to eat, comfortable, safe housing, access to education and health care. In a successful society every person's work would be valued and each person would be valued more than the product of her labor. In a successful society the welfare of all would be the bottom line.