Almost immediately Ehrenreich discovers she can’t get by at all on the average $7-an-hour jobs she finds. In each locality, even the most squalid housing, in transient motels, flophouses, and single trailers, costs more than she earns. (In Minneapolis there are no rentals available at all in her price range.) She immediately realizes she needs two jobs just to subsist, and even then she falls behind in her rent and to compensate she has to cut corners on things like food and clothing.
Her imagery -- of long, exhausting, dehumanizing hours spent waitressing in grubby restaurants, toiling as a maid in wealthy persons’ homes, and restocking women’s clothing at Wal-Mart -- burned itself onto my mind in such a way that I could barely sleep. I’m not doing this book justice in my cursory description of it; I recommend that you read it yourself. Whatever economic strata of society you may occupy, Ehrenreich’s chronicle of her experiences, and her concise evaluation of what they portend in the grand scheme of things, will change the way you look at life, and employment, in the United States.
The reason Ehrenreich’s images had such power for me is that they brought back all too sharply my own days as a subsistence toiler. From the age of 16 until I was nearly 40, I held down a string of exhausting, demeaning jobs: car hopping at an A&W Root Beer stand, delivering junk mail in South Central Los Angeles, working on an assembly line in a storefront candy “factory,” serving as the “personal companion” to a woman with Meniere’s disease (a position where I exchanged live-in driving, housecleaning, and cooking services for room, board, and $20 cash weekly), and others too numerous (and depressing) to mention. Even after I “graduated” to lower-end editorial work (copy editing and typesetting), I still earned, on the average, betweent $10 and $12 an hour...a step up from minimum wage, but still not much of a hedge against high rents, car-related expenses, and the periodic terror of having to find new (and ever less affordable) housing. In 25+ years of working, I only had health insurance for one brief period, and that was because my then-husband’s job covered us both. All during those years I knew what it meant to always dread the first of the month, to have to let some of my bills slide every month so I could pay the more critical ones, to be grateful for any sort of work I could find...and to gradually slip so far in my own estimation that one morning I woke up and realized that although I desperately needed a decent job simply to survive, I no longer felt I deserved one; my thoughts on the whole subject had become sullen, tangled, and crippling. All my years of being economically marginal had succeeded in whacking my self esteem to a bloody, festering stump. I truly believed I had reached an unbearable level of semi-subsistence, one at which I would remain for the rest of my life, and from which there was no foreseeable escape.
Mind, except for a brief period in my 20’s, I was rarely as economically marginal as the low-wage slaves Ehrenreich describes in her book. I had gradually learned to live by my wits, albeit on a low level. Whenever I didn’t want to confront a 9-to-5, I could always earn slightly above minimum wage as a freelance writer, until it became too difficult to survive. Then it would be necessary to join the “straight” workforce again for awhile. It became a vicious cycle for me: freelancing until bankruptcy or homelessness loomed, then reluctantly hunting up a “day job” and keeping it until mental depression and physical exhaustion made life so joyless that I rebelled and reluctantly went back to freelancing again. (It’s interesting to note that, even though I was earning $10-15 an hour at my editorial jobs, my pay was always less than the cost of living. This contributed to my negative attitude toward holding such jobs, as you might imagine.)
Finally I had a couple of lucky breaks (a modestly successful book, and the extremely fortuitous discovery that catalog copywriting paid much better than newspaper and magazine writing), and I made a few tentative steps up the ladder, being ble to earn the same, or slightly better, living without resorting to a full time job. I must also mention that my partner is a high school science teacher, which means his income pays for the bulk of our expenses while mine can sometimes be used for a few small luxuries, like new clothing or dinner in a moderately-priced restaurant. If we’re really flush, we’re able to take a trip to visit friends in Maine or Massachusetts. We live in a decent rental, located in a very pleasant neighborhood. Paying the rent nearly kills us every month, but there are few, if any, cheaper places available. Nonetheless, taking it all into consideration, ours is a nice life in many ways. Unfortunately, it’s built on sand, as it is for countless other Americans.
We have no medical insurance, and as cancer survivors both of us are acutely aware of that fact. Eric has been looking for a full-time, potentially tenured teaching position for the past two years, since losing his previous job in a departmental shakeup. Since 9/11, New York state has cut everything to bare bones, and many if not all school districts are primarily making do with existing personnel rather than seeking new hires. So Eric has been working as a long-term substitute while he tries to find a permanent position. His pay is about half of what a permanent teacher earns, and it includes no benefits, no sick days, no vacation pay. Still, it’s better than working elsewhere, because it’s keeping Eric in his field, where he can continue to hone his teaching skills and maintain his viability as a teacher. This summer he’s teaching two summer school classes, and perhaps next September he’ll be offered a full-time position with benefits. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.
So why don’t I look for a full time job myself, until Eric finds the teaching position he deserves? Because it probably wouldn’t pay. I can earn close to $100 an hour writing catalog copy, without leaving home (and believe me, I appreciate that more than I can say). Even if I only do copywriting for a finite number of hours (which is the case, as the work is seasonal), I’m still ahead of where I’d be with an editorial job that paid the usual $12-$15 hourly wage and required me to commute into New York City five days a week (110-mile round trip, four hours’ travel time each day). I might get benefits, of course, with such a job, but the added expenses of a working wardrobe, monthly train pass, and the fact that my schedule would probably require that we eat out more often, not to mention all the other hidden costs associated with working every day, make it a dubious proposition.
Yet I must admit that my main reason for not wanting to be a wage slave has nothing to do with any of those things. As much as I often realized I was probably being immature and stubborn for not wanting to hold down an “adult” job in the “real” world, when it came right down to it, I simply couldn’t do it. It wasn’t because I was lazy, or inept, or even unmotivated. It was that I dreaded the emotional numbness that inevitably resulted after working for three, four, five, six months at the same dead-end job, dragging myself to and from work every day, coming home feeling too exhausted to want to do anything, and still not being able to pay my bills. I realized I had two choices: to be poor but emotionally alive, or marginally solvent and totally dead inside.
It’s a sad commentary on life in the United States that to countless working women, my situation probably sounds idyllic. I don’t have kids to raise, I don’t have many financial obligations (I blew them off long ago, so I have no credit to speak of, which is fine with me), and my partner is more than supportive. We can live, more or less, on very little money. If I did need to find a “real” job, I probably wouldn’t have to go to Target or Stop ‘n Shop, the way Barbara Ehrenreich’s working women had to, or become a waitress again (my physical condition is too far gone for that :)). I could probably find editorial or communications-related work; while my resume isn’t the greatest, I’m familiar with creative writing. :)
Still, I am only a few steps away from disaster...a serious illness, suddenly having to find another place to live, or a major financial setback, like Eric suddenly losing his sub job in this economic climate. In many ways, I’m still as marginal as I was in my 20’s and 30’s, even though I’m creeping up on retirement age. I’ve often wondered how much of it is my “fault” (for not insisting on getting a degree of some sort, for not focusing on a “career” rather than my music and writing, for not being more aggressive and less philosophical about life, which after all is nasty, brutish, and short).
But I’m still haunted by the fact that the women in “Nickel and Dimed” work a hundred times harder than I ever have, hold down two jobs in many cases, often work through pain and illness because they can be fired if they miss a day of work, drive themselves past exhaustion on a daily, hourly basis...and still have to sleep in their cars and trucks, or live with family members in cramped conditions, because they simply can’t afford to live any other way. My situation can sometimes seem hopeless to me, but when I think of these workers, and how much they endure without complaining, I can’t help but feel ashamed.
