Gender Roles at Work

Building a Middle Class Life on the Backs of the Poor

When she wrote Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America., Barbara Ehrenreich did not set out with the intention of making her readers feel sorry for the subjects of the book, who are workers who scrub floors and hand up clothes in discount stores and help care for older citizens in nursing homes and for all of this hard work receive extremely low wages and often no benefits. She wouldn't mind if you felt compassion for such workers, who often hold down two or three jobs, working sixty or seventy or eighty hours a week, and yet still can't afford to pay medical bills or for decent housing. Most of these workers are women, and many of them are racial minorities, and so in addition to asking you to remember the problems that being poor brings with it she is reminding her readers that women and minorities pay a steeper price for being poor than do white men.

But beyond these points, which have been made by many other writers, she has another argument that she wants to convince us of, which is the fact that low-wage workers - who are most clearly epitomized by Walmart's employees, many of whom could not feed their families without government hand-outs, despite the fact that they are working full-time - are supporting the rest of society. If so many workers were not being exploited by companies, then the rest of us could not live middle-class (or upper-class) lives. Thus when we see someone working in a car wash or mopping the floor in a hospital or washing the dishes in a restaurant, we should not think that the workers holding these jobs are less qualified than those who hold better-paying jobs. We should not scorn them, but nor should our primary response be that of pity. We should instead feel some combination of gratitude and guilt that because other people work so hard and so long that we have a far better standard of living than we would otherwise.

This central idea of Ehrenreich's will in all likelihood shock and even offend many of her readers. Most people who have achieved middle-class standing and some measure of personal success in their lives would like to believe that they have gotten to such a position through their own hard work. And of course in many ways this is true: Often people succeed in life in large measure because they have worked hard and because they have certain talents that make them valuable in the workplace. Ehrenreich is not denying any of this: She acknowledges that talent and ambition and hard work can pay off. However, she is also arguing that they can only pay off in a significant way for some people and they can only pay off for those people within an overall workplace context in which many workers - mostly women - are fundamentally exploited.

One of the most appealing aspects of the argument that she makes in the book is that she approaches the situation with an acerbic sense of humor as she relates her own forays into low-wage jobs and the kind of indignities that attend those jobs.

Best Western, Econo Lodge, and HoJo's all let me fill out application forms, and these are, to my relief, mostly interested in whether I am a legal resident of the United States and have committed any felonies. My next stop is Winn-Dixie, the supermarket, which turns out to have a particularly onerous application process, featuring a twenty-minute "interview" by computer since, apparently, no human on the premises is deemed capable of representing the corporate point-of-view. I am conducted to a large room decorated with posters illustrating how to look "professional" (it helps to be white and, if female, permed). (p. 13).

Throughout the book, Ehrenreich argues that every single person in the United States who is not working an unpaid, minimum-wage job owes some measure of their prosperity to the underpaid workers who fall below him or her on the wage scale. And while her research is specific to the United States, her findings are broadly applicable to any First World nation, and has implications for workers in the Third World as well. This latter is a topic that she and a number of other social critics have written about before, the way in which First World citizens are dependent upon Third World citizens - who frequently work in conditions so appalling that if those factories were transported to the United States would result in the arrests of all those responsible. This is a part of the story that she is telling in this work, that while the middle classes and upper classes in the United States can only maintain the life that they are used to by exploiting poorer workers, essentially all Americans (and this applies to citizens of other First World countries) are dependent upon the labor of workers in the Third World. And just as those at the bottom of the First World workforce tend to be women and racial minorities, the workers at the bottom of the entire global workforce structure tend to be women in Third and Fourth World countries.

The economics of the situation are simple, and the appeal to the companies involved is obvious, in no small part because the real costs in human terms are often hidden from those who benefit most from them. In an earlier work, Ehrenreich spelled out the differential in pay between First and Third World workforces, a differential that has tended to drive more and more jobs away from countries like the United States while at the same time allowing First World citizens to ignore the conditions under which their clothes are made and their food is harvested:

It doesn't take more than second-grade arithmetic to understand what's happening. In the U.S., an assembly-line worker is likely to earn, depending on her length of employment, between $3.10 and $5 an hour. In many Third World countries, a woman doing the same work will earn $3 to $5 a day.

And so, almost everything that can be packed up is being moved out to the Third World: garment manufacture, textiles, toys, footwear, pharmaceuticals, wigs, appliance parts, tape decks, computer components, plastic goods. In some industries, like garment and textile, American jobs are lost in the process, and the biggest losers are women, often black and Hispanic. But what's going on is much more than a matter of runaway shops. Economists are talking about a "new international division of labor," in which the process of production is broken down and the fragments are dispersed to different parts of the world, while control over the overall process and technology remains safely at company headquarters in "first world" countries (http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2002/ehrenreich.asp).