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...
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…
