Nickel and Dimed: Poverty and Low-Wage Work in America

The Trap of Low-Wage Service Work

In Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, workers trapped in dead-end service sector jobs have virtually no chance of escaping poverty or obtaining any meaningful quality of life. That is one of the book's central themes: a constant struggle for mere subsistence against a high cost of living and a very poor quality of life. These jobs share the same defining features — employees are treated as expendable, pay is too low to survive on, and benefits are often nonexistent. They are disproportionately filled by women, young people, and immigrants, and they offer no real future, much less a path to middle-class status.

When Ehrenreich wrote this book, the Great Recession had not yet begun, so this type of work was plentiful. As she discovered, employers ran want ads almost continuously due to high turnover. She identified one primary reason why poverty rates and income inequality have skyrocketed in the United States over the past thirty years: a service economy built on wages too low to sustain workers, with conditions that trap them in permanent precarity.

Surviving in Key West: Housing and the First Jobs

In Chapter Two, Ehrenreich described how she began her experiment to determine how well workers could survive at or near the minimum wage in her hometown of Key West, Florida. At first she worried that friends might recognize her, but "during a month of poverty and toil, no one recognizes my face or my name, which goes for the most part unnoticed and for the most part unuttered" (Ehrenreich 11). This theme of the sheer anonymity and facelessness of low-wage workers recurs throughout the chapter, since they are treated as disposable and expendable commodities that can easily be replaced.

Her first major problem was finding affordable housing. Key West was an extremely expensive town for those earning $6–7 per hour, as were most large cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco, where "tourists and the wealthy compete for living space with those who clean their toilets and fry their hash browns" (Ehrenreich 12). She ultimately settled on renting a cabin thirty miles outside of town for $500 a month, which required a 30–45 minute commute each day. After saving enough money, she paid $1,100 to rent a trailer closer to Key West in a neighborhood described as a "nest of crime and crack," lacking basic services such as a supermarket, bank, or laundromat (Ehrenreich 39).

Finding a low-level service job was simply a matter of filling out applications at supermarkets, hotels, and convenience stores and waiting for someone to quit or be fired. By the 1990s, 81% of all large employers required a drug screening as a precondition for hiring, which tended to flag marijuana users above all others (Ehrenreich 14). Ehrenreich eventually obtained a waitressing job that paid approximately $2.00 an hour plus tips; once tips were factored in, her earnings came to roughly $7 an hour. Even managers were not particularly well compensated, averaging only about $400 a week, though they were at least permitted to sit down — while servers who were not actively waiting tables were "sweeping, scrubbing, refilling, and restocking" (Ehrenreich 18). No matter that managers were largely promoted from the working class; once they crossed over to the corporate side, a clear divide separated them from lower-level employees.

Workplace Conditions, Solidarity, and Dehumanization

In this workplace of menial jobs where unions were almost never permitted, Ehrenreich did not observe much working-class solidarity. She sympathized with George, a 19-year-old Czech immigrant who worked as a dishwasher and shared an apartment with other immigrant workers, sleeping only when one of the beds became available. He was later accused of stealing from the dry-storage room but had not yet been fired by the time she walked out of the job. Her failure to defend him troubled her deeply. This inaction made her feel as though "something new — something loathsome and servile — had infected me," and she reflected that if she had continued that job for another month or two she might "have turned into a different person altogether — say, the kind of person who might have turned George in" (Ehrenreich 41).

Something about this work was even worse than the low pay, absent benefits, and difficult supervisors. That something might best be described as the dehumanizing effect it had on a person's character over months and years. The working poor in these environments were not simply underpaid — they were steadily stripped of the social dignity and sense of agency that shape a person's identity and moral self-perception.

Works Cited

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Metropolitan Books, 2001, 2008.