Scraping By: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich

Why should Americans care about the poor? This is a question that has been asked rarely during the boom '90s, presumably because low unemployment and the rising stock market have lifted most boats. Also common is the belief -- exemplified by the 1996 welfare reform -- that if you can't make it in these flush times, you don't really deserve to make it at all.

But statistical research tells another story. The Preamble Center for Public Policy, for example, estimated at the height of the boom the odds against a typical welfare recipient landing a job that would provide decent housing and a "living wage" were 97 to 1. The same year, 1998, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute reported that 30 percent of the workforce toiled for under $8 an hour; in other words, at a wage that would barely guarantee subsistence.

So why does the rosy picture of mass economic prosperity persist? One place to look for an answer is Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in Boom-time America. It makes real what the above statistics do not, for Ehrenreich spent two years and six jobs investigating how close of an equation could be made between a minimum-wage job and a life of poverty.

At the urging of her editor at Harper's magazine, Ehrenreich went "undercover" in 1998 to figure out "How does anyone," as she put it, "live on the wages available to the unskilled? And how, in particular, were the 12 million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?"

Her plan was simple. She presented herself as "divorced homemaker re-entering the workforce after many years" and quickly landed jobs as a waitress in Key West, a housecleaner in Portland, Maine, a WalMart "associate" in Minneapolis. But she found that, thanks largely to the lack of affordable housing, she could barely get by.

Ehrenreich's book of investigative essays, and particularly her concluding "Evaluation," should be required reading for anyone who abides by the all-boats-rise theory of economic prosperity. Her co-workers lack health insurance; they have no savings; they certainly do not own their homes, yet they seem to be working all the time.

And when trouble strikes -- in the form of a sick relative, a pregnancy or a work injury -- there is often nowhere to turn. Social service agencies provide inadequate resources. Food kitchens are in crisis. Employers do not come to the rescue, nor does the government in the form of extended sick pay, affordable childcare or adequate low-income housing. One of her co-workers lived in her car; another was pregnant but withering away from lack of food. Many held two jobs.

Just as disturbing for those foreign to low-income work are the labor conditions Ehrenreich describes. And the words she uses are not subtle: they are "authoritarian," "dictatorial" and other adjectives usually associated with life under communism. Ehrenreich is shocked to find that her employers freely search her belongings, chastise her for "gossiping," submit her to personality tests, do not allow bathroom breaks and generally treat her as if she were in high school. She reports that WalMart, the nation's largest private employer, frustrates attempts at unionizing or job negotiating, advocating instead a philosophy to "respect the individual, exceed customers' expectations and strive for excellence."

"You have relative freedom when you're not at work," Ehrenreich said in a telephone interview. "When you're not at work you are a citizen of a democracy and a bill of rights applies to you. But when you enter the workplace, especially in low-wage jobs, you check your civil rights at the door."

This may seem ludicrous to those with job benefits and negotiating power, but Ehrenreich argues that work conditions for low-wage laborers often violate the First and Third Amendments of freedom of speech and right to privacy. "You can be fired at the whim of employers," said Ehrenreich, "because there's no protection [from constitutional infringements] unless you have a union contract."