The Bookworm: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

But if it's hard to think "out of the box," it may be almost impossible to think out of the Big Box. Wal-Mart, when you're in it, is total — a closed system, a world into itself. I get a chill when I'm watching TV in the break room one afternoon and see...a commercial for Wal-Mart. When a Wal-Mart shows up within a television within a Wal-Mart, you have to question the existence of an outer world. Sure, you can drive for five minutes and get somewhere else — to Kmart, that is, or Home Depot, or Target, or Burger King, or Wendy's, or KFC. Wherever you look, there is no alternative to the megascale corporate order, from which every form of local creativity and initiative has been abolished by distant home offices. Even the woods and meadows have been stripped of disorderly life forms and forced into a uniform made of concrete. What you see — highways, parking lots, stores — is all there is, or all that's left to us here in the reign of globalized, totalized, paved-over, corporate everything. I like to read the labels to find out where the clothing we sell is made — Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Brazil — but the labels serve only to remind me that none of these places is "exotic" anymore, that they've been eaten by the great blind profit making global machine.

I was supposed to read this in freshman Rhetoric, but I didn’t. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich had just been published and those in the Rhetoric Department at Iowa were head over heels in love with it. I bet it was required reading for every freshman that year. It may still be.

Like I said, I didn’t read it. I didn’t read a lot of stuff during my first years of college, and my grades reflected it. (Here’s a tip on how to do well in college: Go to class and read. Simple, right? Apparently not, because it took me two years to realize it.) I remember sitting through the Nickel and Dimed discussions in class and thinking, “Shit. This book sounds interesting.” I finally read it two weeks ago.

So here’s the premise: Barbara Ehrenreich, a well establish upper-middle class writer living in South Florida, becomes a minimum-wage worker to see what life is like for the millions of Americans working for five or six bucks an hour. After a preface, the book is divided into four sections: 1) She works as a waitress and hotel cleaner in Key West, 2) She moves to Maine and works as a maid and nursing home assistant, 3) She works at Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, and 4) Conclusion.

I’m in love with nonfiction and stories of the human and American experience, so I really enjoyed reading this book. Her accounts of trying to find a job, a place to live, and just get by and feed herself reminded me of my struggle in Santa Cruz. The accounts of her jobs and the people she worked with also reminded me of my experiences as a low-wage worker. My job at UCI has made me complacent and spoiled and I’ve forgotten how much a few of my other jobs sucked. I’d be reading along and think, “Holy shit, I forgot about strict, 15-minute breaks and inflexible bosses.”

Ehrenreich is an honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. I’m unsure if she’s a democratic socialist or a social democrat (yes, there’s a big difference), but, regardless, it’s obvious what her opinions on wages, overtime, and unions are. It was intriguing to see how, after years of teaching and writing and living the good life (being able to afford health care, good food, entertainment, and exotic wine), a big lefty could adjust to life on the lower rungs of America’s socio-economic ladder. She was able to get by, but barely. If she didn’t have her other life and money to fall back on I have no doubt she would have struggled much more. You know you’re in trouble when you work seven days a week and can’t pay the bills.

As someone who has struggled to find work and get by, I completely sympathized with her. In Santa Cruz I applied at every grocery store, bookstore, and for every university opening I was qualified for. When I didn’t have a temp job I called Manpower at least once a day to ask if there were any new assignments. With only $10 I would walk into Safeway, pick out about $15 worth of food on sale, and go to the register hoping my club card would make up the difference (thankfully it always did). I remember when dinner was four pieces of buttered bread. I also remember trying to find a place to live, rooming above my cousin’s garage in the meantime. I remember the dozens of rooms I looked at and the people who never called me back. It was easy for me to feel her frustration and uncertainty.

But it was easy for me to criticize her. She was spoiled and made a few bad decisions. In each location she lived alone, a luxurious option a lot of low-wage workers don’t have. Though I had my own room in Santa Cruz, I lived in a house with two other people. Even now, with a steady job, I still don’t have my own place. Ehrenreich lived in a backyard cottage, trailer, numerous hotel rooms, and an efficiency apartment. Ehrenreich wrote that many of her co-workers shared rooms or trailers (in one case a woman lived in the back of her truck), but I don’t remember her thinking to do the same. If she had invited one of the people she befriend to live with her it would have at most halved the rent, freeing-up a few hundred bucks.

One instance in Minneapolis especially irked me: She refused a job at Menards because she had to work 10 hours without overtime, even though it paid more than Wal-Mart, her eventual employer. Without a job, she was in no position to ask for time-and-a-half for two hours. When you’re unemployed you take what you can get, especially if it pays more. Sure, it’s shady and probably illegal for a business to make it’s employee’s work more than eight hours without overtime, but you have to take that shit. (A lot of businesses, like one I worked for, only pays overtime if you work more than 40 hours in a week.) If you’re starving you have nothing to whine about.

Last thing: I love the quote I used at the top. I completely agree with her. Buy local!