Nickel and Dimed – on (not) getting by in America

by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)

Review by Dr. Craig Harding

Exploring class struggles is not a particularly new topic of inquiry.  Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil; or the Two Nations and Frederick Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England were written in the 1840s and even George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier was written 90 years ago. Yet it seems like very little has changed as a result of these exposés as shown in Barbara Ehrenreich’s work that is a hybrid of investigative journalism and ethnography. Intrigued by George Bush jr’s comments that all work provides dignity, Ehrenreich enters the job market as a 50-ish year old divorcee housewife who has no job experience. Relegated to the lowest paying jobs, she investigates how workers in the lowest paying jobs are able to survive and if dignity is possible.

It is important to understand the perspective Ehrenreich brought to this project (she died in 2022). She grew up in a union oriented working class family - her father was a miner in Butte, Montana but furthered his education and become a CEO at Gillette. Ehrenreich got her PhD in cellular immunology and taught courses on women and health. As a journalist for Harpers, she was a political activist who had been described as "a myth buster by trade", "a veteran muckraker”, a socialist, a feminist and many other ‘ists’. To get a broad understanding of the experience of low paid workers, Ehrenreich works for a month each in three different parts of the United States – Key West, Florida, Portland, Maine and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

As she lacked job skills, Ehrenreich necessarily takes jobs in the lowest paid sector of the economy. Working as a waitress at a family style restaurant located at a hotel parking lot in Key West, the $2.15 an hour plus tips she earns barely allows her to afford rent in a shabby, efficiency apartment that is fifty kilometers away. While she gets along with her workers, she realizes her working arrangements are not financially sustainable so she tries to take on a second job at another restaurant then as a housekeeper at the nearby hotel. Physically unable to do two jobs she quits her jobs after her boss becomes verbally abusive.

Next, Ehrenreich moves to Portland in the shoulder season for tourism, where the best work she can find is at a national brand house cleaners. There, she earns $6.65 an hour while the owner charges the client $25.00 an hour for each member of the cleaning team. Again, needing a second job to afford to rent a small apartment, Ehrenreich takes on a weekend job at a nursing home. Ehrenreich works with the same cleaning staff and develops great compassion for them as their demanding work schedule causes them to make the house appear clean rather than actually be clean. She describes numerous experiences of clients seeking to exert their superiority over the workers even requiring them to be on their knees while scrubbing floors. When one of her colleagues gets pregnant the rest of them rally to support her and ensure she eats properly despite the hectic schedule.

Her final work location is at a Walmart in Minneapolis, where, as usual, she struggles to be able to afford accommodation and food. As she seeks social assistance, she regularly is denied access through a series of measures that prevent support to many applicants. Although she was offered a bob at a hardware chain, the eleven hour shifts with no overtime seem to daunting so she accepts the job at Walmart. The atrocious work experiences and demeaning treatment cause her to start agitating for unionization but she quits before this idea takes hold.

Ehrenreich concludes the experiences with her thoughts on the nature of dignity in the lowest paid sectors of the economy. Subject to drug tests, constant surveillance, verbal abuse and distrust, workers feel unworthy, and start to believe that the wages they receive are reflective of their actual worth. Citing health care, affordable child care, lack of affordable housing and public transportation, the private sector is unable and unwilling to provide wages necessary for an adequate standard of living for all workers and is becoming too expensive for even middle-class families. By all appearances, their struggling to get by results in the working poor not being seen as existing in ‘acute distress’ characterized by an ‘unstainable lifestyle’ of ‘chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment.’

My final eye opener was Ehrenreich’s comment that the working poor are the major philanthropists in a society. They neglect their own children, live in substandard housing, eat unhealthily, and generally neglect their own health to ensure the houses of others are clean, the meals of patrons are served perfectly, and they ensure that prices remain low and affordable to everyone else, but themselves.

While I vicariously understand the challenges facing the working class poor, this book made the experiences much more visceral. The efforts just to survive while constantly being faced with administrative bureaucracy and denials of support bring to life the acute distress faced by a silent sector of out society. While reading, I asked myself what can I do about this? I boycott the worst offenders of these practices, tip well and treat all workers in a respectful manner – but I know this will not bring about change. It takes political will that is absent for the unseen workers who put on a happy face while struggling through difficult conditions – and, despite being an educator, I realize that education alone will not end poverty as a social class. I can encourage my students to seek to mitigate the worst of poverty to provide hope for those students enduring it. Yet, as politicians tinker with an unjust system there remains a need for structural change that can only result form people taking action – and the working class are too busy struggling to get by to do this without societal support.