America's working poor

Indulge me on these dates...

1996 -- Congress passes a welfare reform bill intended to prod recipients of federal cash assistance (typically single mothers) to go to work.
1998 -- Author Barbara Ehrenreich embarks on an undercover reporting project in three states to see if it's possible to live on the wages available to an unskilled worker.
2001 -- After 10 years of sustained growth, the U.S. economy slides into recession. The downturn is exacerbated by the September 11 terrorist attacks.
2001 -- Ehrenreich's book, "Nickel and Dimed," is published.
2011 -- Yours truly gets around to reading it.

At 69 years of age, journalist-essayist Barbara Ehrenreich has built a stellar reputation as a feminist, left-leaning political activist and muckraker. She's the author of a dozen books and (provincial reference here) a graduate of Portland's Reed College, and a Ph.D. in biology.

When she embarked on "Nickel and Dimed," she was in her late 50s, the perfect candidate to present herself as an older white woman trying to re-enter the workforce after years as a homemaker. She took a series of menial jobs in Florida (near her home of Key West), Maine and Minnesota, working as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing home aide and Wal-Mart salesperson.

What did she find out?
If you've read the book or know about it, you know that she showed it was virtually impossible to support herself on a wage of $6 or $7 per hour. Self-support in this case meaning the ability to afford a safe, clean rental; buy nutritious groceries; pay for health care and transportation to and from work.

Barbara Ehrenreich

In heart-breaking detail, Ehrenreich shows over and over again how the working poor don't get by in America. How can they when employers routinely withhold portions of a check to cover the cost of uniforms or equipment required for the job? Or when life intervenes and a worker has to take a day off without pay because of illness or to care for an ailing child? Or when car troubles force a choice between costly repairs or going without wheels?

What's even more wrenching is the pile of indignities heaped upon the men and women who do the daily grunt work: cleaning toilets, changing adult diapers, folding and restocking clothing that customers toss onto floors, meeting the demands and whims of picky diners, putting up with soulless assistant managers who enforce demeaning work rules and keep a distrusting eye on their employees, just waiting for them to steal or take an unscheduled work break.

"Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditchdiggers, changers of adult diapers -- these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society," Ehrenreich writes. "...(M)aybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making you feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner a night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly -- the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party."

So what are we to do?
First, take time to acknowledge the people who take the jobs no one else wants and recognize the service they perform. In other words, make these people visible in your life. Don't look down on them or past them. Tip them. Thank them.

Understand that many of them work for companies that treat them as expendable and easily replaced, and must abide by rules that, for example, go so far as to limit the number of croutons a server is allowed to place on a side salad.

Support grassroots efforts to organize workers under the umbrella of labor unions.

Most important, recognize poverty for what it is: a state of emergency.

"It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition -- austere, perhaps, but they get by somehow, don't they?" Ehrenreich says in her concluding chapter. "What is harder for the nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress. The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to faintness before the end of the shift. The 'home' that is also a car or a van. The illness or injury that must be 'worked through,' with gritted teeth, because there's no sick pay or health insurance and the loss of one day's pay will mean no groceries for the next.

"Those experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment. They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations."

Who among us hasn't made silent judgments about the people at the bottom of the economic ladder? What assumptions do we make about their intelligence and their work ethic? Do we imagine they are capable of taking pride in their work, of picking up the slack to support an absent or ailing co-worker? 

I was 10 years late getting to the book, but in these times of surging rents and ever-growing income disparities between the wealthiest and poorest households, the picture Ehrenreich paints of a tenacious, anxious class of low-wage workers is as vivid as the day it was published. More than ever, we need passionate voices like hers to hold all of us accountable.

Photograph: www.jeremycaplan.com