LIFE AT THE BOTTOM
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
It's a lot easier to write about the theories of low-wage employment than it is to survive on such wages. Thus, my hat is off to writer Barbara Ehrenreich who, having done her share of theoretical writing, hit the streets to find out how people at the bottom survive on the low wages they earn. She took a waitress job in Florida, a cleaning job in Maine, and a sales job at a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, spending about a month on each job. With a little "front" money and a slightly altered resume, she set out to find out how people manage to make it on jobs that pay between $6 and $10 an hour. She found that people don't necessarily make it, but just put one foot in front of the other, juggling horrid working conditions with expensive housing, no health care, and borderline malnutrition. Her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America ought to be required reading for all of those who make public policy people in our country.
Ehrenreich is skilled at bringing the working conditions of low-wage employment to life. My muscles ached along with hers as she described her shift and the trays she hefted at a Florida restaurant. More galling were the random rules - keep your mouth shut, stay busy at all time. Despite this, Barbara Ehrenreich managed to learn that all of her co-workers had irregular housing arrangements. They were sharing or squatting, living in trailers or hotel rooms, or crowded into small apartments. Unable to accumulate first and last month's rent, they lived as they could, sometimes sleeping in their cars. To escape this fate, or to find out how one might, Ehrenreich took a second job. It so stretched her physically and mentally that, in her words, she "lost it" and left a busy restaurant and a clamoring party of a dozen demanding folks. .
While Ehrenreich elicits empathy for the waitresses of the world, her stint as a cleaning service worker causes me to look askance at nationwide cleaning services like Merry Maids, Molly Maids, Mini Maids, and the Miad Brigade. While working women's time crunch has increased demand for these services to the point that they are growing by 15 to 25 percent a year, the people who do the work are paid little, and often instructed in cleaning methods that won't pass muster in most houses. Instead of actually mopping floors, for example, Barbara Ehrenreich writes that she and her colleagues are instructed to use no more than half a bucket of water to "clean" a kitchen floor. Cleaning products, not water, are the preferred substance for "cleaning" other surfaces.
Cleaning service workers made less than $7 an hour, even after raises. Cleaning services, on the other hand, make a tidy profit by fanning out their low-wage, rag-armed armies into neighborhoods. Ehrenreich bites back at cleaning service owners, but also at their clients, especially those who try to "test" cleaners by laying money or jewelry around, or leaving dust or debris in out-of-the way places. I chuckle my way through Ehrenreich's description of cleaning bathrooms, but wonder why such an astute commentator this does not refer to the literature on black women and housework. Again, Ehrenreich holds two jobs to make ends meet, spending her weekends serving food in a retirement home. Concepts like leisure, rest, and relaxation are foreign concepts to those at the bottom.
Ehrenreich's tenure in sales raises questions about the ability of workers to unionize, and about the capriciousness of a series of work rules that are often instituted as measures of control and anxiety, not efficiency. There is something arbitrary to the way shifts are assigned, something mind-numbing in the work that is done. But Ehrenreich does the work, and the same apartment shuffle she did in other locations. The challenge of finding housing while earning less than $10 an hour seems never to go away for low-wage workers. It is the central drama in Ehrenreich's low-wage life. She shares data that indicates that nearly 60 percent of those who earn less than $10 an hour pay more than half of their income on housing.
Ehrenreich brings a reporter's eye and an irreverent mind to the world of low-wage work. She offers those of us who depend on low-wage workers a sobering glace into the terms and conditions of their work lives, and suggests this population may be ready to revolt to get their wages up. I don't expect a revolution in our consumer culture where many of the poor do not aspire to change the income distribution in our country, but simply to end up at the top of it. It would be nice, though, if those Senators contemplating increasing the minimum wage read Nickel and Dimed to understand that this is a necessary, but not sufficient, way to improve the plight of the poor.