Nickel and Dimed
Barbara Ehrenreich
221 pages
published in 2001

Barbara Ehrenreich is a fifty something American writer/journalist, of a liberal bent. One day during a discussion of poverty with her editor, she mentioned that someone should do some "old-fashioned reporting", go out there and try for themselves what it was really like having to subsist on poverty level wages, on $6-7 per hour. Her editor thought it an excellent idea and when would she start? So she left home and family to try her luck as an unskilled worker, working as a waitress, cleaner and Wal-Mart clerk. What she found wasn't pretty.

Before she started her experiment, she set some ground rules: she wouldn't depend on any skills gained from her education or usual jobs, she would take the highest paying job on offer and do it properly --no pretending-- and she would try and find the cheapest (safe) accomendations she could find. She presented herself as a divorced homemaker reentering the workforce after many years, with three years of college as an educational background. She also decided to not take her experiment too far: if she didn't make enough from her job(s) to affort the rent, enough food or a car she used her own money to cover for it. After all, this was an experiment to see if people can survive on a minimal wage job, not an endurance test.

She started out in Key West as a waitress in a not very good restaurant, combined that for a few days with a second job as a hotel cleaner. Then she moved to Maine, to work as a maid for a cleaning agency, cleaning the ever increasing houses of the rich, as well as working weekends as a assistent in an nursing home. Finally, in Minnesota, she worked retail, in a Wal-Mart.

At the end of the project, she found that she was doing well at the work itself, but failing at making a living. Even working seven days a week, she either could not earn enough money to pay for rents, food and the other bare necessities of life or just enough to survive on, but if even a small crisis were to happen, she would've been fucked. And this at a time when the US economy was booming and the job market was tight!

She found that, if you're an unskilled worker looking for a job to sustain your family, you're out of luck: tight job market or not, you won't be paid a living wage, a wage where you can work a normal work week and make enough to pay the rent, food, gas and electricity bills, etc from. Worse, because of the booming economy rents are skyrocketing out of reach of the poorest workers. Low income housing has all but disappeared, replaced by luxury accomendations for the middle class and the rich. Even half a trailer costs $625 in rent per month in Key West and the situation wasn't much better in Maine or Minnesota. In Maine Barbara could not even find any accomedation other then motels to live in. This doesn't make it easier to get by: you cannot cook in a motel room, so you're stuck with eating fast food, or the sort of food you can heat up in a microwave or a hotplate. Living in a motel will always be more expensive then living in a normal house or flat too. Also, don't forget that when you want to rent something, you usually need to pay both a deposit and the first month of rent in advance. It may take quite a while to save up enough money to be able to afford this; a motel may be more expensive in the long run, but at least you can move in immediately.

What I found the most outrageous about her experiences was how people were treated at their jobs. They don't make enough money to live on in the first place, which is something one should reasonably expect from a fulltime job and they're treated like dirt. I've worked cleaning jobs myself, as a summerjob. It's hard and dirty work, but since we were treated with respect and since we got paid reasonably well it wasn't an onerous job. This is not the case with the jobs Barbara did: there was the hassle of drug tests, designed to show who's boss, to keep the workers humble, there were the petty regulations: no talking on the floor, no sitting down, few breaks, etc. There are all the small ways in which the companies steal their workers money: first weeks wages are only paid a month later, having to pay for the equipment you use in your job, having to clean the store or restaurant after you punched out, etc. Worse of all, the people who work these jobs have no medical insurance to speak of --they might get some government help, but that's it-- and if they take time off for being ill, even being very ill, they probably get fired.

All in all, this is a book that will make you very angry if you have a heart. No doubt some conservatives will snort and write it off as the poor own fault: "if I can get a decent job, so can they". To them I would like to say: try it yourself. Everybody should be able to get a job and earn enough to live comfortably: pay the rent, pay the bills, get decent food, have some money left over. It's a crying shame that in the supposedly richest country in the world, millions of people cannot do this.