Nickel and Dimed: On (NOT) getting by in America

Barbara Ehrenreich, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America,” A Holt Paperback, Copyright 2001; Afterword 2008, 235 pp.

Statistics and facts alone do not effectively tell the story of the poverty of the working-poor.  You need someone with writing skills to go undercover, as this author did, and report just what it is like to live the life of the working-poor.  In 1998, moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels, joining the millions of Americans working full time, year-round, for poverty-level wages.  

The author was skeptical of the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform at the time which promised that a job – any job – can be the ticket to a better life. To find out, Ehrenreich took the cheapest lodgings she could find and accepted whatever jobs she was offered and committed to living on what she earned. Her findings are as relevant then as they are today—little has been done in the interval to help the working-poor.

Very quickly, she discovered that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors and not in a vehicle.  I concluded while reading this book that even a single person with no children cannot survive at minimum wage jobs unless you can live in someone’s basement rent-free or live in your vehicle.  Even then, a medical or dental incident will do you in.

Ehrenreich, a Ph.D. Biologist, who has a dozen books behind her dealing with the social and political hallmarks of our economic system, has here, with ''Nickel and Dimed,'' presented herself as an unskilled worker needing to earn a living after a divorce.  She looked for the best-paying unskilled job she could get and hoped to earn enough money at it to pay her rent for a second month. ''So,'' she writes, ''this is not a story of some death-defying 'undercover' adventure. Almost anyone could do what I did -- look for jobs, work those jobs, try to make ends meet. In fact, millions of Americans do it every day, and with a lot less fanfare and dithering.''

Ehrenreich's first stop was her hometown of Key West. She figured that with a $7-an-hour job, and a place to rent costing no more than $500 a month, she would have $400 to $500 a month remaining to spend for food and gas. There were lots of want ads for service jobs in this resort area. Ehrenreich filled out about 20 applications for jobs at supermarkets and hotels. No one called her. So her first revelation was that the vaunted abundance of ads is not a reliable measure of available jobs but serves employers as an insurance policy against the high turnover in the low-wage workforce.

Ehrenreich finally got a job as a waitress at an inexpensive family restaurant. Her shift ran from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. Salary: $2.43 an hour plus tips. To find an affordable rent she had to move 30 miles out of town, a 45-minute commute on a crowded two-lane highway. How did her co-workers manage housing? One waitress shared a room in a $250-a-week flophouse; a cook shared a two-room apartment with three others; another worker lived in a van parked behind a shopping center.  (Read my review of “Nomadland)

''There are no secret economies that nourish the poor,'' Ehrenreich writes. ''On the contrary, there is a host of special costs. If you can't put up the two months' rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can't save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved at a convenience store.'' Without health insurance, you risk a small cut becoming infected because you can afford neither a visit to the doctor nor antibiotics.

In the summer tourist slump, Ehrenreich found that her income -- salary plus tips -- dropped from about $7 an hour to $5.15. At that rate, the only way to pay her rent was to get a second job. So for a while, she worked an 8 a.m.-to-2 p.m. shift at a second restaurant, then rushed to her regular shift at the first -- a 14-hour day of brutal physical work. With such a schedule she could not, of course, keep her decent housing so far from town. Ehrenreich's new home was an eight-foot-wide trailer parked among others in ''a nest of crime and crack'' where ''desolation rules night and day. . . . There are not exactly people here but what amounts to canned labor, being preserved between shifts from the heat.''

So much for waitressing in Florida. On to Maine and scrubbing floors. Despite plentiful ads for jobs, Portland turned out to be ''just another $6-$7-an-hour town.'' Ehrenreich again took two jobs to make ends meet -- a weekend job in the Alzheimer's ward of a nursing home and a full-time job with a housecleaning service.

At the Merry Maids, the economics were as follows: the customer pays $25 an hour per cleaning person to the service; the service pays $6.65 an hour to each cleaner. ''How poor are they, my co-workers?'' Ehrenreich asks. Half bags of corn chips for lunch; dizziness from malnutrition; an impacted wisdom tooth requiring frantic calls to find a free dental clinic; worries about makeshift child-care arrangements because a licensed daycare center at $90 a week is beyond any cleaner's budget.

And soon, even with two jobs and no children to support, Ehrenreich starts having money trouble. Housing is the killer. She foresees a weekend without food unless she can find charitable help. More than an hour on the phone with various charitable agencies (cost of calls, $2.80) nets her a severely restricted food voucher -- no fresh fruits or vegetables, chicken or cheese -- worth $7.02.

Minneapolis is Ehrenreich's last stop. In this city, as in the other two, finding affordable housing was a major problem. Across the nation, the supply of apartments for low-income families is decreasing: 36 units available for every 100 families in need. Like many of the poor, Ehrenreich is reduced to an overpriced motel, more like a flophouse in terms of cleanliness and safety. Borderline homelessness is how she describes it. The old rule that one should pay no more than 30 percent of income for rent has become inoperative; for most poor renters, the figure is now more than 50 percent.

In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where the ''living wage'' for a single parent and one child was calculated to be $11.77 an hour, Ehrenreich has a job at Wal-Mart paying $7 an hour. Many of her fellow workers, even those with working spouses, hold two jobs.

In this way, three months went by, and Ehrenreich's investigation was finished. What does she conclude? No surprises here. Even for a worker holding two jobs, wages are too low, housing costs too high for minimally decent survival. ''In the rhetorical buildup to welfare reform, it was uniformly assumed that a job was the ticket out of poverty and that the only thing holding back welfare recipients was their reluctance to get out and get one.'' But if a living wage for one adult and two children is, according to the Economic Policy Institute, $30,000 a year, a total calculated to include no luxuries unless health insurance and licensed childcare are considered luxuries, this amount will never be provided by the private sector to entry-level workers.

''Most civilized nations,'' Ehrenreich writes, ''compensate for the inadequacy of wages by providing relatively generous public services such as health insurance, free or subsidized childcare, subsidized housing and effective public transportation.'' So what should we think about the fact that in America we are sending the poor out to make it on their own on little more than a quarter of a living wage?

Ehrenreich's picture of the working poor was taken during the best of times: just before the dot-com stock bust and eight years before the staggering recession. Yet it appears, a rising tide does not lift all boats; trickledown economics stops just south of the middle class.  

My Notes:

Pg. 223:  When Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001, the dot-com bubble was about to burst and the stock market had begun to falter.  The book quickly ascended the best-seller list and began winning awards, including the Christopher Award, from a Catholic group, for books that ‘affirm the highest values of the human spirit.’ It has been adopted as a ‘community read’ in dozens of places around the country and is required reading for many college students.

Pg. 234:  The National Low-Income Housing Coalition reported that in 2006 a worker had to earn $16.31 an hour to afford a two-bedroom housing unit at market rents, and this figure can be taken as a rough estimate of what a true nationwide living wage might be. 

Pg. 234:  Housing, transportation, childcare, and health care (47 million Americans lack health insurance (in 2001), usually because their jobs do not provide it) will all require decisive action from the public sector. 

Pg. 3:  When the author started this project in 1998, the National Coalition for the Homeless found it took, on average nationwide, an hourly wage of $8.89 to afford a one-bedroom apartment and the odds against a typical welfare recipient’s landing a job at such a ‘living wage’ were about 97 to 1.

Pg. 127:  The St. Paul-based Jobs Now Coalition estimated that, in 1997, a ‘living wage’ for a single parent supporting a single child in the Twin Cities metro area was $11.77 an hour.  This estimate was based on monthly expenses that included $266 for food (all meals cooked and eaten at home), $261 for childcare, and $550 for rent. 

Pg. 194:  The author states that ‘sometimes I was given scraps of sociological data to work with, such as “Watch out for so-and-so, he’s a real asshole.”

Pg. 196ff:  The book shows that the real question is not how well you perform at work but how well you do in life in general, which includes eating and having a place to stay. The fact that these are two separate questions needs to be underscored.  In the rhetorical buildup to welfare reform, it was uniformly assumed that a job was the ticket out of poverty and that the only thing holding back welfare recipients was their reluctance to get out and get one.  Yet, the results in this book show that something is wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow.  You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.

Pg. 200:  The official poverty level is still calculated by the archaic method of taking the bare-bones cost of food for a family of a given size and multiplying this number by three.  Yet food is relatively inflation-proof, at least compared with rent.  In the early 1960s, when this method of calculating poverty was devised, food accounted for 24 percent of the average family budget and housing 29 percent.  In 1999, food took up only 16 percent of the family budget, while housing had soared to 37 percent.  We might as well abolish poverty altogether, at least on paper, by defining a subsistence budget as some multiple of average expenditures on comic books or dental floss.

Pg. 205:  Why don’t the poor just pick-up-and-go to where there is a better paying job?  The answer is that actual human’s experience a little more friction than marbles do, and the poorer they are, the more constrained their mobility usually is.  Low-wage people who don’t have cars are often dependent on a relative who is willing to drop them off and pick them up again each day, sometimes on a route that includes the babysitter’s house or the childcare center. 

Pg. 213:  The Economic Policy Institute recently reviewed dozens of studies of what constitutes a ‘living wage’ and came up with an average figure of $30,000 a year for a family of one adult and two children, which amounts to a wage of $14 an hour.  This is not the very minimum such a family could live on; the budget includes health insurance a telephone, and childcare at a licensed center, for example, which are well beyond the reach of millions.  But it does not include restaurant meals, video rentals, Internet access, wine and liquor, cigarettes and lottery tickets, or even very much meat.  Yet, about 60 percent of Americans make less than $14 per hour (2001).  Many of them survive by teaming up with another wage earner a spouse or a grown child.  Some draw on government help in the form of food stamps, housing vouchers, and the earned income tax credit.

Pg. 219:  Americans of the newspaper-reading professional middle class are used to thinking of poverty as a consequence of unemployment—and, this used to be true and could be solved by generating more growth in the economy.  But when we have full or nearly full employment, when jobs are available to any job seeker and desperate poverty remains, then the problem goes deeper.  We now have the ‘Working Poor.’