Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

“I wish I could say that some supervisor or coworker told me even once that I was special in some enviable way–more intelligent, for example, or clearly better educated than most. But this never happened, I suspect because the only thing that really made me ‘special’ was my inexperience. To state the proposition in reverse, low-wage workers are no more homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less likely to be funny or bright.”

To combat pervasive myths that low-wage workers are less capable, Ehrenreich notes that even though she was more highly educated than her coworkers, there was no difference in how she was perceived. This lends a tone of humility to the text and shows that Ehrenreich sees the full humanity of her coworkers; she wants readers to understand that low-wage workers are not worth less or lack value as people.

“...I was raised by the absurd Booker T. Washingtonian precept that says: If you’re going to do something, do it well. In fact, ‘well’ isn’t good enough by half. Do it better than anyone has ever done it before. Or so said my father, who must have known what he was talking about because he managed to pull himself, and us with him, up from the mile-deep copper mines of Butte to the leafy suburbs of the Northeast, ascending from boilermakers to martinis before booze beat out ambition.”

This quote highlights Ehrenreich’s personal connection to the class struggle and the views about class mobility that she was exposed to while growing up. These views echo a common view in the US that hard work is the solution to poverty, and the example of Ehrenreich’s father, who worked his way up the corporate ladder, is an instance in which this was true. However, the confession of her father’s drinking is a subtle hint at the stressors and pressures that come along with working one’s way up the socioeconomic ladder, suggesting there can be a heavy toll for even those who succeed in the capitalist system.

“In poverty, as in certain propositions in physics, starting conditions are everything. There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are 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.”

Ehrenreich notes the ways that being impoverished is actually more expensive: housing instability leads to greater rent costs, and inability to access a full-kitchen leads to unhealthy and more expensive meals. The difficulties of affording housing and maintaining a stable living situation become apparent to Ehrenreich after several weeks in her waitressing job at the Hearthside in Key West. When her coworker Gail considers moving into a motel and Ehrenreich recoils at the cost, Gail asks her how she is supposed to pay for a month’s rent and deposit for a new place. Ehrenreich realizes that the only reason she was able to get the $500 a month efficiency is because of the $1300 she set aside as a start-up cost.

“I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don’t understand how she can go so long without food. ‘Well, I don’t understand how you can go so long without a cigarette,’ she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself. I don’t know why the antismoking crusaders have never grasped the element of defiant self-nurturance that makes the habit so endearing to its victims—as if, in the American workplace, the only thing people have to call their own is the tumors they are nourishing and the spare moments they devote to feeding them.”

At Jerry’s in Key West, Ehrenreich observes that most of her coworkers smoke, and many even leave their cigarettes lit in ashtrays in the backroom so they can take quick puffs. Connecting the dedication to smoking and the stress that the workers experience, she supposes that smoking is one of the few activities that the workers can engage is that is purely for their own self-gratification. Rather than taking a tone of judgment for the lack of concern for their health, Ehrenreich sympathizes with the urge to smoke as a way of carving out a space of a few moments for oneself, and even begins smoking again herself.

“But as the days go by, my old life is beginning to look exceedingly strange. The emails and phone messages addressed to my former self come from a distant race of people with exotic concerns and far too much time on their hands. The neighborly market I used to cruise for produce now looks forbiddingly like a Manhattan yuppie emporium. And when I sit down one morning in my real home to pay bills from my past life, I am dazzled by the two- and three-figure sums owed to outfits like Club Body Tech and Amazon.com”

The shift in perspective that Ehrenreich experiences during the experiment shows the sharp contrast in how upper middle-class and lower-class Americans view money. She looks at her past self and her frivolous spending of money with shock because, in her “new life” as a low-wage worker, she is counting pennies and barely making enough money to pay rent and eat. The concerns of the wealthy appear trivial in contrast to the concerns of daily survival that now occupy her attention.

“There is no vindication in this exit, no fuck-you surge of relief, just an overwhelming dank sense of failure pressing down on me and the entire parking lot. I had gone into this venture in the spirit of science, to test a mathematical proposition, but somewhere along the line, in the tunnel vision imposed by long shifts and relentless concentration, it became a test of myself, and clearly I have failed. Not only had I flamed out as a housekeeper/server, I had forgotten to give George my tips [...]”

Although Ehrenreich began the experiment with the detachment of a scientist and the intentions of an investigative journalist, she becomes personally involved in the work that she does and, after quitting the job at Jerry’s on a particularly stressful shift, feels a sense of disappointment in herself. This moment of vulnerability captures the way that low-wage work exhausts people not only physically but emotionally and mentally as well. It also shows that, although Ehrenreich is deceiving everyone by hiding her true intentions, she feels as emotionally invested as if the jobs are her real-life, even becoming attached to her coworkers.

“So ours is a world of pain—managed by Excedrin and Advil, compensated for with cigarettes and, in one or two cases and then only on weekends, with booze. Do the owners have any idea of the misery that goes into rendering their homes motel-perfect? Would they be bothered if they did know, or would they take a sadistic pride in what they have purchased—boasting to dinner guests, for example, that their floors are cleaned only with the purest of fresh human tears?”

The amount of physical injury that Ehrenreich observes during the experiment is astounding. However, many of the workers do not have health insurance and cannot afford to take any days off, so they often work through their injuries, dealing with the pain with over the counter medications and self-medicating. Ehrenreich points out how unethical it is that the house cleaners at The Maids sacrifice their health and their bodies for a company that does not compensate them fairly.

“More to the point, I am wondering what the two-job way of life would do to a person after a few months with zero days off. In my writing life I normally work seven days a week, but writing is ego food, totally self-supervised and intermittently productive of praise. Here, no one will notice my heroism on that Saturday’s shift. (I will later make a point of telling Linda about it and receive only a distracted nod.) If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?”

While working two jobs in Maine, Ehrenreich begins to feel exhausted after a few weeks of work. Though working two jobs gives her the most comfortable situation of all the three places, she also feels herself beginning to lose her sense of self. By comparing the emotional burden of having so little time to oneself to a repetitive injury caused by physical motion, she shows that the emotional and spiritual burden of low-wage work is comparable to the physical burden.

“Work is supposed to save you from being an ‘outcast,’ as Pete puts it, but what we do is an outcast’s work, invisible and even disgusting. Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditchdiggers, changers of adult diapers—these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society. Hence the undeserved charisma of a man like Ted. He may be greedy and offhandedly cruel, but at The Maids he is the only living representative of that better world where people go to college and wear civilian clothes to work and shop on the weekends for fun.”

In this passage, Ehrenreich explores the marginalization of low-wage workers, who are given such little recognition in a society that relies upon them to function smoothly. She notes the hypocrisy of an America that purports to value equality and democracy when many of its laborers are treated like they are unimportant as human beings because of the labor that they perform. She connects this to the way that her fellow cleaners at The Maids treat their boss, Ted, arguing that they view him with awe because he is the only person from a higher socioeconomic status that they interact with on a regular basis.

“I have been worrying that the scenario I have created for myself, both here and in Maine, is totally artificial. Who, in real life, plops herself down in a totally strange environment—without housing, family connections, or job—and attempts to become a viable resident? Well, it turns out that my friend’s aunt did exactly that in the early nineties: got on a Greyhound bus in New York, with two children in two, disembarking in the utterly strange state of Florida.”

Ehrenreich introduces Caroline, the aunt of a friend from New York, by commenting on her fear that the experiment is artificial. The criticism that the experiment is artificial has a great deal of truth in it, but she notes in several different places in the book that her aim was to simply test the economic viability of surviving on low-wage work, and not to capture the full experience of poverty. By including the interview with Caroline, Ehrenreich provides a contrast with her experiment by presenting a real-life example of a woman who worked low-wage jobs and struggled with poverty.

“He is bad, as are some of the impassive viewers right in this room, who will soon be judged and exposed by their urine. My mind slides back to one of the ‘approve/disapprove’ statements on the Wal-Mart survey: ‘There is room in every corporation for a nonconformist.’ But no, no, no! The correct answer, as we will all find out soon enough, is ‘totally disagree.’”

As Ehrenreich watches a daytime talk show while sitting in the waiting room to take the drug test for Menards, she sees a young man berated for stealing from a family member. She considers the implications of the judgment that is bestowed on the young man, and she compares this to the way that people who are impoverished are constantly judged, evaluated, and tested, like the many hoops that Ehrenreich has to jump through during the application process. She hypothesizes that the purpose of this judgment and degradation is to select workers who are so desperate for work that they are willing to be completely stripped of their individuality.

“The last few years have seen a steady decline in the number of affordable apartments nationwide. In 1991 there were forty-seven affordable rental units available to every one hundred low-income families, while by 1997 there were only thirty-six such units for every one hundred families […] No national—or even reliable local—statistics are available, but apparently more and more of the poor have been reduced to living in motels.”

The housing crisis is a major theme of the book. A severe lack of affordable housing options for people who are impoverished is a recurrent situation that Ehrenreich faces in all three of the locations, though the worst situation by far is in Minneapolis, where she struggles for weeks and eventually gives up on finding anything that could possibly remain in her budget, staying at a Comfort Inn. She also bemoans that there is so little data on this problem: the lack of statistics on the amount of working impoverished people who live in motels makes it impossible to prove that there is a problem, much less address the issue and secure government funding to provide more affordable housing.

“No nose or other facial jewelry, we learn; earrings must be small and discreet, not dangling; no blue jeans except on Friday, and then you have to pay $1 for the privilege of wearing them. No ‘grazing,’ that is, eating from food packages that somehow become open; no ‘time theft’ […] ‘What is time theft?’ Answer: Doing anything other than working during company time, anything at all.”

During the incredibly lengthy orientation for the Wal-Mart associate’s job, the employees are taught the numerous rules that they must follow to keep their jobs. Of all the rules, time theft is the most bizarre to Ehrenreich, and it seems to encompass any sort of action that is not working, including conversing with her coworkers. She wonders if the purpose of this rule is to prevent workers from unionizing. This emphasizes the control and power that the Wal-Mart corporation seeks to maintain over its employees.

“At least part of the answer, which I only figured out weeks later, lies in the employers’ deft handling of the hiring process. First you are an applicant, then suddenly you are an orientee. You’re handed the application form and, a few days later, you’re being handed the uniform and warned against nose rings and stealing. There’s no intermediate point in the process in which you confront the potential employer as a free agent, entitled to cut her own deal. The intercalation of the drug test between the application and hiring tilts the playing field even further, establishing that you, and not the employer, are the one who has something to prove.”

One of the themes that Ehrenreich focuses on throughout is how little power low-wage workers possess to negotiate for higher wages or even garner the smallest bit of control over their schedules or benefits. She notes that the hiring process itself plays a psychological trick on the employees by convincing them that they are being evaluated and have no choice or agency over their work. This makes it appear as if they need the company more than the company needs them, which suppresses wages and makes it less likely that the employees will demand better treatment.

“When I groaningly accuse Ellie of trying to trick me into thinking I’m getting Alzheimer’s, she’s genuinely apologetic, explaining that the average customer shops the store three times a week, so you need to have the element of surprise. Besides, the layout is about the only thing she can control, since the clothes and at least the starting prices are all determined by the home office in Arkansas.”

Ehrenreich’s manager at Wal-Mart, Ellie, moves the clothing displays around and Ehrenreich is momentarily confused by the change. Ehrenreich’s interpretation of why Ellie does this suggests that Wal-Mart controls every single aspect of the job to such a high degree that Ellie takes pleasure in one of the few parts of the job that gives her a sense of agency and creativity. This observation connects to another one of the major themes of the book, which is that low-wage workers do monotonous, repetitive labor that dampens their spirits and thus should be given greater control over their work and lives.

“Finally I lie down and breathe against the weight of unmoving air on my chest. I wake up a few hours later to hear a sound not generated by anyone’s TV: a woman’s clear alto singing two lines of the world’s saddest song, lyrics indecipherable, to the accompaniment of trucks on the highway.”

The living situation that Ehrenreich finds herself in at Clearview, which she dubs one of the worst motels in the US, is horrific; her first room is flooded with sewage, and she is hardly able to sleep due to her fear and discomfort. This moment of connection that Ehrenreich feels with one of her neighbors portrays the despair that many people feel while living in poverty. The tone of the passage captures Ehrenreich’s own feeling of loneliness, but it also shows that she is not alone.

“What I have to face is that ‘Barb,’ the name on my ID tag, is not exactly the same person as Barbara. ‘Barb’ is what I was called as a child, and still am by my siblings, and I sense that at some level I’m regressing. Take away the career and the higher education, and maybe what you’re left with is this original Barb, the one who might have ended up working at Wal-Mart for real if her father hadn’t managed to climb out of the mines. So it’s interesting, and more than a little disturbing, to see how Barb turned out—that she’s meaner and slyer than I am, more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I’d hoped.”

The contrast between the two personalities, “Barbara” and “Barb,” is a humorous metaphor for the way that low-wage work changes people by making them feel frustrated, invisible, and disappointed. Ehrenreich is embarrassed by some of her meaner thoughts when she works at Wal-Mart, but honestly portraying herself shows that low-wage work inevitably creates a change in people’s personalities as they feel constantly underappreciated and undervalued. 

“I get a chill when I’m watching TV in the break room one afternoon and see…a commercial for Wal-Mart. When a Wal-Mart shows up within a television within a Wal-Mart, you have to question the existence of an outer world.”

This absurd and hilarious observation as Ehrenreich sits in the break room at Wal-Mart portrays the way that Wal-Mart’s mega-corporation has colonized so many aspects of life that it is nearly inescapable. She comments on the way that globalization has transformed much of the world as large corporations have taken over the US and much of the world. By injecting dark humor into the narrative, Ehrenreich shows her own take on the capitalistic ethos and Wal-Mart’s seemingly unstoppable expansion at the cost of its workers.

“Someone has to puncture the prevailing fiction that we’re a ‘family’ here, we ‘associates’ and our ‘servant leaders,’ held together solely by our commitment to our ‘guests.’ After all, you’d need a lot stronger word than dysfunctional to describe a family where a few people get to eat at the table while the rest—the ‘associates’ and all the dark-skinned seamstresses and factory workers worldwide who make the things we sell—lick up the drippings from the floor: psychotic would be closer to the mark.”

In many passages in the book, Ehrenreich considers the psychological effects on the employees of the language that employers use. One such theme is the way that employees are guilted into accepting less advantageous situations because employers speak as if the workplace is a “family.” She notes that this applies not only to the associates in the US, but also the workers in factories all over the world who are underpaid. She believes that the corporations use this language cynically to manipulate their employees by creating a sense of loyalty.

“I got [a job] and sometimes more than one, but my track record in the survival department is far less admirable than my performance as a job holder.”

Ehrenreich recounts the several biggest mistakes she made, particularly in Minneapolis, which emphasizes how difficult it is for low-wage workers to survive and how much pressure and stress they experience. One of the most potent realizations Ehrenreich comes away from the experiment with is that the labor itself, as difficult and tiring as it was, was not the central obstacle; instead, it was finding a way to pay for one’s rent, food, and incidental expenses with so little financial flexibility. The many ways that she tries to shave off costs introduce their own problems, as sometimes she does not have a kitchen and cannot cook, or she lives far away from work and must pay a lot for gas for her car.

“When the market fails to distribute some vital commodity, such as housing, to all who require it, the usual liberal-to-moderate expectation is that the government will step in and help. We accept this principle—at least in a halfhearted and faltering way—in the case of health care, where government offers Medicare to the elderly, Medicaid to the desperately poor, and various state programs to the children of the merely very poor. But in the case of housing, the extreme upward skewing of the market has been accompanied by a cowardly public sector retreat from responsibility.”

Housing is the central issue that Ehrenreich focuses on in the final chapter. She is especially enraged at the way that the government has done so little to provide low-cost housing options for low-wage workers. Rent is by far her biggest expense, and she is forced to choose between safety, convenience, and affordability when searching for a place to live that is within a $7 an hour budget. She points out that the way that poverty is calculated is part of the problem, as the statistics do not show the true prevalence of poverty or instability in housing.

“My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers—the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being ‘reamed out’ by managers—are part of what keeps wages low. If you’re made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you’re paid is what you are actually worth.”

The psychological effect of low-wage work is a major theme of this book. Ehrenreich emphasizes the way that the workers’ spirits are diminished over time, from managers and homeowners spying on them (as in the case of the women at The Maids), to punishments for the tiniest infractions, to policies and attitudes designed to make an employee feel unimportant. She argues that the low wages are part of the problem in making these workers feel worthless, but poor working conditions produce the same effect on workers.

“I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that ‘hard work’ was the secret of success: ‘Work hard and you’ll get ahead’ or ‘It’s hard work that got us where we are.’ No one ever said that you could work hard—harder even than you ever thought possible—and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.”

A major point Ehrenreich makes is that the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 was predicated on the comforting dictum that hard work is always the answer, and that work will raise people out of poverty and into the middle class. She argues that this is a comforting fantasy that the wealthy and middle-class tell themselves, but that many low-wage workers not only cannot work themselves out of poverty, but they fall into even greater poverty because of the rising costs of living and the stagnation of their wages.