I thought the book had an excellent premise, yet after reading it for a while, I wanted to smack the author. She kept making references to her education (oh, so obviously higher than those she was studying), repeatedly insulted the subjects of her study, and made snide comments about the people she was working for, even though in several situations, she came from the same background these people did.
I’d love to hear other people’s reactions to this book. So many people thought it was so wonderful, yet I thought it was lacking in many ways. I’m wondering if I missed something. Anybody care to share their thoughts on the book?
The information she got was very interesting, but yes, she was infuriatingly smug. You could tell she didn’t even try to learn about her co-workers. In one instance, she was making snide comments about a “diminutive Hispanic or possibly Asian” co-worker being basically a bitch- she didn’t even try to talk to this woman, but just pre-judged her. Also, in reading the woman’s dialogue, you can just hear that excessively whiny tone people put on when imitating someone they don’t like.
It would have been a much better book if she would stop pontificating about how much better she is than her co-workers (how many times did she have to remind us that she was doing this voluntarily and for a cause?) However, the figures she quoted were interesting enough to wade through her personal observations.
I, for one, thought that most of the time her “I’m doing this voluntarily” was to re-emphasize that even though she’s sharing the same experiences as the people she’s with that she can’t entirely relate exactly their situation as she has the out of just packing it in and going home. Those she worked with do not have that option. Kind of like that Pulp song (now William Shatner song!) Common People where the singer is lambasting some upper class / upper middle class person who wants to “slum” with the Common people and that she won’t ever really know what it is like since she can call her dad and be taken away from it all.
I thought it was very useful look at the world of low wage work. Her point about the huge disconnect between wages and housing costs is important and rarely addressed by any administration.
Unfortunately I thought she missed one of the major causes of low wages: immigration. If you constantly import workers who can’t command high wages of course you’re never going to see incomes go up.
I agree about immigration. Liberals are reluctant to address this issue, but if they want anybody who’s not already a liberal to give them cred, they have to. Barbara Whatsername didn’t have the cojones to deal with it.
I did want to scream after reading the book – at the indifference of all the well-heeled fatcats to the suffering of low-wage folk under their policies. I don’t think working people ought to have such a rough time finding a place to live. (I can see the free marketers (“Are there no cardboard boxes?” “Are there no lean-tos?” I lived in a lean-to when I was young, and saved $400,000 while working as a lacquer polisher by doing so.")
It’s been a while since I’ve read it, so I might have some of the details wrong, but the impression I got from the book was that people are poor because they’re stupid. She seemed to focus on people with no desire to get ahead or sit down and think about their situation. And she’s supposedly so smart but she doesn’t suggest really obvious things to suggest to them; such as: the woman who spends all her money on fast food because she doesn’t have a car to go grocery shopping team up with the woman who lives in her car so she can’t save money by cooking at home.
Like I said, those people might’ve worked for different companies, I don’t remember, but my overall thinking was if you want to beat “the man” at his stupid game you’re going to have to team up and get smarter.
The book had an exact opposite effect on me than I think was intended, lol!
Another thing that really got me was when she was working as a maid in the house of someone who probably had about the same socio-economic status she did in real life, and she complained that the people had a wall of books about pregnancy, then went on to deride them for not having books on things like war, poverty, and the environment. I don’t know why that stuck in my craw so much, but she had never met these people before, yet was determining what sort of people they were by their bookcase, when she was cleaning, without ever having spoken to them.
Then she kept using ridiculous words like “silopsism” and quoting Karl Marx, which to me seemed like she was exercising her knowledge just to say “Hey, I’m smart - I know Marx, and these idiots I worked with didn’t! See the divide? See how much smarter I am??” I thought uses of such words and quotes (regardless of her intent) made the book far less accessible to her target market, and it made her appear smug and self-righteous.
I really, really wish she had made more of an attempt at objectivity. What actually inspired this thread was that I got into an argument with a friend about this book, and she told me that I must want to “keep low wage earners down” because I didn’t get the message of the book. I got it loud and clear, and I agree with it wholeheartedly (you can’t make a decent living on minimum wage) - but I hated the messenger and though she could have conveyed the message far better.
It’s been a coupe of years since I read it, but my impressions as well as I can remember them are that the book is very readable, kinda depressing, and I came away from it inspired to be nice to the waitresses, Wal-Mart cashiers, etc. that I personally encounter, and see them as human beings.
I see the book as an attempt to give the reader some idea of what it’s like to be a low-wage worker in America. And for that, it does a good job and deserves to be widely read, especially by people who haven’t spent any time on the lower end of the socio-economic scale themselves, and especially especially for people whose job involves managing/supervising such people.
I did, but it wasn’t her smugness (which also came off to me as 'if I, college educated and able to catch a plane home, felt like this, how about someone who is really stuck here), nor really the unfairness. It was the stupid choices she made. The whole bit about smoking pot, then having to invest in something so she could take the drug test for a minimum wage job. The belt. The Wal-Mart job instead of the better paying Menard’s job. The “Minneapolis will be cheap.” But that did help illustrate the problem that the working poor has - with even a little money to spare you can make mistakes and still afford the deposit on an apartment. When you are on the edge, even simple stupid decisions can send you to a homeless shelter.
IME, and I’ve only watched, the teaming up concept is good in theory. But it often ends up being a team of a taker and a giver. The giver ends up losing out in the end…i.e. “we will take your car to go grocery shopping” becomes, “and you will run four other errands in your car and I won’t reimburse you for gas.” “We will share an apartment” becomes “and I won’t pay my share of the phone bill and leave you stuck when I move in with my boyfriend in two months.”
She seemed to have no empathy for the people she worked with. She pitied them, but there was no admiration, or affection. I think it would have been a much more powerful thing if she had stayed one place for a year.
I thought it was weird that she never addressed the roommate issue. She always lived alone, and seemed to take it that private accomodation–however shitty–is a basic need, and that if you can’t afford your own place on a certain income level, you can’t live on that income level.
None of the people I know who live at minimum-wage live alone. Some live with signifigant others, some live with family, some live with friends or coworkers, but there are always two wage earners for every kitchen/bath. For the first 3 years my husband and I lived together we always had a third roomate. It was a finacial neccesity for everyone involved.
The fact that she didn’t even address this issue seemed to me to leave a big glaring hole in her entire “this is impossible” arguement. An extra $300 a month is a big chunck of the sorts of budgets she was discussing. The fact that living with another adult apparently didn’t even ocur to her as an option seemed, to me, to suggest how little she understood the people she worked with.
I also remember taking issue with her idea of “slumming.” Early on, she mentions her "pauper’s dinner of something and something while sipping a cheap Chianti from a paper cup. I think that image alone illustrates her complete missing of the point.
I thought she did a fair enough job, given the self-imposed limits to which she was willing to go. In other words, she wasn’t really willing to live the life, i.e., living in a car, etc., and always had a parachute to get out safely.
I didn’t get the impression that she thought these people to be stupid. Rather, I thought she hit accurately on the hopelessness of the situations many people find themselves in. They have no time to ‘improve’ themselves, as nearly every waking hour is spent surviving. If you’re managing to survive, then it becomes acceptable to do just that, without further ambitions being necessary. People can rationalize nearly anything to their advantage. Those who can’t end up in a bottle or worse.
Her comments about being educated (as I recall) usually related to the assumptions or stereotypes that were made by employers as to her supposed low-economic state, i.e., if you’re poor, you must be either stupid or uneducated. I recall that prejudice from my military years, and it rankled.
I was disappointed that she dropped out so quickly, giving short shrift to the research.
Another reason why people are reluctant to “team up”; my mother works with poor women in rural areas, educating them about taking care of their own health. She teaches them about basic things like nutrition and birth control, but she also teaches them about assertiveness, how to deal with stress, and how to avoid potentially abusive partners.
One of her segments is on intimacy, what are the signs that you can trust someone, what does it mean to have an intimate relationship, etc. She says that often, these women have never had an intimate relationship in their lives. Their “friendships” are marked with backstabbing and gossip. Their parents were abusive and/or unavailable. Their lovers, ditto. I realize that this behaviour happens in all socio-economic levels, however, it seems to me that the poor shoulder more than their share of the burden in this case. The disproportionate amount of addiction, abuse and crime that happens among the lowest tier of wage-earners can only make things worse.
It’s very clear to me that many of these people don’t feel that they can trust anyone else. I knew a girl who was struggling to better herself and pull herself out of poverty. She rented a nice apartment with some friends, who would pawn their own CDs, accuse her of stealing them, then demand money from her. Would you blame her for not wanting to repeat that experience?
But that’s what bothered me. She saw the hopelessness, she sawthat they had o time or luxury to “improve” themselves, but she didn’t see anything beautiful about anybody as they were, no improvement needed. I’m not saying I expected it to be a romantic, pastoral tale of diamonds in the rough, but she saw nothing of value in anyone’s life as they were, nothing but squalor and hopelessness. And while it’s true that there’s not a lot of beauty in the shitty paychech-to-paycheck life, there’s some. I really think if she had stayed longer in one place she’d have learned to recognize it.
I got the impression, although I could be remembering wrong, that she did consider that option very briefly, and dismissed it on the grounds that she wasn’t willling to extend her research to find out what a minimum-wage earner’s social life was like. Which would have brought a lot more insight to her findings.
Two things that stood out to me. When she was working as a maid, and one of her co-workers sprained her wrist, she kept pushing and pushing and couldn’t understand why the other woman didn’t want to seek medical attention. Hello? No health insurance? No worker’s comp? Also, at one point in that sequence, she had some gripe about food. She didn’t get enough time to eat, or she couldn’t believe her co-workers’ lunches were so meager, or something. When I was maiding, I went all day on one granola bar, and my co-workers had similar diets. You can’t have a heavy meal sitting in your stomach when you’re pushing and pulling and lifting. Not to mention, you don’t know where your next bathroom break is coming from.
And before that, when she was waitressing, they got slammed and she walked out. I stopped reading right there, and didn’t get back to it for several weeks. She hit one obstacle and said “Enough is enough”? Not even that, but she thought that was an insurmountable obstacle? It was incidents like that that made me wonder what the hell the author was doing this for. We know she had the option to leave, but what did she learn by leaving?
She was an ass, no doubt about it, but I’m still on the fence as to whether she did any good. The people who really need to be reached by this book are the people of her status or higher, those who are able to effect changes. If it inspired them to say “Good heavens; no one should have to live this way!” and work to raise the minimum wage, lower housing costs, and extend benefits, then it was a good thing. If it left them saying, “Oh, they like living that way” (which did seem to be her attitude sometimes), then it was time wasted.
Well, it’s not always easy to find someone who needs a roommate. When I was first living on my own and trying to make ends meet on a very low wage ($5.65 an hour, if memory serves), I asked just about everyone at the hotel I was working at if they needed a roommate or knew someone who did. No one did. Also, almost everyone I know who has teamed up with someone else to rent a room or found someone with a room to rent has done so online (Craig’s List, Roommates.com, etc.). Most economically disadvantaged people (like the ones in Nickel and Dimed), don’t have easy access to the Internet.
And it would have been hard for the author to keep up the charade at home as well as at work. How would she have explained to her roommate why she had a laptop computer (not cheap in 2005 and even less so in 1998) and why she was always typing on it?
I think this book had some interesting things to say.
The first is that it is possible, and indeed fairly common, to be hardworking and honest and still be unbearably poor. The work that the poor do is not easy. It is often not unskilled. The people doing these jobs are not on the whole lazy and stupid (although some of their choices- like staying in a hotel or not fixing home made meals may seem stupid to people on the outside).
And the poor have no special survival mechanisms. They cannot deal with their poverty any better than anyone else can. They really do end up homeless or whatever through bad breaks. They really just cannot deal with health problems. They are often just screwed, even if they work hard and make the best decisions they can.
The second is that there is a system of disposable labor that is causing poverty. Workers are not doing honest work. They are not trained, they do not advance, and the company makes no effort whatsoever to retain them. The system actually thrives on episodes like the one where she walked out of the job. The idea is to hire workers, work them to the point of breakdown, and then let them leave in disgust. Workers that quit don’t ask for much from the company, and there is always a steady supply of new workers fresh out of their last crappy job that they quit. It does not cost anything more than a couple hours training to hire a new worker, and thousands are saved on things like union wages, benefits, workers comp claims, unemployment, raises, maintaining workplace standards…workers are more likely to quit than complain and change things when they know there is no chance of advanement if they stay in the company.
This system is new. And it is perpetuated in very specific ways. And it hurts people. And it is something we can fight against. American can do better than this.
I read the book too long ago (when it first came out in hardback) to be specific, but I do remember that I found her smugness and lack of empathy to be obstacles. One thing I remember being especially jarred by was her contempt for cleaning women. When she was cleaning the homes of the middle class people she remarked that she would never demean another human being by ‘asking’ them to clean up after her. Well, she wouldn’t be ‘asking,’ would she? She’d be hiring them to do so. But she seemed to think that taking pay to clean for people was about equal to slavery. I feel differently – it’s honest work, for crying out loud. And, contrary to how the author felt, it’s entirely possible to make a living cleaning houses (see below).
Also, by moving on so quickly after each job she was only showing us part of the story. There are always people in the straits that she showed (the very lowest end of the wage scale), but they aren’t usually the same people. Most people move up. I know restaurant employees and housekeepers personally (which I didn’t remember feeling that the author did) and I don’t know any who’ve stayed at that bottom rung permanently. I have a good friend who started her career as a waitress at the bottom rung 22 years ago – she had an infant son, and no child support coming in, BTW. They lived in one of those hotels that rent by the week. She started out working at a coffee shop, taking the worst shifts. After a while, she improved to the point where she was able to get better and better shifts; until, finally, she was able to move to a different, better-paying restaurant. Again, she started with the worst shifts and worked her way up. Eventually (after about 10 years), she was working the best shifts at one the of the best restaurants in our town. And, of course, an improvement in living-conditions came with each wage increase. My sister-in-law owns her own, small cleaning service. She started out 12 years ago (after a divorce) working at the Merry Maids-type places. She didn’t stay for long – you really can’t make much money working for those type of places, which is why most Merry Maids soon move on. Bonnie started putting ads in the paper while she was still working for the Merry Maids place (possibly in violation of their rules), and as soon as she had enough of her own customers she stopped working for them. Now she is bonded and has a few women working for her. These stories are anecdotal evidence, of course – but no more so than the stories in the book.
The book rung hollow and condecending to me. I work at a Walmart (overnight stocker), and I don’t have that bad of a life - I can afford my apartment, food, the insurance plan from Wallyworld, cable internet, drive a decent used car and am putting ~$100-150 into savings every month. I do live in a low-cost of living area though, which helps quite a bit.
Well, she could always say she won it in a contest or something. Or that she saved for a significant period of time to buy it.
I’ve taught the book several times to college students (and am, in fact, teaching it right now.) I’ve always found it to be layered and complex – for me it points out the impossibilities of getting entirely outside one’s own subjectivity. I see Ehrenreich as hyper-aware of her privilege and the ways it influences her thinking and response (I especially the parts where she winds herself up to “confess” she’s a writer and her peers and supervisors basically say “so what?”)
My students tend to be passionate about the book (love and hate) and it has sparked a lot of debates while they work out their different viewpoints on the text.
I have personally been on both sides of the book – a waitress, fast-food slug and farm laborer and a professional. While I can see some of the mistakes she makes (both in thinking and action) I do think that she ultimately gets the big arguments about social injustice right.
