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

by Barbara Ehrenreich

Managers can sit—for hours at a time if they want—but it’s their job to see that no one else ever does, even when there’s nothing to do,

If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in? I don’t know and I don’t intend to find out, but I can guess that one of the symptoms is a bad case of tunnel vision. Work fills the landscape; coworkers swell to the size of family members or serious foes. Slights loom large, and a reprimand can reverberate into the night.

“calm down” generally functions as an incitement to rage.

Getting “reamed out” by Ted can ruin their whole day; a morsel of praise will be savored for weeks.

The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly “unskilled.”

My mentors in these matters were not lazy; they just understood that there are few or no rewards for heroic performance.

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.

Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a halt.

When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.

Ours is an economic culture that reflexively rewards and flatters the prosperous while punishing and insulting the poor, no matter how hard they work.