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

by Barbara Ehrenreich

So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.

you can think all you want, but sooner or later you have to get to the bench and plunge into the everyday chaos of nature, where surprises lurk in the most mundane measurements.

just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day.

don’t know what it is

about the American upper class, but they seem to be shedding their pubic hair at an alarming rate.

But the relevant point about Holly is that she is visibly unwell—possibly whiter, on a daily basis, than anyone else in the state.

We’re not just talking Caucasian here; think bridal gowns, tuberculosis, and death.

deep reserve of rural Mainers, as explained to me by a sociologist acquaintance, I touch her arm and tell her she shouldn’t be doing this.

For the first time in my life as a maid I have a purpose more compelling than trying to meet the aesthetic standards of the New England bourgeoisie.

Maids, as an occupational group, are not visible, and when we are seen we are often sorry for

Bottom line: $7.02 worth of food acquired in seventy minutes of calling and driving, minus $2.80 for the phone calls—which ends up being equivalent to a wage of $3.63 an hour.

We’re told to get to work at 7:30, but the meter doesn’t start running until about 8:00, when we take off in the cars, and there’s no pay for the half hour or so we spend in the office at the end of the day, sorting out the dirty rags before they’re washed and refilling our cleaning fluid bottles.

the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple.

“I don’t mind, really, because I guess I’m a simple person, and I don’t want what they have. I mean, it’s nothing to me. But what I would like is to be able to take a day off now and then . . . if I had to . . . and still be able to buy groceries the next

Housework Wars,” Toronto Star, November 20, 1999). By the second quarter of 1999, 17 percent of new homes were larger than three thousand square feet, which is usually considered the size threshold for household help, or the point at which a house becomes unmanageable to the people who live in it (“Molding Loyal Pamperers for the Newly Rich,” New York Times, October 24, 1999).

“Barb,” or more precisely, “BARB,” drifting off

whose tags haven’t been changed to reflect their

What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re actually selling is your life.

don’t want to work with people who can’t hold up their end or whom you don’t like being with, and you don’t want to keep

readjusting to new ones. We exchange addresses, including my real and permanent one. I tell her about the book I’m working

“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 child care, and $550 for rent (“The Cost of Living in Minnesota:

Studies show that preemployment testing does not lower absenteeism, accidents, or turnover and (at least in the high-tech workplaces studied) actually lowered productivity—presumably due to its negative effect on employee morale. Furthermore, the practice is quite costly. In 1990, the federal government spent $11.7 million to test 29,000 federal employees. Since only 153 tested positive, the cost of detecting a single drug user was $77,000.

Long-term motel residents are almost certainly undercounted, since motel owners often deny access to census takers and the residents themselves may be reluctant to admit they live in motels, crowded in with as many as four people or more in a room (Willoughby Mariano, “The Inns and Outs of the Census,” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2000).

Certain categories of workers—professionals, managers, and farmworkers—are not covered by the FLSA, but retail workers are not among them.

rents usually have to be less than 30 percent

of one’s income to be considered “affordable.”

me as I would have liked; no one ever said, “Wow, you’re fast!” or “Can you believe she just started?” Whatever my accomplishments in the rest of my life, in the low-wage work world I was a person of average ability—capable of learning the job and also capable of screwing up.

More commonly it was left to me to figure out such essentials as who was in charge, who was good to work with, who could take a joke. Here

It’s a lot harder, I found, to sort

out a human microsystem when you’re looking up at it from the bottom, and, of course, a lot more necessary to do so.

Similarly, at Wal-Mart, a coworker once advised me that, although I had a lot to learn, it was also important not to “know too much,” or at least never to reveal one’s full abilities to management, because “the more they think you can do, the more they’ll use you and abuse you.”

but I learned something that no one ever mentioned in the gym: that a lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.

Furthermore, I displayed, or usually displayed, all those traits deemed essential to job readiness: punctuality, cleanliness, cheerfulness, obedience.

I suspect that most welfare recipients already possess them, or would if their child care and transportation problems were solved.

I think it’s fair to say that as a worker, a jobholder, I deserve a B or maybe B+.

how well I did at life in general, which includes eating and having a place to stay. The fact that these are two separate questions needs to be underscored right away.

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.

On small things I was thrifty enough; no expenditures on “carousing,” flashy clothes, or any of the other indulgences that are often smugly believed to undermine the budgets of the poor.

fast food, which I was able to keep down to about $9 a day. But

In Key West, I earned $1,039 in one month and spent $517 on food, gas, toiletries, laundry, phone, and utilities. Rent was the deal breaker. If I had remained in my $500 efficiency, I would have been able to pay the rent and have $22 left over (which is still $78 less than the cash I had in my pocket at the start of the month).

So yes, with some different choices, I probably could have survived in Minneapolis. But I’m not going back for a rematch.

Something is wrong, very 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

reflected in the official poverty rate, which has remained for the past several years at a soothingly low 13 percent or so.

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.

the early 1960s, when this method of calculating poverty was devised, food accounted for 24 percent of the average family budget (not 33 percent even then, it should be noted) and housing 29 percent.

So the choice of food as the basis for calculating family budgets seems fairly arbitrary today;

It did not escape my attention, as a temporarily low-income person, that the housing subsidy I normally receive in my real life—over $20,000 a year in the form of a mortgage-interest deduction—would have allowed a truly low-income family to live in relative splendor.

Every city where I worked in the course of this project was experiencing what local businesspeople defined as a “labor shortage”—

wages for people near the bottom of the labor market remain fairly flat, even “stagnant.”

Some economists argue that the apparent paradox rests on an illusion: there is no real “labor shortage,” only a shortage of people willing to work at the wages currently being offered.