Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Nickel and Dimed



On (Not) Getting By in America

Most people in the United States have, at some point in their lives, worked a low paying, dead-end job. Many have been able to move beyond such inequitably low positions, but most of us have at least had a taste. As such, I think we can all identify with Barbara Ehrenreich’s plight as she delves head first into the meager and depressing world that the affluent have come to look at from a distance with naive curiosity. This word poverty we use to refer to the ragged huddled masses is, to billions around the world, a stark reality. Over the course of Ehrenreich’s undercover study, she worked six different low wage jobs, each one with its own set of difficulties, both physical and emotional.

As Ehrenreich ventures off, she enters an entirely new world. And it is one in which the term ‘unskilled labor’ is an alarmingly fallacious phrase—for only someone with very skillful hands can manage to balance the distressing tasks of finding and keeping a low wage job (maybe even two at a time), whilst being able to pay rent and food costs, thus securing a decent living establishment. Ehrenreich notes the various, and often unseen difficulties that come into play here. For one, she notes that many of the workers she meets in her experiment have disabling medical problems. And of course, despite the world renowned affluence of the United States, our government does not provide affordable health care. Another factor that astounds the author is how people manage to take care of children on such inadequate wages, especially when Ehrenreich herself is barely able to survive under these conditions.

At first, the prospect of going out and roughing it for a few months seems like an engaging, albeit mildly frightening novelty; however, Ehrenreich quickly realizes that is not entirely the case. First, in dealing with more practical matters, the author quickly understands the true value of time and money. She notes in one of the final chapters that when it comes to property, the poor simply cannot compete with the wealthy. Thus, they are doomed to toil away for next to nothing, whist paying exorbitantly high rent costs. In an attempt to understand the plight of the tragically destitute, Ehrenreich herself seems to fall into the same self-perpetuating habits. For one, because rent is so high in many places, she is deduced to living in hotels that charge by the week because she is not able to afford deposits and such.

While, at times, Ehrenreich’s experiment seems like a mere chronicling of superficial complaints, her insights on the matter of corporate dehumanization are both sobering and thought provoking. I found it particularly enraging that she was forced to submit to a drug test for a particular job, even when, as the author explains, it’s economically unviable for companies to make their workers do that. And that’s really just one of the examples of the various ways companies infringe on the poor’s civil liberties. Ehrenreich dually notes that these types of jobs are not only draining on one’s time and energy, they are also a parasitic entity, making one’s own identity virtually irrelevant. The poor become obscured and voiceless in an overwhelming sea of corporate oppression.

Although written in more prosperous times, Nickel and Dimed is a hauntingly poignant reality check in 2009. With inflation rising, and the value of the dollar steadily lowering, it seems that things are only going to get worse. When the United States government’s response to an oncoming recession is bail outs for bloated, economically unsustainable businesses, it’s abundantly clear that the various luxuries of the rich outweigh the needs of the poor. Ehrenreich emphasizes the sad fact that most employers will do nearly anything to keep from raising wages, even when such a measure is obviously called for. “There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here,” Ehrenreich writes, “making ours not just an economy, but a culture of extreme inequality.”