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

The most positive thing I have to say was that this was an easy read, which was vaguely enlightening on what it's like to work minimum wage. And it's well annotated with multiple scholarly citations.

On the other hand, I'm a resident. It's like the trump card in all pity poker games forever. Which makes pity poker no fun at all. Oh, normal people whine about not getting paid time and a half to work 11 hours in a row? I've worked 34 hours in a row for less than $10.00/hour. You stand for four hours in a row? I've stood for 30 hours in a row, in an operating room. You had to clean up peoples pubic hairs? I've had to put my hands in people's orifices, including orifices that someone just created with a scalpel and hold their spleen in the air so that the stool that accidentally just entered the peritoneal cavity doesn't get on it. And I've had almost every bodily fluid imaginable on my hands, feet, and occasionally face. When I was a med student, I paid for such privileges. Cry me a freaking river. I just can't be bothered to feel sorry for someone working 60 hours/week or 7 days/week with some of them being part time.

Also, while I agree that the amount of money spent on the criminalization and prosecution of marijuana (in this case, evidenced by drug testing) is nothing short of inane, you lose your moral high-ground if you actually were using marijuana just proximal to the time you knew you were applying for a job. Like seriously, ideals are all well and good if you serve them with a side of common sense.

And there's just no answers offered here, either. You think the minimum wage isn't a living wage? You do realize that if you pay everyone more, prices will just go up, right? And as much as I'd love to live in the socialist wonderland that she proposes in her afterword - with government-subsidised school and healthcare and housing, I'd rather read a book about how she's trying to get there or stop-gap measures we can employ, rather than “I worked at Walmart and it was awful, but the people who worked there full time didn't seem to mind so much.”

Living on a tight budget for a while is about as close as many upper-class people get to being poor. This, of course, is nothing like actually living in poverty. About 25 years ago now, as the Clinton-era “welfare-to-work” push was underway, writer Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Nickel and Dimed, in which she (as a woman of means) went “undercover” to experience what it's like to actually live on minimum wage in America. She lived in three different areas (Florida, Maine, and Minnesota), experiencing several different kinds of jobs: waitressing, hotel housekeeping, maid service cleaning, working at a nursing home, and retail at Walmart. She gives herself a couple thousand dollars to start with and to cover any true emergencies, and then gets to it.

In what should not have been but seems to be a surprise, being poor is really hard. There's no getting ahead. There's barely even keeping her head above water. Being on your feet all day is physically exhausting and trying to figure out whether she can make her body get through a second job or if she can afford not to is a constant struggle. Housing absorbs nearly all of her income, and it's a constant struggle to find something cheap enough that she can afford, but close enough to work to not drain her resources (her Rent-A-Wreck car and gasoline, not to mention time) excessively. At her price range, these apartments often lack full kitchens, so fast and packaged foods are her only real options. She can't absorb the cost of unscheduled time off, so feeling like she might be getting sick just means pushing through.

There has been a lot of criticism of this book over the years, some of it very valid and other parts of it less so. Ehrenreich admits to some unattractive and classist beliefs as she begins her experiment, like that her education (she holds a Ph.D.) and other markers of her status will somehow be recognized, that it will be obvious that she doesn't really belong among the working poor...which of course never happens. And it's hard to believe she's as surprised as she claims to be at how difficult getting by on minimum wage actually is, but her whole life experience has worked to shelter her from that knowledge. Generally, I found that she acknowledged the privileges she brought with her, like the ability to have any sort of savings and a lifetime of straightforward access to health care. Her interest in and concern for her coworkers seems genuine, if a bit shallow because she doesn't stay any one place long enough to form strong bonds.

Reading this in 2019, ultimately, meant that the initial shock and/or surprise about the insights that it offers aren't really to be had anymore. The issues she highlights (the difficulty of putting together a security deposit while living paycheck-to-paycheck, workplace injuries covered up by shady employers, the inane “personality tests” that are often required for retail work) are long since old news to anyone paying even cursory attention. This isn't a bad place to start, if you are a person who has never been poor wanting information about what poverty might be like to experience. But if you've already got a firm grasp on the basics of why life below the poverty line might be challenging, you won't find anything new or paradigm-changing here.

The book that makes you happy to have gone to college.

It's been a number of years since this book was first published, and I still think it is excellent. Just as relevant now as ever (if not more so), and a very straightforward, sharply written, illuminating (and even very entertaining) first-person essay on trying to live like most Americans do: as unskilled laborers in the lower rungs of America's service industries. A decent amount of research footnotes the story to better inform readers. Most pleasing is that the author avoided writing this book as an anthem or a guilt-trip: she's never self-righteous about her assignment and she claims up front that she's not going “all the way” – in other words, she knows that temporarily acting like she has to live on minimum wage is a far cry from truly having to your whole life. Overall there's a lot to like here, and at about 200 pages, it's a quick, satisfying read.