An interview with the author of the book
NICKEL AND DIMED
The following is an interview with Barbara Ehrenreich reprinted from the
pages of SOCIALIST WORKER NEWSPAPER.
Trapped by low wages
August 3, 2001
"WORK ALONE
doesn't ensure a decent standard of living." That's the blunt conclusion
of Heather Boushey, coauthor of Hardships in America: The Real Story of
Working Families, a study released by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI)
last month.
EPI researchers found that nearly one-third of working families with young
children in the U.S. don't earn enough to afford basic necessities like food,
housing, health care and child care.
According to their study, among families that earned up to twice the
federal government's official poverty line, the vast majority faced constant
difficulties putting food on the table, paying the rent, covering utility
bills and so on. And this is the situation despite the longest economic
expansion on record.
The EPI's findings underline the points made by Barbara Ehrenreich in her
book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
Ehrenreich researched her book by taking a series of low-wage jobs at the
bottom of the ladder in the "miracle" economy. Nickel and Dimed
is filled with stories of the people she met--and how they had to fight tooth
and nail just to get by.
The success of the book--which sold out of its first printing earlier this
year in a matter of weeks--is more evidence of the growing discontent with a
system that has made the rich richer while working people face worsening
conditions.
Ehrenreich talked to Socialist Worker's ELIZABETH LALASZ about why
she wrote Nickel and Dimed--and what the fight for a different future will
involve.
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WHY DID you choose the topic you did for Nickel
and Dimed?
THIS ALL grew out of a conversation with the
editor of Harper's magazine about welfare reform. This wasn't something
that I was pitching him an article on. I was just talking about it and
marveling at the smug assumption that women coming off of welfare would do
perfectly fine as soon as they got a job.
The arithmetic just didn't look good to me.
I
had been thinking about this a lot, because I often write about issues related
to women and poverty, and I said, "Somebody should go do the
old-fashioned kind of journalism and try it for themselves."
Anyway, many months later, he said,
"You!" So it started as a magazine assignment. And there was a lot
of response to that article once it was published, so my book editor said,
"Do more, and we'll make a book out of it."
WHAT SURPRISED you the most about what you
found as you did the research for the book?
THE WORK was extremely hard, but I knew it was
going to be. And I was sort of nervous about that.
I had waitressed when I was a teenager and in
college, but this was more than 30 years later. And I didn't know if I would
be able to keep up with that. It was really, really hard, especially when I
tried to work more than one job at a time.
But the biggest surprise, and what was
psychologically hardest, was the authoritarian--or I might even say, the
fascist--atmosphere of so many of these workplaces.
I hadn't been mentally prepared for that--for
the loss of privacy, the knowledge that my purse could be searched at any time
by management, presumably looking for stolen goods. And the absurd rules.
A
couple of places had rules that you weren't supposed to talk to your
coworkers.
As a person who has the most wonderful work
life possible--that of a freelance writer--it was really a jolt to suddenly be
treated as an object of suspicion.
ACCORDING TO the statistics, 40 million
people in the U.S. live on $8 an hour or less. How did people that you met
make ends meet on so little?
THERE ARE two major strategies. One is that you
live with other wage earners. You pool several people's wages to pay rent.
That could be a husband, boyfriend or a grown child. Or you might have a
roommate who wasn't a family member. I heard a lot about that.
The other obvious strategy is to have more than
one job. And I think that this is a lot more common than the Bureau of Labor
Statistics suggests. They say that 6 percent of the workforce works more than
one job. I must have met all of them, because it just seemed so common.
But there are a lot of people who don't manage
that well at all.
There were people who ended up homeless. I
worked alongside some women who were homeless.
There were people who I didn't think were
getting enough to eat. And in fact, they complained about being pretty dizzy
by the end of the day.
There were people who ended up living in these
residence hotels--a lot of which are pretty creepy, but still cost way too
much. And if you're stuck in that situation, you're really trapped, because if
you're paying $250 a week to live in a motel room, you're not ever going to
build up the money to move into an apartment, which takes three months' rent.
WE'RE NEARING the five-year anniversary of
"welfare reform," and that's the lifetime limit on benefits, so more
and more people will be cut off. What kind of effect will this have?
I THINK there's been a consistent effort on the
part of the politicians to cover up the reality of what's been happening with
welfare reform.
There are reports from all across the
country--the American Friends Service Committee issued a report about a month
ago--of increased levels of hunger among women who have left welfare. This
also seems to be evident by all the food pantries and shelters from all
different parts of the country that have been maxed out and are talking about
welfare reform being one of the causes.
So there's been kind of collective delusion
about the real effects of welfare reform.
I really want to underscore that the conditions
that I found between 1998 and 2000 were at the pinnacle of prosperity. It was
the unprecedented dot-com boom and so forth.
I think that as soon as joblessness starts to
rise--which it has been--liberals and leftists will focus their attention on
unemployment as the problem, forgetting that even in the best of times, the
jobs weren't good enough.
GEORGE W. BUSH is in the White House now,
and there aren't many people who think he's a friend of the poor. But many of
these cuts took place while the Democrats--supposedly the party of working
people--controlled the White House.
IT WAS because of welfare reform that I
couldn't possibly bring myself to vote for Al Gore last time. I thought that
this was a complete betrayal of what the Democrats had at one time stood for.
That's another thing to underscore about the time period I was researching and
writing--those were the Clinton years.
WHAT CAN people do to challenge the
conditions you write about?
THE TRADITIONAL answer is to organize and get a
union. And I appreciate much more how hard that is in the totalitarian
atmosphere of these workplaces. You can be fired for anything.
It's illegal to fire people for union activity,
but that's not what they would say that they were firing you for. At Wal-Mart,
you can be fired for using the word "damn." And that would probably
be the excuse to fire someone.
WHAT'S BEEN the response to your book?
THE RESPONSE has been utterly amazing. I had no
idea that there would be this much interest in it. I've had hundreds of people
come to book signings. It's been unbelievable.
I think it reflects in part the fact that the
"bubble" has broken in the economy, so people are prepared to think
about things a little more critically.
This isn't a policy or a polemic-type book,
compared to most things that I write. I was most concerned with just
reporting--in as concrete and minute-by-minute a way as I could--on what it
means to earn $7 an hour in this country.
But obviously I would want to see some kind of
revival of the old liberal agenda--like national health insurance and
subsidized child care. We have to return to some kind of public responsibility
for public housing, which has really diminished.
Raising the minimum wage is supposed to be
discussed in Congress this summer. I think that people should get involved in
living-wage campaigns wherever they are. And support organizing efforts.
I
wish there were more such organizing efforts to support.
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