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Barbara Ehrenreich
Sociologist; Author, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
In conversation with Deirde English, Teaching Fellow, School of Journalism, UC Berkeley
English: I was blown away by this book, not only because of what it tells us about low-wage work in America, but because it provides a harrowing vision of the social universe that we occupy. Barbara's work has been compared to Mencken's and Orwell's. Her new book tells us about the world of pain behind the gleaming and sterile exteriors of restaurants, hotels and shops, showing us another America. It reveals the relationship between these two worlds and the bankruptcy present in both, providing a bleak and noir vision that is also darkly funny in many ways. Why did you set out to do low-wage work and where did you go to pursue these opportunities?Ehrenreich: I had suggested to Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's, that somebody ought to do this kind of journalism. I told him that the math does not work if you are earning six, seven, eight dollars an hour, looking at the rents as they are. We were talking about welfare reform, and I said, "It's time for somebody to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism, try for themselves and write about it!" That was a foolish thing to say, because he told me to do it.
English: A lot of people are amazed that you would have the physical fortitude to do low-wage work. They fear it would be overwhelmingly physically taxing.
Ehrenreich: I was frightened of that. I wanted to avoid waitressing, because I'd done that as a teenager and thought it would be too much. But I ended up doing it and I'm pretty strong now – though I just about reached my breaking point now and then. Mentally, though, it was taxing. There was a lot to learn; I never use the word "unskilled" now for any job. I was challenged every time.
English: How did you start off?
Ehrenreich: I went to three cities – one was Key West, because I live near there. My rules were that I had to find the cheapest place to live, the best paying job I could – consistent with not using my actual resume – and that I had to take it very seriously; I could not mess up this project by getting fired for no good reason. I had to do everything possible to succeed and then see if I could make ends meet.
English: You got your first job through the classifieds. Did you just take out the paper and decide which kind of low-wage job you wanted to do?
Ehrenreich: I learned one thing fast: There are a lot of want ads but that doesn't mean there's really a job there; there's so much turnover in low-wage jobs that a lot of places keep a want ad all the time. It took longer than I thought it would. I ended up, despite applying for hotel housekeeping jobs, being steered towards waitressing – because I speak pretty good English. I didn't realize at the beginning that was going to have an effect.
English: You were, shall we say, career counseled into waitressing because the people who do the housekeeping jobs in that part of the country tend to be non-white, and non-English speaking.
Ehrenreich: Or white and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe.
English: You became a waitress – was that pretty backbreaking work?
Ehrenreich: Not so much backbreaking as exhausting. It's running all the time. You have to look busy even when there's no one to serve, because if you don't look busy and you're not finding some side work to do, the manager will find something really grim for you to do. It was exhausting even when there were no customers.
English: The first restaurant was the Hearthside, a mom-and-pop restaurant?
Ehrenreich: No, no. That was part of a big discount hotel; the other one, which I call Jerry's – just to avoid any kind of lawsuit – is a very large national chain, famous for its many varieties of breakfasts.
English: So why on earth did you go on to Jerry's from your first job?
Ehrenreich: Because I wasn't making enough money. The servers in these places got paid two dollars and change an hour, and you had to make up the rest in tips. I was not even making the minimum wage in that first place because the business was slow. I didn't realize it was going to be off-season, so I moved on to Jerry's. I want to emphasize that I was a very hard-working and ambitious low-wage person, and this is not the story of someone failing to make ends meet because they weren't trying. I had to get into Jerry's: high volume, low tips.
English: Did you find out how to make do on a low-wage income?
Ehrenreich: No. I found that, perversely, it can be more expensive to be poor than to be middle class. One of the waitresses gave me my first lesson in this. I was alarmed at the fact that she was living in a motel and said, "Look at what you're paying; you've got to get into an apartment." Her response was, very sensibly, "Where am I going to get the first month's rent and a security deposit to move into an apartment?" I had never thought that such an amount of capital would be an insurmountable obstacle to people. Then I ended up in the same situation myself: living in residential motels in the Twin Cities area, at the fantastically high rate of $250 a week, for a creepy, dirty, room. But the important thing financially about that situation, in addition to that high weekly rent, is there was no fridge, no microwave, no hot plate; all my food now came from convenience stores and fast-food outlets. That's more expensive. I thought I knew how to be poor – I was a graduate student, making lentil soup by the pot, which I would freeze in Tupperware containers. But now I couldn't afford the Tupperware, and much less, I didn't have a kitchen.
English: Talking about housing issues, there's a place in your book when you say you were astonished to find that you aspired to the status of trailer park, of trailer trash.
Ehrenreich: I didn't realize how expensive it is to live in a mobile home. First, it's hard to find a trailer park; they're filled up. In Key West, a half-sized trailer was $625 a month in 1998 – like living in a tin can, and that included no utilities. You need air conditioning if you're living in a tin can in the summer there; that is extraordinarily expensive.
English: What about housing in Portland, Maine?
Ehrenreich: I ended up in a residential motel; I thought it was a rather pleasant one. My first feeling when I got into these motels was that, "Something's wrong, I must not be doing this right; this is not how real poor people live." My co-workers were the other low-wage people in these motels. The thing about me that was different from them – other than the fact I was actually a journalist – was that I was living in luxury because I had a whole room to myself. In other rooms, single rooms, there would be a family, often with no fridge, no microwave; you eat on the bed, and there are sleeping bags on the floor for the kids.
English: Did you have to drive increasingly further away to find a place to live?
Ehrenreich: It's too expensive to live near the jobs in many areas. You know that in the Bay Area; that's also true in the Twin Cities area: The remaining low-priced housing is in the center of town, and the jobs move to the periphery. If you're an inner-city person and you don't have a car, you're stuck with long bus rides, or joblessness.
English: Yet the poverty statistics in this country don't take this into account, and that's something you write about. The last chapter of your book is an eloquent essay on poverty in America: about the relationships of housing costs to poverty, the way that poverty statistics are kept and that this has completely omitted the affordability crisis.
Ehrenreich: We comfort ourselves with the statistic that only 13 percent of Americans are poor, but that's based on a definition of poverty which is almost ludicrous today. It was devised in the early 1960s and takes the cost of food that a family needs and multiplies that by three, as if food were really one-third of the family's expenses. There's been very little inflation in food costs compared to housing costs, so it's a meaningless definition. By official definitions of poverty I was not poor on $7 an hour, and that's what I averaged in all my different jobs.
English: Would you say that you were unable to support yourself on low-wage work?
Ehrenreich: I finally realized that you have to have more than one job. I tried working two jobs in one day; but that was too hard for me: an eight-hour and a six-hour shift of heavy physical labor. Hotel housekeeping combined with waitressing was beyond me. But in Maine I had a weekday job, cleaning houses with a maid service, and then on the weekends I worked in a nursing home. So seven days a week I felt pretty flushed. How long could I have held out, I don't know. If you had children it would be hopeless.
