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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: Did you finally get your dream job?
Ehrenreich: That was my thought in going to Maine. The job that came along very quickly was with a house cleaning service: $6.63 an hour. This is not the same as being an independent house cleaner. You work in teams, highly controlled. Every motion has been defined for you and programmed by management. That was the most physically punishing of all the jobs.
English: Describe the profit structure of the maid's organization: What were they charging compared to what you were making?
Ehrenreich: They paid us $ 6.63 an hour; if you missed a day you were punished by having it bumped down to $6 an hour, where it remained for two weeks. I never missed a day, but mothers of small children were always being punished and getting down to $6 an hour. The clients were charged $25 per person-hour; this is not a very capital-intensive industry, so that was quite a profit margin. There were individual managers I liked, who understood their goal was to leap in and help out in a rush time. Then there were those who saw their job as entirely surveillance, viewing us all as potential thieves, druggies and slackers.
English: Moving on from Maine, you had to pass a drug test to get your next job. It came as news to me that drug tests prevalent in corporate America only really test for marijuana.
Ehrenreich: They don't pick up hard drugs or alcohol; basically it's a ritual of humiliation. I realized another thing about drug testing when I had to go through it: You have to drive to apply for the job, drive back for an interview, then drive again to some clinic somewhere for the drug test. If you're paying for gas – which was close to two dollars a gallon last year – paying for a baby sitter, and you're not being paid to do this, it becomes a big disincentive to changing jobs. There were other tests that you had to pass. At first I thought, Give me a break, because some of these questions say, Agree/disagree: It is easier to work when you are a little bit high. Another of my favorite questions was: In the past year I have stolen: Check dollar amount below…
English: After passing these tests you successfully landed a job at Wal-Mart.
Ehrenreich: Yes. But there's one more hurdle at Wal-Mart, as it is not actually a corporation; it's a cult. You have an eight-hour orientation of videos with Sam Walton exhorting you from the dead to sell more, and a 12-minute anti-union videotape, which was the hardest thing I ever had to sit through in silence. Anyway, I got a job in ladies' wear, thinking I would be good at it, giving fashion tips to ladies. But it's not like that at all: My job was to pick up things off the floor, return things that had been tried on to their exact places by the shopping cart full, one after another. It was drudgery and required a tremendous amount of memorization.
English: What were your co-workers like?
Ehrenreich: A pretty beaten down bunch. It was not a job with a lot of social interaction; we were not permitted to talk to each other. You could ask where something goes, but chatting was against the rules, so we had to sneak to chat. They were hard-working people, some of them with more than one job; people who in most cases could not afford health insurance because the employee contribution is too high.
English: What was the effect of this on your self-esteem and morale?
Ehrenreich: I had started this whole venture with the idea of it almost as a mathematical proposition: match wages to rent and gas and food money. I was surprised at how quickly I was drawn in psychologically: wanting to do well, really wanting to succeed, partly because I didn't want to let down my co-workers, by being slow or something. The thing that undermined me psychologically was that management attitude. I hadn't experienced anything like that since junior high school; I have never had people get four inches from my face and yell at me for making some mistake.
English: Weren't you punished in one case for having a bowl of clam chowder?
Ehrenreich: I stole a cup of clam chowder! And I dissed a manager who was very rude to one of the immigrant dishwashers; I was offended by the way she talked to him. She said something to me like, "There's so many of them," speaking of the immigrant workers, and I didn't respond or smile. So I was punished. I had to stay after work and do extra things, make up vats of blue cheese dressing and other little things she invented for me.
English: How do you react to the criticism that you are just an entitled person pretending to be poor?
Ehrenreich: That is definitely true. I was all the time really a journalist and had my laptop with me in my room or wherever – in the trunk of my car. And I knew that.
English: Did you spend money on yourself during this period of time from your own resources?
Ehrenreich: I called you once using my calling card number from my real life, and I called my kids. But this kind of project is something journalists used to do a lot earlier in this century. There is a tradition of journalism where you went out there, worked in the factory, went to the slaughter house.
English: Studs Terkel, in talking about your book says, "She has accomplished what no contemporary writer has even attempted: to be that nobody who barely subsists on her essential labors." But really, in reading this book, I was inspired by the realization of how many more stories like this beg to be written. The need to have, especially as you talk about the segmentation of the labor force along ethnic and racial lines, people of all ethnic groups going out – to hear a report from an Asian sweatshop, or what it's like to be an Hispanic laborer.
Ehrenreich: I worked with people who are writing poems, keeping a journal, or writing a whole book in one woman's case. I want those stories out.
English: How have your personal habits changed since these experiences? Do you look at the world differently vis-à-vis eating in restaurants, tipping, staying in hotels, shopping at places like Wal-Mart?
Ehrenreich: I tip more, that's true. But I think the big change is more psychological. I was always a person with a social conscience and thinking of issues of inequality. But I look at things differently. If I see a woman behind the counter at the food mart at the gas station – she may be smiling when I pay for my gas – but I'm thinking, "How many hours today have you been on your feet?" Or, "What are you going home to, if it is indeed a home at all? Who's taking care of your children? Are you torn up with anxiety about what your kids are doing while you're here?" I see more pain.
English: Why do you think that the experiences of low-wage work are rarely portrayed in our culture when they reflect the actual lives of so many Americans?
Ehrenreich: The TV show "Roseanne" was an exception in the 1980s, but there's nothing like that now. I watch sitcoms and dramas; I seldom see anybody earn less than $15 an hour. It's young lawyers, young professionals, young doctors – maybe social workers. In the mainstream media when you're writing for magazines and so on – they're not interested. A lot of that is the pressure to keep "good demographics." Advertisers want to think that they're reaching the affluent people; they don't want downbeat stories about the down-and-out.
English: How high do you think the minimum wage should be? What is the impact of increases that are in the range of 50 cents to a dollar per hour?
Ehrenreich: Any increase is good in that it lifts things up for people who are even up at the $8 an hour level; there's an upward pressure from a raise in the minimum wage. How high should it be? Is that like asking, "What is a living wage?" The national estimate I mention in the last chapter of the book comes from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. This is a year old now, but they analyzed a lot of different analyses nationwide – living wage estimates – and came up with $14 an hour, for one adult with two children. That's a lot; it would break a lot of employers to pay that much, or so they say. If private employers can't do that, we've got to have public sector subsidies of health care, child care, housing.
English: What about the law of supply and demand? If there's a labor shortage shouldn't wages just go up?
Ehrenreich: That question fascinated me, because even though I had zero skills to offer, I could get jobs so readily at all these places. I even had an employer confide in me, self-pityingly, about how hard it was to get enough people, and reliable people. He's paying $6.63 an hour. Something is wrong. The market is not working because wages have gone up a little since 1996, but not up to their 1979 levels for people in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution. What's gone on with the market is that employers will do anything to resist wage increases – as far as I can see.
English: Why don't the workers organize into unions?
Ehrenreich: I would very cautiously bring up the subject, but some people weren't really sure what a union was. The larger answer is that the low-wage workplace has an atmosphere of fear. You can get fired so easily. It is illegal to fire people for union activity, but the AFL-CIO – backed up, interestingly enough, by Human Rights Watch – claims that ten to twenty thousand people a year are fired or punished for trying to organize in the work place. At Wal-Mart for example, you can't say "damn," or "hell," or many other words that you can probably think of. People who've gotten involved in union organizing in Wal-Mart haven't been fired for that, but for saying "damn." So they always have something.
English: Your book gives us a demonstration of what will happen to millions of women, many of them single mothers, when they try go from welfare to work. But the question is, what made Americans so anxious to end welfare as we know it?
Ehrenreich: There was a concerted campaign by conservative pundits and politicians that goes back to the 1980s; conservative think tanks pushed on Charles Murray's book Losing Ground in 1984. They made it a populist issue appealing to working people who are having a hard time by saying, "Look, these other people don't even have work." They were able to create resentment. They used racism; they tried to portray the average welfare recipient as an African-American woman with six children who just keeps having children to get more welfare benefits.
English: Most welfare recipients are white, and most have just one or two children.
Ehrenreich: There was a big campaign around this, but the belief many liberals shared is that a job is a ticket out of poverty.
English: That you can make it in this country by the sweat of your brow, if you work hard and play by the rules. I think Americans want to believe and want to live in a country where that's true. The force of your argument here and your experience is to show that it simply isn't true.
Ehrenreich: And if that's not true, the whole social contract is up for question. You work your hardest, you give and then you'll get back; or you'll at least live indoors and have three meals a day if you do that. But it doesn't work.
English: We're talking about Welfare-to-Work: the whole plan to put mothers back to work on these kinds of low-wage jobs. You were on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" recently and she devoted the whole show to this problem. Have you had any reflections on that experience since being on her show, about the message that went out?
Ehrenreich: There was one thing I couldn't point out on the show: There were three women having a very hard time with poverty, even though they were working women. In one case the woman was sort of making it – a woman from Washington, D.C., who has also been profiled in the New Yorker – in that she got off welfare, became a police woman, but found that she could not support her three children on that pay. She had to leave them at home. She has a second job, so she's really working 14, 16 hours a day. This was presented as a great model of success, and you do have to admire her. But her 13-year-old daughter is now raising the other two children. And I don't like that. She wasn't able to come home until ten o'clock at night; the children were alone after school until then.
English: So many people talk about the self-esteem and great feelings that come from being off welfare and having a job. We could all buy that if the jobs actually allowed you to have some kind of a decent life and raise your children with dignity. But the idea that self-esteem comes out of a situation in which you have to abandon your children – to make enough money for groceries – seems like a very poor idea of self-esteem. Some people think that wages aren't rising because of the millions of low-wage immigrants who come into this country.
Ehrenreich: In most situations I was working alongside native-born Americans of different ethnic groups, although there were more likely to be immigrant men in jobs like dishwashing and restaurants. Northern European countries have also experienced a big influx of immigrants and have not had this downward spiral of wages. There's something else going on in this country. I think it's time for native-born American workers to make common cause with the immigrant workers they find themselves working with.
English: Are wage differentials in other highly developed countries are as great as they are here?
Ehrenreich: No, they're not. Just look at CEO wages – we don't call them wages anymore at the CEO level. The ratio of average CEO pay in the U.S. to the average blue-collar worker pay in the same corporation is something like 470 to 1. It used to be 30 to 1 in 1960. No other country has that kind of gap – it's out of control here.
English: Where would you fall in terms of how much you were making – in the lowest 10 percent of America?
Ehrenreich: No, I was above the lowest 10 percent, but below the lowest 20 percent. So I would not have been eligible for government help. That's important to remember: The way poverty is defined leaves out so many people. I tried getting private charity on two occasions: I went to food pantries, but it is a lot of effort to get food out of these places. I was sent to a supermarket where I could pick up a voucher for food, but they specified exactly what I could buy: no vegetables, no produce, no fruit; I could have Hamburger Helper and hamburger meat, or Tuna Helper – no tuna though. It was specified down to the brand name and that seems a little creepy to me; I want to investigate that someday.
English: You have a Ph.D. in biology. Why did you leave that field to have a career in activist journalism?
Ehrenreich: I was one of many people whose careers were interrupted in the late 1960s by the war in Vietnam. I had fellow students who also wanted to do something more socially relevant.
English: One thing that motivated a lot of people to go into journalism was that you couldn't find the war experience talked about in the mainstream media in a way that resembled reality. There was a burgeoning of the underground press. In recent years people hoped the Internet would provide that function for our period of time. It doesn't look so promising in that way, but we have urgent reasons to have some kind of independent media, don't you think?
Ehrenreich: Media that is not beholden to advertisers, media that is much more accessible to ordinary people.
Return to Part 1 of the Conversation >>
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