We often think that we deal in reality and misery, with weighty decisions. But our "reality" is so far removed from the lives of lots of our fellow citizens that the description of their lives in Nickel and Dimed will seem as foreign as a National Geographic special.
Nickel and Dimed is written by a journalist who took a year "off" and joined the entry-level working class as a full-fledged member. She became one of the people who work at the McDonalds and the Wal-Marts, and who are so frequently lampooned with the snooty "and do you want fries with that?"dismissal. They are, in short, the people who do a lot of the dirty work in the bowels of our body politic.
This is a disturbing book. It's meant to be. We can justify (or rationalize) ignoring its message by focusing on the law and on our "business." But we should listen to Jacob Marley: "Mankind was my business!"
The author begins with a premise that seems to make perfect sense: "In the buildup to welfare reform, it was uniformly assumed that a job was the ticket out of poverty and that the only thing holding back welfare recipients was their reluctance to get out and get one."
The author's travels take her to Key West, Maine, and Minneapolis. She works in restaurants as a server, where this 50 year old Ph.D. is called "waitress" and occasionally is demoted to "girl." She works as a "dietary aide" in the Alzheimer's ward of a nursing home, where her job is to single-handedly ensure that dozens of incompetent old people are well fed, that the dishes are sanitary and that no mistakes - like a sugary sweet on a diabetic's tray - endanger her charges. She works in the "soft-lines" of a Wal-Mart, where her primary job is to pick up after clothing shoppers who don't return items to the racks. Finally, she signs on with The Merry Maids, one of the leading housecleaning franchisers. There, she cleans other people's houses - and their toilets.
The importance of this book is its new perspective on poverty. Just as John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me shocked a nation of readers with an inside view of racial segregation, Nickel and Dimed is one of the first inside views of the working poor. Generally, the poor don't speak with their own voice - they just have non-poor people who speak for them with (I think) the very deepest of good intentions. Those "in the pits," though, the soup kitchen servers, the rescue mission pastors, the low-end housing providers aren't writing books and speaking out - they're too busy sandbagging against the overwhelming floodwaters of human need
One reviewer compares Ehrenreich to H. L. Mencken. She has the scalpel of Mencken, to be sure. But she also takes a heavy, blunt object to traumatize apathy to these neighbors of ours. Nickel and Dimed is full of enduring images: the vacant stares of nursing home patients wearing only their adult diapers; the pregnant housecleaner who gets faint every afternoon from inadequate nutrition; and the three kinds of [feces] stains in a toilet bowl. When asked if a particular middle class family is rich, one housecleaner replies, "If we're doing the cleaning, they're rich" And the cleaners sometimes seem grateful to be wiping up after others: "After all, if there weren't people who have far too much money and floor space and stuff, there could hardly be maids." Nickel and Dimed drums away on the class theme that we seem only comfortable with living, not talking about. But what we have done as a society is what authorities as far apart as George W. Bush and Jesse Jackson say that we never can do - we have left these people behind. "I've noticed that many of my coworkers [at a Wal-Mart] are poor in all the hard-to-miss, stereotypical ways. Crooked yellow teeth are one sign, inadequate footwear is another."
Ehrenreich finds both cruel irony and indignity in the Wal-Mart experience. There, the "family" of employees come and go through a revolving employment door. If someone is lucky enough, they may get to stay long enough to have management lead The Wal-Mart cheer: "Give me a W . . ." Well, there's the indignity. The irony comes about from employee functional poverty in the midst of the retail Mecca. The sales people have to wear (and furnish) shirts with collars. Ehrenreich describes a co-worker waiting, waiting for a $7 shirt to be "clearanced," because "At $7 an hour, a $7 shirt is just not going to make it to my shopping list."
There's no Potemkin-like call to action in Nickel and Dimed. It's "just" an accurate portrayal of the way millions upon millions of people live. As we play our games of golf (which I love), and eat regularly at T.G.I. Fridays (seen by the $7 an hour crowd as an impossible luxury), we can and we do forget the hopelessness of working poverty.
"If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?" I think it does, for the poor and the not-poor. And that may be the saddest thing about life today under our American flag.
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