Poverty Sucks

Not that I would know. I'm in the process of reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (On Not Getting By in America), and although everyone knows poverty sucks, I am still surprised and horrified at what some people need to go through just to meet their basic needs. This book is about Ehrenreich's social experiment - as a middle class Phd graduate, she steps into the shoes of low-wage workers in order to see how people survive (or don't survive) on minimum wage. She acknowledges of course, that being in the middle class and merely "visiting" poverty, she has advantages her fellow co-workers don't have, such as good health due to a lifetime of good medical coverage, for instance, or the luxury of a running car. In addition, being white and a native English speaker, Ehrenreich does not pretend to understand what it is like for workers who do not fill that criteria.

In 1998, when Ehrenreich started this project, it took an hourly wage of $8.89 to afford a one-bedroom apartment - this can be contrasted with the fact that for a welfare recipient, the chances of landing such a job were about 97 to 1.

Ehrenreich took jobs as a cleaning lady, a waitress, and retail salesperson. Her experiences are horrific - some of her coworkers live in cars, others work from 7-2, then 2-10 in order to pay for rent, and almost all of her coworkers are ill due to the demands of physical labour. For most of the time that Ehrenreich engages in this project, she takes ibuprofen almost every day in order to manage the pain and keep working. Low-wage earners have very few breaks at their job, if at all, and are often not allowed to sit, drink water, or otherwise be normal human beings with needs. That's probably what struck me most about her book - the lack of human dignity associated with these jobs. I mean, it's bad enough if you have to clean rooms at a motel - but to have to do so without stop for hours on end, only to satisfy a middle-class client who has very little regard for your job, and a boss who sees you as a commodity, is just lowsy. I really don't know how people do it, and it really sucks that they have to. I've worked retail and coffee shops in my day, but not because I really needed to to survive - it was more a matter of having extra money. Working low-wage jobs for those reasons is a whole other matter. When I was working those jobs I also felt humiliated, even though I knew that if I quit, I would be all right, whereas some of my coworkers would not (and sometimes, I did quit, because I couldn't take it). In addition, I never worked full time at these jobs, much less had two full time jobs at the same time. When I did have something resembling an 8-hour shift, it was a nightmare for me. And my low wage jobs weren't as bad a some - I worked at coffee shops, but I wasn't a maid, on my knees, scrubbing floors as Ehrenreich does in her experiment.