Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in Boom-Time America by Barbara Ehrenreich//White-Collar Sweatshop; The Deterioration of Work and its Rewards in Corporate America by Jill Andresky Fraser

In: Dissent: a journal devoted to radical ideas and the values of socialism and democracy, Band 48, Heft 4, S. 131

Abstract

Five jobs and three cities later, Ehrenreich concludes that many of today's jobs don't pay enough to support one person--much less a whole family. She works two jobs at a time and eats 'chopped meat, beans, cheese and noodles.' But in all three cities, rent gets the better of her economy. 'You don't need a degree in economics,' she writes, 'to see that wages are too low and rents too high.' But this is a mathematical conclusion, which could have been made with the aid of a calculator. By taking these jobs herself, Ehrenreich is able to capture the material details of workplace indignity--from the obstacle course she is forced to run at the restaurant ('Employees are barred from using the front door, so I enter the first day through the kitchen, where a red-faced man with shoulder length blond hair is throwing frozen steaks against the wall and yelling, `Fuck this shit!") to the 'unwanted intimacy' she acquires as a maid cleaning the bathrooms of the privileged. Whether rehearsing the taxonomy of dirty toilets ('there are three kinds of shit-stains') or the grueling routine of washing windows in an un-air-conditioned house ('Outside, I can see the construction guys knocking back Gatorade, but the rule is that no fluid or food item can touch a maid's lips when she's inside a house'), Ehrenreich shows how work's various postures of submission recreate the upstairs-downstairs world of old Europe. As the brochure of a Maine cleaning service brags, 'We clean floors the old-fashioned way--on our hands and knees.' Some corporate chieftains inspire fear the old-fashioned way. Grove, for example, ran Intel the way Al Capone ran Chicago. When an aide is late for a meeting, Grove waits, 'holding a stave of wood the size of a baseball bat.' Finally, he slams 'the wood onto the surface of the meeting-room table,' and shouts, 'I don't ever, ever, want to be in a meeting with this group that doesn't start and end when it's scheduled.' Other bosses go high tech, relying on computer technology to monitor an employee's every move. The Investigator software program--used by Exxon, Mobil, and Delta--keeps track not only of workplace performance measures (like the number of an employee's key strokes and mouse clicks per day) but also of troublemakers. Should an employee type an 'alert' word like boss or union, Investigator automatically forwards her document to her supervisor. 'Back in the fifteenth century,' a PR executive tells Fraser, 'they used to use a ball and chain, and now they use technology.' Finally, Ehrenreich and Fraser force us to rethink the politics of poverty. Several reviewers have hailed Nickel and Dimed as a worthy successor to Michael Harrington's The Other America. The comparison is apt, but not for the reason these reviewers think. For Harrington discovered the poor, as he put it, 'off the beaten track,' rotting in the inner cities or along the rural peripheries. Though he discussed poverty's many guises and causes, he left the impression that people were poor because they did not fully participate in the economy. They were 'the rejects of the affluent society' who 'never had the right skills in the first place' or 'lost them when the rest of the economy advanced.' (In recent decades, William Julius Wilson has advanced a similar argument.) To understand the alien world of the poor required the talents of a modern-day Dickens, for only an artist could capture the 'smell and texture' of people who 'talk and think differently.' Harrington's audience was the affluent society, the millions who had suddenly joined the middle class and forgotten that poverty existed. The only way to widen the circle of 'the friends of the poor,' he thought, was to describe and decry, in elegant and haunting prose, the poor's isolation, to remind everyone that though the poor were 'other,' they were still America.