University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: November 4, 2004

By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
Contributing Editor

A North Carolina legislator called her book "intellectual pornography" and she once was introduced on a talk show as "the anti-Christ."

EHRENREICH

But at UB last week, Barbara Ehrenreich, author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America," was greeted with enthusiastic cheers and spontaneous bursts of applause during her Distinguished Speakers Series lecture.

After noting wryly that being part of the UB lecture series was "the first thing I have ever shared with Donald Trump," Ehrenreich described how she began her undercover assignment of working at minimum-wage jobs and living solely on their proceeds in order to find out first-hand how people actually got by (or didn't) on such low wages.

When welfare reform was passed by the Clinton administration in 1996, minimum-wage jobs were heralded as the way out of poverty for young women on welfare, she said.

In "Nickel and Dimed," she chronicles how that promise simply doesn't add up.

"The math did not look good to me," she recalled after perusing newspaper help-wanted ads and then looking at the monthly rentals in the real estate section.

So Ehrenreich decided to leave her comfortable life as a well-known political essayist and travel to Florida, Maine and Minnesota, where she took jobs as a waitress, a housekeeper in a hotel, a maid at a cleaning service, a nursing-home aide and a Wal-Mart "associate."

Invariably, she said, the job interview process began with a drug test.

Despite studies showing that the tests don't result in reduced absenteeism or improved productivity, she said that employers seem to require them anyway as "a little ritual of humiliation to get you in the mood for the job."

Next, she said, would come the personality test, which included such questions as, "In the last year, I have stolen (check dollar amount)," and "Agree or disagree with the statement 'It is easier to work when you're a little high.'"

She said that all the jobs she held were physically very demanding.

But what came as more of a surprise and what she said was more humbling to her was that they also were mentally challenging.

"I had a hard time learning how to do them," said Ehrenreich, who has a doctorate in biology from Rockefeller University.

She noted that the jobs were made still more difficult by such management policies as prohibiting bathroom breaks, talking among fellow workers and drinking anything—even water—on the job.

She pointed out that Wal-Mart is being sued in 26 states for not paying overtime. In fact, she said, managers sometimes tell their workers, "'Go punch out and then come back to the floor. I have a lot for you to do.'"

But the hardest part of her assignment, as she had suspected, was being able to live on the money she was bringing in.

In the Twin Cities, the cheapest room with a refrigerator and microwave rented for $800 a month, so Ehrenreich opted instead for a room in a "creepy" residential hotel where there was no requirement for the first month's rent and a month's rent for a security deposit.

For that price, she said, she didn't get a refrigerator or a microwave or even a shade on the window, but she was living in luxury compared to her neighbors.

"The other rooms in this hotel were occupied by families," she said, "so that the king-size bed was also the desk and the dining room table."

With no place to cook, she lived on fast food while noticing that some of her colleagues subsisted on bags of Doritos because they rarely had money to buy more substantial food.

She calculated that even if a single mother was lucky enough to be able to take home $1,200 a month and not have taxes taken out, if rent was $600 and child care was $400 (both of which, she said, are so conservative as to be unrealistic), there would be only $200 left each month for groceries, utilities, transportation or car maintenance and toiletries-not to mention costs for medical care and other unforeseen expenses.

Because of such inequities, some of the women she worked with opted not to rent a place at all, but they did not think of themselves as homeless.

"If you have a vehicle to sleep in, you don't call yourself homeless anymore," she said.

Ehrenreich pointed out that even when living under such conditions and being paid $7 an hour, she was not considered poor by federal government standards. The government uses the price of food—which has remained relatively stable—to calculate poverty levels instead of the skyrocketing prices of housing and child care, she said.

She noted that the government considers only 12.5 percent of Americans to be living in poverty, while a recent study by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations found that if more accurate statistics are used, 25 percent of Americans live in poverty.

Ehrenreich's book was given to every incoming student this semester as part of the UB Reads program, which is designed to instill a sense of community among freshmen and their families, and to get them talking about issues related to transition and success.

The book also was the October selection of The Buffalo News book club.