"Nickle and Dimed" on not getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

http://www.thinkingpeace.com/Lib/lib095.html

http://www.barbaraehrenreich.com/nickelanddimed_excerpt.htm

This is an wonderfully eye opening book that my husband was assigned to write a report on for one of his classes (the report follows). I honestly couldn't put this book down after casually picking it up because I found the title interesting. I have known many people have lived the life that the author describes and honestly much worse. What is interesting is that many of those people seemed complacent in their situations and as if the living situations weren't already bad enough due to the poverty and apathy they lived with due to their lack of education, ambition, or self esteem, they often compounded these with drug use, filthy living conditions, (this and the lack of adult supervision often times lead to encounters with Child Protective Services and resulted in continuing the abuse cycle and lack of educational opportunities that the adults had experienced themselves), encounters with the law, (mostly repeated traffic violations for driving unlicensed, uninsured, unregistered vehicles which most often lead to at least one member of the family having several warrants, no valid drivers license, and numerous unpaid fines in several states), moving when their debts became too overwhelming to face anymore leaving a trail of unpaid utility companies, landlords, and jobs where they often just stopped showing up, (in the computer age this behavior was particularly destructive as most housing will check a persons credit and as most utility companies are connected in some way, this behavior often caused these individuals and families to be forced to move into increasingly worse living conditions and often being unable to have basic utilities (like a home phone), but by far the worst of the self destructive behaviors that I witnessed was the lack of filing taxes once the refund (or god forbid an actual payment was required due to the lack of foresight and any thought of the ensuing consequences; they had changed their W-2 to the maximum dependents possible to get "more" income during the year) became too small to be an incentive. Why was this so destructive, because this eliminated the possibly of qualifying for any type of federal grants or loans that would in many cases enable these people to better their situations with additional education or training that would have given them the wages they needed to not just survive, (if periods of homelessness, living 8 persons in a two bedroom apt, and having to rely on foodbanks almost monthly, is surviving) but to actually be able to live and have the security that the bills and the groceries can be paid and purchased but as many studies have shown, often times individuals will self sabotage themselves (and their families) if they get too far out of their comfort zone and as implausible as it sounds, I have known many individuals that this type of life is their comfort zone. With these individuals it is highly probable that even if their income was more than adequate to support a reasonable lifestyle, they would still maintain their current destructive behaviors making sure that the bills still went unpaid, the jobs didn't last, and that the children would grow up to continue the same cycle. My Grandmother often said, "you only get in life what you settle for", harsh as that blanket statement sounds, I find in many cases it is true although I would modify it to say, "you only get in life what you are comfortable achieving, striving, and working for. You will only go as far as you are willing to break away from your comfort zone and refuse to settle for a life that isn't rewarding or fufilling for you" I know so many people that stay in situations (jobs, relationships, and lifestyles) that are killing their spirit and altering their personalities into such negative mindsets that they truly repel (or are so depressed that they fail to recognize) positive opportunities, people, and situations that could help them rise out of their misery. The one thing that the author doesn't address in this book is the issue of depression and mental illness. Many individuals that I have known would benefit greatly from therapy or antidepressants (which in most areas are available free or at minimal cost). I have found myself thinking in many cases that I know this individual would be appalled if they were mentally healthy and looking at back at their own words and actions. I have heard patients, friends, and family talk about antidepressants and therapy almost waking them up, removing the crippling dark cloud that they have lived with for so long that it had permiated every area of their life without their even realizing it. They tell me that they look back (almost like a drunk or drug addict sobering up one day) and are shocked to realize how jaded and destructive they were behaving and thinking without even realizing it. Unfortunately, I find that the more affluent in our society accept therapy, antidepressants, and in general taking care of ones body and mind as normal and routine as brushing ones teeth in the morning, yet most of the individuals I have know in the lower income groups view it with a stigma or are downright hostile to any sudgestion that they might benefit from a little self help. It as though they continue to neglect their psyche (and often times their body as well) without realizing the impact on their (and those around them) quality of life.
I cannot recommend this book enough not only to the individuals that have and are living it but to those who think poverty is someting third world or that only the unemployed experience. I wondered to my husband the other day what would happen if I in all my pregnant glory stood out on a corner at a major intercection with a sign that said something like, "pregnant, employed full time, can't make ends meet", What would people do? Yet there are so many people in our country that are in my situation and much, much worse, yet they are invisible.

Can we ever really expect to reconcile economic inequity amongst ourselves?

When I pulled the book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001, Holt/Owl, New York, NY) out of the stack of school books and left it on the couch in preparation to read it, my wife picked it up and began looking it over, based on our own current financial position. The title sucked her in. As a college student working part-time, married to a pregnant nurse, we are often worried about money lately. She quickly latched on to the story about the author working as a dietary aide and read me significant portions of it, as we’ve both had experience in nursing homes. I had to wrestle the book away from her with promises to let her finish it after this assignment. The truth is we’ve both lived this book ourselves, and maybe I longer than she. This, too, is a long story… let’s just say that, between leaving CU in the Spring of 1990 on academic suspension from the School of Engineering to my return to the College of Arts & Sciences in the Fall of 2003, I held numerous jobs every bit as lousy as the ones the author subjected herself to. However, for me there was rarely any fallback position except to move back into my mom’s house when I occasionally screwed up and went ‘belly up’, and this actually happened more times than I care to recall. During that time I worked at convenience stores, as a pizza delivery driver, a perfume salesman, a cemetery grounds worker, a waiter, a guitar salesman, a janitor in a casino and later a high school, a cabdriver in Fort Lauderdale (during a subsequently aborted relocation attempt), and more that I’ve likely forgotten. The two ‘good’ jobs that I actually list on my resume were a three-years-plus stint as a wet-chemist in a government environmental laboratory (or “contract laboratory technician”, really) and another three years and change as a bank teller. I found myself both drawn in and repulsed at the similarity of her experiences to mine. It reminded me of why I personally possess both liberal and conservative points of view depending largely on the phrasing of the question and the subject at hand. In an attempt to explore my own feelings on the matter, I shall try to look at both sides of the argument, and discover which, if either, of the two sides of this argument I support, in whole or in part.
Two sides? Only two sides? As described above, I’ve lived on the impoverished side, and in a way I still do. In the last six years, though, I’ve invested considerable time, effort, and money (in the forms of therapy and student loan debt, among others) to getting the education that I believe will allow me to enter the upper-middle-class world of degreed professionals that the author refers to ‘returning to’ after her forays into the wilderness of unskilled labor in America. In doing so, and in the events that prepared me for this journey into investing in myself, I am living the highly improbable –if not necessarily impossible- life of the non-traditional student. (As such, I will admit to no small amount of both respect and jealousy towards those who manage to complete a Bachelor’s degree before their twenty-third birthday; I wish I had listened to those who begged me to keep going to school when I was twenty.) This process, and maybe aging as well, has led me to believe that “you get out of life what you put into it”. In my twenties, I refused to work two jobs at once, believing (as the author describes) that “people who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty” (220). Having watched my mother work mostly one job at a time through my childhood, I thought it was my ‘birthright’ to be able to live well with only one forty-hour-a-week job. The difference I was neglecting was that my mom had put herself through college and had to work up to a level where she could support the two of us with one job.
Also during my twenties, I knew plenty of people who worked at jobs equally as crappy as mine who seemed to accept this as their lot in life, without the need or aspiration to improve upon this. I think it has a lot to do with expectations. They had grown up with relatively little money at hand and did not expect to ever make very much. At the same time, most of my classmates in the affluent suburban high school I attended grew up around quite a bit of money, but they knew that they had to go to college and work hard if they expected to live as well as their parents. So, I understand the ‘meritocracy theory’ of economic advancement that says, in effect, “Hey, I worked hard for this money, and made it without any help from you, so why should you feel you have any right to share in the fruits of my labor?” Additionally, I’ve known plenty of people who were more interested in doing drugs than studying something that might get them a better job, so why should my tax dollars go to take care of them when they land in the hospital with a failed liver? This trend seems more evident the higher you climb on the income ladder, and I’ll go as far as to declare that plenty of people at this university study subjects, and later embark upon careers, that I would be unwilling to commit to, no matter how much they might pay. Lawyers, doctors, stock brokers, and so many more professions earn considerably more than I may ever make with a Geography degree, but that’s okay with me, as long as I can find a job I enjoy that also allows me to live at a higher standard of living than I do now or have lately. That’s another side effect of growing up poor for most of my thirty-five years: I am now completely convinced that I can be a materialist and not have to “sell-out”, but damn it, I’m also old enough that I need the health insurance to pay for my prescriptions! A nicer bed, house, big-screen plasma HDTV, car, stereo, the occasional opportunity to travel overseas in tourist class, all of these goals deserve no less of my efforts to earn more income for myself and my family.
On the other hand, as one who was raised by a Johnsonian liberal, a real Great Society “true believer”, as it were, I also agree with the author’s final words about how all of the working poor sacrifice their time and energy for us every time they work for less than they really need (221). If I were an Economist, I might refer to this as an ‘opportunity cost’; in essence, it costs the poor (both money and comfort) to accept jobs at lower than the living wage. To paraphrase 1980’s singer-songwriter D. Boon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minutemen_(band)), they are ‘victims of our leisure’ --a phrase no doubt borrowed from Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book, but it well illustrates the predatory nature of those who try to take more of their share and insist on making a profit from every transaction, whether personal or professional. Herein lies the essential difference between liberal and conservative as we define them today, a definition which has changed in the forty-odd years since the advent of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society: liberals took the Christian ideal of ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ and turned it into government policy, in the form of social programs designed to help equilibrate a society that was seen to be in the early stages of decay by supporting the poor and helping them to pull themselves up ‘by their bootstraps’.
Conservatives, on the other hand again, led largely by Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater) in his 1963 presidential election campaign against LBJ, saw these ideas as both dangerously Communistic and, less publicly, contrary to their ideal of the ‘love thy neighbor’ concept, which was far more isolationistic. That is to say, the latter-day conservative view, having been heavily influenced by the Christian Right, seems to be more along the lines of, “Those who have more are surely blessed by God, and those who have less are therefore, by necessity, less pure in their love of God. Thus, we should not have to share our blessings with those who do not share in our beliefs; let them take care of their own, as we do.” The recent rash of charitable government grants almost exclusively given to religiously-centered charities (see “Faith-Based Initiatives” under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_policy_of_George_W._Bush for more information) clearly reflects this influence, despite its extreme departure from the original planks of Goldwater’s 1963 campaign. These two sides represent the most polarizing conceptual span in the ideology of Americans today, and perhaps even to some extent the world as a whole.
If we consider this ideological gap as a continuum, with the “bleeding heart liberals” on one side and the “I got mine” conservatives on the other, it is possible to examine every single contentious issue in this country in terms of ‘liberal vs. conservative’ viewpoints, as so often happens. The labor issues experienced personally by the author are no exception, and are furthermore complicated by the modern conditions of globalization, i.e., interdependence of world economies. She promotes her liberal viewpoint to her Wal-Mart co-workers, half-heartedly trying to incite them to organize their own union. One hundred years ago, unions were just beginning to seriously improve wages and working conditions in factories, mines, and other heavy and dangerous industries then expanding across this country, and many men, women, and even children lost their lives in strike-breaking actions perpetrated by the owners of the mines and factories, such as that at Ludlow in southern Colorado in 1914 (http://www.colorado.edu/geography/cartpro/cartography2/spring2005/muhovich/CoalMiningProject/Ludlow.htm). In many critical ways, working conditions in this country are deteriorating to levels that may again incur these kinds of conflicts between labor and management, as predicted by the author herself. The center of the argument lies in the answer to this question: Who has more right to the profits of a firm, the owners of the firm who invested the capital to create the firm, or the laborers that do the work of the firm?
The answer from each side serves the interests of the participants, naturally. The venture capitalists and captains of industry say, “Without our efforts and our wealth to fund the initial venture, this firm could not have existed. Thus labor owes us their gratitude for allowing them to work for us, and they should be happy with whatever we give them, and the ‘invisible hand’ of the market shall determine the wages they receive.” On the other side of the argument, laborers say, “Without our efforts, your factory, mine, steel mill, et al., would stand empty, making no profit for anyone whatsoever. Therefore, you owe us your gratitude and a decent living wage, not to mention reasonable hours, clean, safe working conditions, group health insurance, workmen’s accident compensation, and perhaps even a retirement fund. Is that too much to ask?” Increasingly, businesses have decided that that is too much for labor to ask, but here’s where the argument gets tricky. Management responds, “Labor is expendable; if they think they are unfairly compensated, they are welcome to look for better work elsewhere. We’ll just find someone who’s willing to work for less money, and without benefits.” In the early 1900’s, this often meant bringing in various groups of non-English-speaking immigrants -desperate to leave crowded and impoverished conditions in Europe- as ‘strikebreakers’. Earlier in this semester, we heard about how blacks were lured to Chicago from the South as strikebreakers in the factories, and when the strikes were over, they were often left unemployed. In the twenty-first century, it has become simpler and cheaper to take the factories and, increasingly, the oil rigs and mines to the impoverished nations, and ship the goods back to the markets where the most profit can be made, i.e. Europe and North America. In the process, American unions have seen their numbers decline markedly since their peak in the 1970s, seen largely as obsolete artifacts of a bygone era. The ‘loosening’ of labor laws by conservative administrations of the last twenty years have also cut into the gains made by labor unions in the past.
In comparison to fifty years ago when almost all of the goods available for sale in the U.S. were manufactured here, now very few manufactured goods originate in the U.S. This too leads to higher pressure for lower wages as jobs have been fleeing overseas to Asia, generally, and more specifically to China. Efforts to stem this tide by moving U.S. manufacturing to Mexico (thereby increasing Mexico’s economic well-being, with the hopeful side effect of stemming the tide of illegal immigration into the U.S. from Mexico) with NAFTA have been largely ineffective due to the continued cost-effectiveness of Asian manufacturers. With U.S. wages as much as ten times higher than those available in Mexico, Mexicans and South Americans, both educated and non-, will continue to cross the border illegally, creating yet another ideological break, this time within the ranks of Republicans and conservatives in general. Those on the side of the Industrialists support continued immigration to help keep wages low for unskilled laborer jobs, while those more attuned to their xenophobic and racially-prejudiced constituents worry that continued immigration will lead to a “darkening” or “Latinizing” of the entire nation. Oddly enough, I have always remembered that my fifth-grade social studies textbook (way back in, say, 1981) predicted exactly this effect based solely on continued higher birth rates among the largely Catholic Latin populations of Mexico and South America. No shit.
So what are we, as Americans, supposed to do with this information? The answer will be different for every individual, based largely on where their opinions lie on the ‘liberal vs. conservative’ and even the ‘capitalistic vs. xenophobic’ continuum described above. As Ehrenreich writes, by many statistical standards, the gap between the rich and the poor has been growing for decades (203). This is in many ways a good thing for the affluent; they can continue to pay immigrants appallingly low wages to mow their lawns, fix their cars, raise their children, and so on, with no pesky benefits or taxes to worry about. Xenophobic conservatives have less to gain in this regard; many of them are low- wage-earners themselves, and they find themselves struggling even harder to make ends meet as immigrants increasingly dominate various unskilled and semi-skilled heavy labor occupations. Even Mexican President Vicente Fox famously quipped in May of 2005, "There is no doubt that Mexicans, filled with dignity, willingness and ability to work are doing jobs that not even blacks want to do there in the United States". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicente_Fox)
If your feet fall on the liberal side of the fence, as mine do, you might say that they are already a valuable part of the American melting pot, criticized groundlessly for the same things and in much the same ways that immigrant Irish, Italian, Chinese, and so many others have been mistreated historically in America, not to mention all of those African-Americans whose ancestors were brought here forcibly, and the Native Americans who were here before European colonization of the Americas. They have as much, or as little, right to be here as any of us, so why quibble about it? Most of all, they are already here and already a major portion of the populace, larger than the African American segment. What would you do, build a fifty-foot high wall along the entire border and ship them all back? Unfortunately, this is exactly what some of the xenophobes say needs to be done. Multinational manufacturing concerns show no sign of bringing manufacturing or heavy industry back to this country, so it is unlikely that that will save the nation’s sliding economy. Economists will tell you that it’s not sliding, we are merely experiencing ‘jobless economic expansion’, which is merely a politically-correct way of saying that the rich are indeed getting richer, while the poor are indeed getting poorer.
My personal opinion is that the only way to possibly avoid or benefit from this situation is to try as hard as you can to get into that upper-income group, and for most people the most reliable way of achieving this high level of economic status (although, as with everything else in life, there are no guarantees) is through education. I’ll not even advocate four-year universities for everyone; I’m sure many people would do better pursuing various alternative forms of education beyond high school, such as vocational training, applied professional degree programs, and so on. For me, though, I aspire to the same level of upper-middle-class life that the author returns to with such an enlivened sense of gratitude after her experiences as a working-class poor woman. As I say, I have plenty of experience of life on that side of the tracks, and I definitely hope never to go back. Unfortunately, as unmitigated immigration continues, non-existent social program funding will be increasingly unable to assist those in need, leading to predictably higher crime rates, higher rents and costs of living for the working poor, and an ever widening gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. As current voting trends and prevailing public opinion are uncertain, we can only speculate that more prisons and border walls will be built instead of providing more social aid or direct foreign aid to Mexico to reduce or perhaps reverse the current situation. You might even feel compelled to buy only union-made products and make consumer decisions by learning about which companies support unions and which do not, perhaps leading you to personally boycott Wal-Mart, even if it is a little more expensive to do so. As a consumer, you vote with your dollars every time you make a purchase. Unfortunately, for many of the misinformed, undereducated working poor, buying goods as cheaply as possible at the Wal-Marts of the world is a necessary component of everyday survival strategy, which will probably keep them going in their vicious circle for many years to come.