Because Pennies Don't Sound As Good

It seems the world will never run out of intrepid people willing to do really interesting things in service of journalism.

I’d been intending to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed for quite a while. I’ve meant to read most books on my shelf for a while, since there are so many of them. But that’s another story.

In the vein of Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man and John Griffin’s Black Like Me (which I haven’t read, but intend to at some point), Ehrenreich devotes her book to infiltrating a corner of society to which she definitely does not belong: that of minimum-wage workers. She starts in Florida, where she lives, and travels to Maine and Minnesota, and gets essentially whatever job and housing she can without using her education—a PhD in biology and years of experience as an essayist.

In Florida, she works as a waitress at small hotel restaurants, first a small one that she finds at first overwhelming but has no problems adapting to, and where she even bonds with some of the other workers. The pay there isn’t enough to support her housing in an “efficiency” a ways up the road, though, so she leaves for another restaurant, this one overwhelming, busy, and completely impersonal. She moves into a trailer to be closer to the restaurant, but the staff there is a clique to which she can’t seem to win entry, and she ends up walking out, ending the Florida phase of her adventure.

In Maine, she does a little better, getting two jobs as a nursing home kitchen attendant and a cleaner with The Maids. The nursing home job was fairly comfortable and easy-ish, the time she had to serve the entire Alzheimer’s ward and the time a resident deliberately pitched a cup of milk at her aside. The cleaning job is another story altogether. Physically and mentally demanding, she also gets to know her fellow maids fairly well, and their stories seem to comprise much of this section of the book.

Her last stop, in Minnesota, results in a glamorous job as a floor stocker for that ubiquitous shopping…place, Wal-Mart. Here she does perhaps the worst of anywhere, with huge financial problems and trouble finding housing, along with horrible job dissatisfaction, like that’s any surprise.

It’s hard to summarize or condense what the book was trying to say, even for the purposes of reflection. It’s not terrible “thought-provoking,” simply because understanding and appreciating the book doesn’t require a great deal of independent thought. The stories Ehrenreich tells, hers and those of her coworkers, are fascinating and devastating. At only 221 pages, it’s a quick read, with a lot of power per page. (That’s the ppp, the newest addition to the Tori Borland System of Measurements, along with the rf, or Ruinability Factor, which is how good a book was multiplied by the complexity of the plot, or any other good thing that moviemakers tend to bungle.)

Anyway, the one thing that did really strike me about the book was how often Ehrenreich ended up cheating. She says right up-front, at the very beginning, that she wasn’t going to starve herself or sleep in her car in service to the project. At each of her three stops, she ends up dipping into funds brought from home, as well as occasionally sneaking out to check her e-mail or letting her friends take her out for dinner and a movie.

If she couldn’t make it without cheating, then how do the people without an easy out?