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Barbara Ehrenreich spent two years as a waitress, maid and Wal-Mart clerk, trying to find out how America's working poor make it. Her answer: A lot of them don't.

By Laura Miller

May 9, 2001 | Of all the unlikely things people achieve today, from mapping the human genome to surviving bizarre wilderness ordeals in the Australian outback for the amusement of a national television audience, none seems quite as remarkable as supporting a family of four on $17,230 per year. Yet, as hard as that heroic task might be to pull off -- and anyone who's done it deserves accolades for adding a whole new meaning to the term "home economics" -- it wouldn't win you much sympathy from the federal government. At $17,230 in annual family income, you'd still be one dollar over the official poverty line.

Some of the officials who expect families to survive on such an income couldn't even cover their annual travel budget with $17,229. (In fact, a show about them trying to make it, even on $20,000 a year, would be about the only reality TV program I'd watch.) Since some people do manage it (11.9 percent, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau figures), presumably it can be done, but Barbara Ehrenreich is one of the few social critics and commentators to actually attempt the feat herself. On the urging of Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's magazine (where some of the material in "Nickel and Dimed" first appeared), she agreed to try to figure out, firsthand, how anyone lives "on the wages available to the unskilled." Two years, six jobs and three cities later, she had the material she needed to write "Nickel and Dimed."

An observant, opinionated and always lively essayist -- she was Time magazine's house lefty for several years -- Ehrenreich has written about everything from the history of war to men's fears of romantic commitment, always from a left-wing perspective. This, though, is her most immediate book, both because it largely eschews punditry for direct experience and because her experiment prompted Ehrenreich to reflect on her own working-class roots. Daughter of a man who "managed to pull himself, and us with him, up from the mile-deep copper mines of Butte to the leafy suburbs of the Northeast," formerly married to a one-time warehouse worker turned Teamster organizer, Ehrenreich sometimes felt during her weeks as a "wage slave" the presence of an alternate self, as when she harbored evil thoughts about her co-workers during a stint at Wal-Mart:

Take away the career and the higher education, and maybe what you're left with is this original Barb, the one who might have ended up working at Wal-Mart for real, if my father hadn't managed to climb out of the mines. So it's interesting, and more than a little disturbing, to see how Barb turned out -- that she's meaner and slyer than I am, more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I'd hoped.

One of the sly pleasures of "Nickel and Dimed" is the way it dances on the line between straightforward social protest and an edgier acknowledgment of inconvenient truths. Certainly there is plenty of fuel for outrage in the trials of poor Americans, both in the artificial test case Ehrenreich constructed for herself and in the real lives of the many people she met during her grim adventures. This book foments righteous indignation in the old-fashioned tradition currently revived to great success by Eric Schlosser in his bestselling exposé, "Fast Food Nation." But it also half-raises questions without truly answering them, escorts paradoxes onstage then shoos them off again without letting us get a really good look at them and generally shies away from admitting that however intolerable the conditions Ehrenreich describes may be, any viable alternative to tolerating them is far from obvious.

Ehrenreich began her project in Key West, Fla., a town near her actual home. She worked as a waitress in two restaurants and as a hotel maid. In Portland, Maine, she got jobs at a nursing home and with a housecleaning service. And it was in Minneapolis that she worked for Wal-Mart as a salesclerk. She wanted, in particular, to find out how "the 12 million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform [were] going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour"; the answer, to judge by Ehrenreich's experience, is just barely, if at all.

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