Scraping by

The first thing Ehrenreich discovered is that nobody working full time for minimum wage -- or even a dollar or two over it -- can survive in any of the three towns she visited without either getting a second job or resorting to overcrowded rooms in flophouses or simply sleeping in the car. Home-hunting in Key West and confronted with a trailer well out of her price range, she writes, "It is a shock to realize that 'trailer trash' has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to." Shortages of affordable housing plague all three cities, but Minneapolis proved particularly challenging. Like most recent arrivals, Ehrenreich was forced to stay in motels, eating up the small reserve of starter cash she allowed herself and encountering what she calls the "host of special costs" confronting the poor.

If you get stranded in a room with few or no kitchen facilities, for example, "you eat fast food, or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store" -- unhealthy and not especially cheap. One of Ehrenreich's co-workers at the Portland housecleaning service (which charges customers $25 per person-hour, of which the worker gets $6.65) couldn't afford more than a small bag of corn chips for lunch and told Ehrenreich she sometimes gets dizzy during her eight-hour cleaning shifts. In the absence of health insurance, treatment of minor medical problems gets postponed until the problems are no longer minor. Rundown accommodations with feeble security (such as the dive in which Ehrenreich stayed in Minneapolis and dubs "the worst motel in the country") invite the further catastrophe of crime. Since many of the people Ehrenreich worked with can't afford to take a day off (no sick or vacation time), such threats to their health also menace their precarious finances. None of this makes it any easier to save for the security deposits that must be made on an affordable apartment, even if they were lucky enough to find one.

To some of Ehrenreich's middle-class readers, these privations won't be entirely unfamiliar. "Everyone has a broke diary," writes Angela Nissel in the introduction to "The Broke Diaries," her breezy, funny account of her years as an impoverished college student. In one diary entry (the book is based on a journal Nissel posted on the Web), she informs us that her previous year's income was $4,750. She describes conning textbooks out of book publishers by pretending to be an instructor, using mayonnaise when she runs out of hair conditioner, subsisting on oatmeal and pancakes, flirting with the utility company man to keep her power from being turned off and taking up almost any invitation that entails free food, from attending a stranger's funeral to soldiering through a tedious church supper.

While it's not true that everyone has a broke diary, plenty of people do. I can remember times during my college years when for weeks I ate only a meagerly topped baked potato for dinner each night -- my best friend referred to one such period as "the Depression." The fact that he could joke about my penury and Nissel can treat hers as almost a lark serves as a reminder that poverty is more than a matter of low income; it's also a frame of mind. Both Nissel and my collegiate self expected our "broke diaries" to be slender volumes. And that optimism is not just a product of privilege, since Nissel -- an African-American, daughter of a nurse, with friends from the projects -- is hardly your typical, blithely entitled Ivy League undergraduate. Even though our degrees (mine in English and hers in the superbly impractical medical anthropology) didn't promise riches in any obvious way, we both believed we'd get out of the hole eventually, and eventually we did.

So perhaps worse than the grim mathematics of the life Ehrenreich sampled is the relentless grinding down of dignity and, by extension, hope. She records the low-grade carping that her restaurant co-workers savor behind the backs of officious middle managers (is there any other kind?), but working for huge, corporate entities is even worse. Ehrenreich bridles at the degrading personality tests, drug tests and "orientations" required of all new employees applying at these behemoths. Chatting with customers and co-workers is rechristened as "time theft" by Wal-Mart authorities, who expect every 15-minute break to be punched out on the time clock. The Merry Maids cleaning service forbids its workers from allowing either food or drink to pass their lips while in a customer's house -- not even water and no matter how hot the day or sweaty the work. Parched, and faced with "banks of glass doors" and countless knickknacks in one yuppie manse, Ehrenreich writes:

I wonder if Mrs. W. will ever have the occasion to realize that every single doodad and objet through which she expresses her unique, individual self is, from another vantage point, only an obstacle between some thirsty person and a glass of water.

Perhaps most shocking, for its pure, petty tyranny, is the merciless way service employers regulate their workers' bladders. Peeing while on the clock is forbidden in many of the jobs Ehrenreich took, and she and her co-workers had to "sneak" off when the manager wasn't looking in order to answer nature's call.

Ehrenreich considers the inanely obvious "personality tests" required at most job interviews to be particularly insidious instruments of symbolic control. "The real function of these tests," she decided, "is not to convey information to the employer, but to the potential employee, and the information being conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us." Even worse, in her opinion, is drug testing, which she sees as intended to reinforce the notion that even employees' intimate bodily functions will be monitored by the boss. However, I suspect she's giving the unimaginative middle-management types who set up these screening programs credit for more fiendish psychological finesse than they possess.

Next Page: The noble poor don't see themselves as noble

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