Scraping by

By Laura Miller

May 14, 2001 | Read the story.

I've spent my time working in fast-food restaurants and a department store, making a meager living. I've seen some despicable things done to employees in the name of saving money. The lowest has to be laying off the seasonal help a week before Christmas. People left crying because they had been depending on that money to see them through the holidays. All because the owners wanted a fat profit margin so they could look good when they sold the department store.

Not allowing people to rest or go to the bathroom is against the law. Unfortunately, too many people either don't know this, don't want to have to fight their managers or are too tired and are too afraid of losing their jobs. I've walked off, leaving my area and customers, to go the bathroom because no one would come and cover things and I had to go. There wasn't a single thing a manager or the company could do about it. They can't fire you for going to the bathroom or taking a break when you're ready to collapse.

I had the luxury of being informed of my rights. If you're unsure of what rights you have I suggest writing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or visiting its Web site. It's a good place to start finding out what your rights are.

-- Susan King

Laura Miller's review of Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed" reminded me of my own fugue as a working poor person in the late '80s -- and how it came to an end. After three years in Germany enlisted in the U.S. Army, I returned to the U.S. with two notions stuck in my head: America needed a Western European-style social safety net and I needed to reject my white middle-class upbringing by choosing a life of dignified labor. For a year, I earned slightly better than minimum wage as an apprentice electrician, suffering through frostbite and endangerment at the hands of methadone-using drunken co-workers.

My wife and child and I lived in a thermostat-less basement apartment on one of the meanest streets in the Rust Belt Midwest. Visits by police (to my drug-dealing, fight-prone neighbors), school social workers (to my other neighbors who had been informed that education was compulsory) and ambulances (to my abusive and OD'ing neighbors) were regular events in my neighborhood. My son's kindergarten teacher was genuinely surprised that I wanted to interact with her to learn more about his progress at school.

After a cold, scary winter, I caved in. Disgusted with hand-to-mouth existence and living in the midst of dire social distress, I enrolled in college with my GI Bill benefits and took a less stressful job in serene suburbia. I thrived at the university. However, I found myself sneering at my professors, who typically had lived entire lives in middle-class comfort but somehow knew that poverty and marginality were caused by capitalist exploitation, never individual weakness and stupidity. I realized that the real world tempered my leftism. Perhaps if Ehrenreich could be objective enough to shuck her George Bernard Shaw-era leftism -- presuming that enlightened fortunate elites need to save the masses -- she would have had an easier time accepting that the working poor don't believe that they are the victims of a vast capitalist conspiracy.

-- Steve Lee

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, I took a job as a grocery clerk. At the time, grocery clerks were predominantly single mothers and they had a union -- but these union members were being forced out and replaced by teenagers like myself who were paid minimum wage and granted no benefits. Obviously, for many years, chain grocery stores like this one were able to profit handsomely while providing their clerks and butchers and the like union wages.

Busting these types of unions sadly reclassified former working-class professions into the unsavory title of "unskilled laborers." And while (following in my example) Stop-n-Shop's higher management certainly received nice financial bonuses, none of this income "trickled down" to their workers. (And wasn't that the original idea? Give corporations more freedom and they'll spread the wealth by their own volition?)

This book and the recent strike by custodians in Los Angeles give me hope that union organizers will reemerge to elevate the working poor's payrolls and dignity. Unions were not perfect, but providing corporations like Wal-Mart free rein to treat their workers as they wish ... Well, that 20-some-year-old experiment has proven to be disastrous.

-- Louise McDonnell

Next Page: "How many of the unskilled workers were dying of starvation and disease?"

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