Nickel and Dimed: Evaluation Summary & Analysis

Though one might think someone who has a Ph.D. could easily hold down a low-wage job, the first thing Barbara learned is that no job is “unskilled,” and each required concentration and new terms, tools, and skills. In this world, she was only average.

In addition, Barbara notes, each job has its own hierarchy, customs, and standards, that required her to figure out who was in charge and who was good to work with. She also had to make sure she was fast and thorough, but not so fast and thorough that she made life difficult for the other workers. They knew that there are very few rewards for heroic performance.

All Barbara’s jobs were physically demanding, even physically damaging, in the long-term, and she feels proud of having been able to manage her fatigue without collapsing or taking time off. She also knows she usually displayed punctuality, cheerfulness, and obedience, all traits that job-training programs encourage in post-welfare job candidates. She gives herself a B or B+ for her performance as a worker.

In our society, it’s assumed that a job is the way out of poverty and welfare recipients just need to get one in order to stay on their feet. To Barbara, her experience proves this is not the case. She spent no money on flashy clothes or going out and ate chopped meat, beans, and noodles, or fast food at $9 a day.

However, in Key West, Barbara earned $1,039 in one month and spent $517 on food, gas, toiletries, laundry, phone, and utilities. She could have been able to pay the rent if she had stayed in her $500 efficiency with $22 left over (though sooner or later, she would have had to spend something on medical and dental care). But by moving to the trailer park in order to take a second job, she had to pay $625. She could have bought a used bike instead of using the car, but she still would have needed two jobs—and she learned she could not sustain two physically demanding jobs.

Barbara was most successful in Portland, though only from working seven days a week. She earned $300 a week after taxes and paid just $480 a month in rent. But if she had stayed until summer, the Blue Haven’s summer rent would have kicked in. And she’s not sure she could have kept up the 7-day-a-week regimen.

In Minneapolis, the only way Barbara can imagine having succeeded is if she had found a $400 a month apartment or made $440 a week after taxes at Menards (though she’s not sure she could have stayed on her feet eleven hours a day). She knows she made mistakes—she should have stayed in the dormitory bed, worked somewhere better-paying than Wal-Mart, and not lived in motels for $200-300 a week. But she realizes it’s wrong when a single person can barely support herself while working and owning a car.

Rents are too high and wages too low, Barbara concludes. With the rising numbers of the wealthy, the poor have been forced into more expensive and distant housing—even as the poor often have to work near the rich in service and retail jobs.

The official poverty rate has remained low for the past several years, but only, Barbara argues, because the poverty level is calculated based on the cost of food. But food has remained relatively inflation-proof, while rent has skyrocketed (meaning that if the poverty rate were linked to the cost of housing, it would be much higher). The public sector, meanwhile, has retreated, as public housing spending has fallen since the 1980s.

While rents are sensitive to market forces, wages aren’t. Every city Barbara worked in was experiencing a “labor shortage,” yet wages at the low end of the labor market remained flat. Wages did rise, Barbara learned from various economists, between 1996 to 1999—however, they have not been able to bring low-wage workers up to the relative amounts they were earning in 1973. Barbara argues that employers resist wage increases however they possibly can. She recalls how Ted once griped to her about not being able to find enough workers. When she asked why he didn’t just raise wages, he seemed surprised, saying he offered “mothers’ hours,” as if to say that no one could complain about wages with such a benefit. Many employers, Barbara has learned, will offer anything from free meals to subsidized transportation rather than raise wages, since these can be taken away more easily when the market changes.

Barbara asks why workers don’t demand higher wages themselves. She was initially surprised that people didn’t just leave underpaid, demanding jobs. But low-wage workers are not just “economic man.” They’re often dependent on relatives or friends with a car, or else use a bike, which limits range. Just filling out applications, being interviewed, and taking drug tests is a hassle and leads to more time without work.

In addition, for the laws of economics (including supply and demand) to work, people involved need to be well-informed. But most low-wage workers have no financial advisors, only help-wanted signs and ads, relying mainly on unreliable word of mouth. There’s also what one analyst calls the “money taboo” preventing people talking about their earnings. Employers do their best to prevent any discussion or disclosure of wages as well.

The question of why people don’t demand better wages and conditions where they are is a huge one, but Barbara weighs in with her experience of the power of management in getting workers to feel like “associates” through profit-sharing plans, company patriotism, and meetings that function like pep rallies.

Barbara was also shocked at how low-wage workers are made to surrender their basic civil rights: her purse could be searched at any time at the restaurant, and drug testing is a routine degrading act that has the function of keeping employees “in their place.” Rules against “gossip” make it difficult for employees to band together, and low-wage workers without union contracts can be fired “at will,” or without a reason. So she understands why low-wage workers don’t behave in an economically rational way: they are not free agents and their sphere is neither free nor democratic. For Barbara, many of the indignities imposed on workers make them feel unworthy enough to accept how little they’re being paid.

Barbara came across very few slackers, and in fact recognized that workers often consider management as an obstacle to getting the job done, whether it was waitresses challenging managers’ stinginess toward the customers, or housecleaners resenting the time constraints that forced them to cut corners.

Barbara claims that this cycle supports a culture of extreme inequality, in which corporate actors are far removed from their underpaid laborers, and because of class and sometimes racial prejudice, they tend to distrust these people and spend great amounts of money on things like drug and personality testing. Barbara identifies a broader parallel between this sort of corporate behavior and government (local, state, and federal) cutting services for the poor while investing heavily in prisons and the police.

A “living wage,” according the Economic Policy Institute that Barbara cites, is on average $30,000 a year for a family of one adult and two children—about $14 an hour. That amount includes health insurance, a telephone, and childcare – but not restaurant meals, internet access, or alcohol. About 60 percent of American workers actually earn less than this. While some rely on a working spouse or relatives or government assistance, many rely on wages alone.

The non-poor often think of poverty as difficult but sustainable, but Barbara shows it is a situation of acute distress—a lunch of potato chips leading to dizziness, a “home” in a van, an illness that can’t be treated. She suggests that we should understand poverty as a state of emergency.

In the summer of 2000, Barbara returns to her “real life,” eating at restaurants, sleeping in hotel rooms cleaned by someone else and shopping in stores tidied up by someone else. In the world of the top 20 percent, problems are solved without anyone seeming to do them. When people from this class speak, they are listened to, and when they complain, people below them will probably be punished. They have inordinate power over the lives of the poor, often determining the minimum wage and labor laws.

Barbara is alarmed by how invisible the lives of the poor are to the affluent—which is certainly not the case the other way around. The wealthy are less and less likely to share schools, private clubs, taxis, and gated neighborhoods with the poor, and even the affluent young now prefer summer school and internships to working as a lifeguard or waitress.

Both political parties are eager to support welfare reform, even though the 1996 legislation didn’t include any provision for monitoring people’s post-welfare economic conditions. Only by very carefully combing newspapers can you find that food pantry demand is increasing or shelters are operating above capacity. Americans are used to thinking of poverty as tied to unemployment, which means there needs to be an increase in jobs, but Barbara shows that the problem goes deeper when there is nearly full employment. The welfare poor, she argues, were often condemned for their laziness and dependency, but now that the majority of the poor are working, the correct reaction is shame at our dependency on the underpaid labor of others. The working poor, in fact, she argues, make sacrifices so others can benefit. She predicts that one day they will tire of getting so little in return and demand to be paid what they’re worth, but we will all be better off for this in the end.