Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA (14 page)

I don't get the last word with Ted, of course. A couple of days later, I am out with the still-limping Holly, who continues to treat me like some nonhuman and slightly unreliable cleaning product—a defective Janitor in a Drum—when she gets a call via beeper from Ted that I'm to be driven back to the office and sent out to another team that's facing a rough first-timer. Why me? I don't know, maybe he just wants to talk to me. First thing he says as we head out, just him and me in the car, is how great I'm doing—he gets just great reports—so he's giving me a raise to $6.75 an hour. I can't believe this: smashing fishbowls and threatening work stoppages is doing great? But he's moved on to how he's not a bad guy, I should know this, and he cares a lot about his girls. See, he's got some great gals, like Holly and Liza, but there's a certain number of malcontents and he just wishes they'd stop their complaining. I know what he's talking about, right? This must be my cue to name, a few names, because this is how Ted operates, my coworkers claim—through snitches and by setting up one woman against another. He's told us, for example, that if someone is absent it's up to the rest of us to get on her case, because we're the ones who'll suffer if our teams are shorthanded. But I use the occasion to ask him the question that's been bothering me since Holly's fall: Will she be paid for the day when he sent her home, since she was, after all, injured on the job? “Oh yes, of course”—but his chuckle seems a little forced—“What do you think I am, an ogre?” Well, no, though I don't say this, the word I am thinking of is pimp.

Why does anyone put up with this when there are so many other jobs available? In fact, one woman does leave for what she insists is a better job—working the counter at a Dunkin' Donuts. But there are some practical reasons for sticking with The Maids: changing jobs means a week and possibly more without a paycheck; plus there's the attraction of the so-called “mothers' hours,” although in practice we often end up working till five. The other, less tangible factor is the lure of Ted's approval. This, perhaps as much as the money, is what keeps Holly going through nausea and pain, and even some of the livelier, bolder women seem inordinately sensitive to how he's feeling about them. Getting “reamed out” by Ted can ruin their whole day; a morsel of praise will be savored for weeks. I see the power of his approval most clearly on Pauline's last day. She is sixty-seven and has been on the job longer than anyone—two years—enough to rate her a mention in the newsletter published by corporate headquarters. Her back has long since given out but she's leaving now because she's scheduled for knee surgery in a couple of weeks, the result, she says, of too much floor scrubbing. Still, Ted makes no mention of her departure at the morning meeting of her last day, nor does he thank her privately or wish her well at the end of the day. I know this because I offer her a ride home that day when it appears that her usual one isn't going to show up. As we drive through the rainy streets of South Portland, she talks about the surgery and the weeks of recovery that will follow it, and then the need to go out and find another job, preferably one that doesn't involve so much bending and lifting and crouching. But mostly she talks about Ted and her feeling of hurt. “He's never liked me since I had to stop vacuuming because of my back,” she says. “I've asked him why I get paid less than anyone”—anyone at her level of seniority is, I think, what she means—“and he says, 'Well, if you could just vacuum. . . ”' There's no bitterness in her voice, just the mortal sadness of looking ahead, toward the end of one's life, at the gray streets and the rain.

The big question is why Ted's approval means so much. As far as I can figure, my coworkers' neediness—because that's what it is—stems from chronic deprivation. The home owners aren't going to thank us for a job well done, and God knows, people on the street aren't going to hail us as heroines of proletarian labor. No one will know that the counter on which he slices the evening's baguette only recently supported a fainting woman—and decide to reward her with a medal for bravery. No one is going to say, after I vacuum ten rooms and still have time to scrub a kitchen floor, “Goddamn, Barb, you're good!” Work is supposed to save you from being an “outcast,” as Pete puts it, but what we do is an outcast's work, invisible and even disgusting. Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditchdiggers, changers of adult diapers—these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society. Hence the undeserved charisma of a man like Ted. He may be greedy and offhandedly cruel, but at The Maids he is the only living representative of that better world where people go to college and wear civilian clothes to work and shop on the weekends for fun. If for some reason there's a shortage of houses to clean, he'll keep a team busy by sending them out to clean his own home, which, I am told, is “real nice.”

Or maybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making you feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly—the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple.

On my last afternoon, I try to explain who I am and why I've been working here to the women on my team for the day, a much more spirited group than Holly's usual crew. My announcement attracts so little attention that I have to repeat it: “Will you listen to me? I'm a writer and I'm going to write a book about this place.” At last Lori leans around from the front seat and hushes the others with “Hey, this is interesting,” and to me: “Are you like, investigating?”

Well, not just this place and not exactly “investigating,” but Lori has latched on to that concept. She hoots with laughter. “This place could use some investigating!” Now everyone seems to get it—not who I am or what I do—but that whatever I'm up to, the joke is on Ted.

At least now that I'm “out” I get to ask the question I've wanted to ask all this time: How do they feel, not about Ted but about the owners, who have so much while others, like themselves, barely get by? This is the answer from Lori, who at twenty-four has a serious disk problem and an $8,000 credit card debt: “All I can think of is like, wow, I'd like to have this stuff someday. It motivates me and I don't feel the slightest resentment because, you know, it's my goal to get to where they are.”

And this is the answer from Colleen, a single mother of two who is usually direct and vivacious but now looks at some spot straight ahead of her, where perhaps the ancestor who escaped from the Great Potato Famine is staring back at her, as intent as I am on what she will say: “I don't mind, really, because I guess I'm a simple person, and I don't want what they have. I mean, it's nothing to me. But what I would like is to be able to take a day off now and then. . . if I had to. . . and still be able to buy groceries the next day.”

I work one last day at the Woodcrest and then call in sick. Sorry, Linda, Pete, and all you sweet, demented old ladies! I visit Lori on Sunday and let her have the satisfaction of returning my uniforms to Ted and explaining my departure however she wants.

From the air Minnesota is the very perfection of early summer—the blue of the lakes merging with the blue of the sky, neatly sculpted clouds pasted here and there, strips of farmland in alternating chartreuse and emerald—a lush, gentle landscape, seemingly penetrable from any angle. I had thought for months of going to Sacramento or somewhere else in California's Central Valley not far from Berkeley, where I'd spent the spring. But warnings about the heat and the allergies put me off, not to mention my worry that the Latinos might be hogging all the crap jobs and substandard housing for themselves, as they so often do. Don't ask me why Minneapolis came to mind, maybe I just had a yearning for deciduous trees. It's a relatively liberal state, I knew that, and more merciful than many to its welfare poor. A half an hour or so of Web research revealed an agreeably tight labor market, with entry-level jobs advertised at $8 an hour or more and studio apartments for $400 or less. If some enterprising journalist wants to test the low-wage way of life in darkest Idaho or Louisiana, more power to her. Call me gutless, but what I was looking for this time around was a comfortable correspondence between income and rent, a few mild adventures, a soft landing.

I pick up my Rent-A-Wreck from a nice fellow—this must be the famous “Minnesota nice”—who volunteers the locations of NPR and classic rock on the radio. We agree that swing sucks and maybe would have discovered a few more points of convergence, only I'm on what a certain Key West rock jock likes to call “a mission from God.” I've got my map of the Twin Cities area, purchased for $10 at the airport, and an apartment belonging to friends of a friend that I can use for a few days free of charge while they visit relatives back East. Well, not entirely free of charge, since the deal is I have to take care of their cockatiel, a caged bird that, for reasons of ornithological fitness and sanity, has to be let out of the cage for a few hours a day. I had agreed to this on the phone without thinking, only fully recalling, when I get to the apartment, that birds-at-close-range are one of the phobias I have always allowed myself, along with oversized moths and anything derived from oranges. I find the place with no trouble, delighted that the city and my map are in such perfect agreement, and spend an hour with one of my hosts absorbing cockatiel technology. At one point, my host lets the bird out of its cage and it flies directly at my face. With enormous effort, I bow my head and shut my eyes while it hops around on my hair, pecking and grooming.

Don't let the cockatiel throw you off; this is no yuppie ambience. It's a tiny, cluttered one-bedroom affair furnished by the Salvation Army and done up in late seventies graduate student décor. When my hosts leave, I find no olive oil or balsamic vinegar in the cupboards, no half-empty bottles of Chardonnay in the fridge, no alcohol at all other than a solidly blue-collar half-pint of Seagram's 7, and the favored spread is margarine. It's pleasant enough, even cozy, with a firm bed and views of a tree-lined street—except for the bird. But as I'd learned from my coworkers in Maine—several of whom had spent time in tightly shared space—people who depend on the generosity of others for their lodging always have something untoward to put up with, typically incompatible relatives and long waits for the bathroom. So let the cockatiel-Budgie, as I came to call him, instead of his more pretentious given name—be a stand-in in this story for the intrusive in-laws and noisy housemates that a person of limited means crashing with distant family in a strange city might normally expect to endure.

Never mind. I'm off first thing in the morning to look for a job. No waitressing, nursing homes, or housecleaning this time; I'm psyched for a change-retail, maybe, or factory work. I drive to the two nearest Wal-Marts, fill out applications, then head for a third one a forty-five-minute drive away on the opposite edge of the city. I drop off my application and am about to start hitting the Targets and Kmarts when I get an idea: no one is going to hire me based on an application showing no job experience—I have written, as usual, that I am a divorced homemaker reentering the workforce. What I have to do is make a personal appearance and exhibit my sunny, self-confident self. So I go to the pay phone in the front of the store, call the store's number, and ask for personnel. I'm put through to Roberta, who is impressed by my initiative and tells me I can come on in to her office in the back of the store. Roberta, a bustling platinum-haired woman of sixty or so, tells me there's nothing wrong with my “app”; she herself raised six children before starting at Wal-Mart, where she rose to her present position in just a few years, due mainly to the fact that she's a “people person.” She can offer me a job now, but first a little “survey,” on which there are no right or wrong answers, she assures me, just whatever I think. As it happens, I've already taken the Wal-Mart survey once, in Maine, and I rush through it again with aplomb. Roberta takes it off to another room, where, she says, a computer will “score” it. After about ten minutes, she's back with alarming news: I've gotten three answers wrong—well, not exactly wrong but in need of further discussion.

Now, my approach to preemployment personality tests has been zero tolerance vis-à-vis the obvious “crimes”—drug use and theft—but to leave a little wriggle room elsewhere, just so it doesn't look like I'm faking out the test. My approach was wrong. When presenting yourself as a potential employee, you can never be too much of a suck-up. Take the test proposition that “rules have to be followed to the letter at all times”: I had agreed to this only “strongly” rather than “very strongly” or “totally” and now Roberta wants to know why. Well, rules have to be interpreted sometimes, I say, people have to use some discretion. Otherwise, why, you might as well have machines do all the work instead of actual human beings. She beams at this—“Discretion, very good!”—and jots something down. With my other wrong answers similarly accounted for, Roberta introduces me to “what Wal-Mart is all about.” She personally read Sam Walton's book (his autobiography, Made in America) before starting to work here and found that the three pillars of Wal-Mart philosophy precisely fit her own, and these are service, excellence (or something like that), and she can't remember the third. Service, that's the key, helping people, solving their problems, helping them shop—and how do I feel about that? I testify to a powerful altruism in retail-related matters and even find myself getting a bit misty-eyed over this bond that I share with Roberta. All I have to do now is pass a drug test, which she schedules me to take at the beginning of next week.