Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA (26 page)

5. While working for The Maids, Ehrenreich hears Ted claim that he's “not a bad guy. . . and cares a lot about his girls.” How do the assumptions of supervisors such as Ted affect their employees? How does Ted compare to Ehrenreich's other bosses? To yours?

6. Ehrenreich is white and middle class. She asserts that her experience would have been radically different had she been a person of color or a single parent. Do you think discrimination shaped Ehrenreich's story? In what ways?

7. Ehrenreich found that she could not survive on $7.00 per hour—not if she wanted to live indoors. Consider how her experiment would have played out in your community: limiting yourself to $7.00 per hour earnings, create a hypothetical monthly budget for your part of the country.

8. Ehrenreich experienced remarkable goodwill, generosity, and solidarity among her colleagues. Does this surprise you? How do you think your own colleagues measure up?

9. Why do you think low-wage workers are reluctant to form labor organizations as Ehrenreich discovered at Wal-Mart? How do you think employees should lobby to improve working conditions?

10. Many campus and advocacy groups are currently involved in struggles for a “living wage.” How do you think a living wage should be calculated?

11. Were you surprised by the casual reactions of Ehrenreich's coworkers when she revealed herself as an undercover writer? Were you surprised that she wasn't suspected of being “different” or out-of-place despite her graduate-level education and usually comfortable lifestyle?

12. How does managers' scrutiny—“time theft” crackdowns and drug testing—affect workers' morale? How can American companies make the workplace environment safe and efficient without treating employees like suspected criminals?

13. Ehrenreich concluded that had her working life been spent in a Wal-Mart-like environment, she would have emerged a different person—meaner, pettier, “Barb” instead of “Barbara.” How would your personality change if you were placed in working conditions very different from the ones you are in now?

14. The workers in Nickel and Dimed receive almost no benefits—no overtime pay, no retirement funds, and no health insurance. Is this fair? Do you think an increase in salary would redress the lack of benefits, or is this a completely separate problem?

15. Many of Ehrenreich's colleagues relied heavily on family—for housing and help with child-care, by sharing appliances and dividing up the cooking, shopping, and cleaning. Do you think Americans make excessive demands on the family unit rather than calling for the government to help those in need?

16. Nickel and Dimed takes place in 1998-2000, a time of unprecedented prosperity in America. Do you think Ehrenreich's experience would be different in today's economy? How so?

17. After reading Nickel and Dimed, do you think that having a job—any job—is
better than no job at all? Did this book make you feel angry? Better informed?
Relieved that some one has finally described your experience? Galvanized to
do something?

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[1]
Eighty-one percent of large employers now require preemployment drug testing,
up from 21 percent in 1987. Among all employers, the rate of testing is highest
in the South. The drug most likely to be detected—marijuana, which can be detected
weeks after use—is also the most innocuous, while heroin and cocaine are generally
undetectable three days after use. Alcohol, which clears the body within hours
after ingestion, is not tested for.

[2]
According to the Fair Labor Standards Act, employers are not required to pay
“tipped employees,” such as restaurant servers, more than $2.13 an hour in direct
wages. However, if the sum of tips plus $2.13 an hour falls below the minimum
wage, or $5.15 an hour, the employer is required to make up the difference.
This fact was not mentioned by managers or otherwise publicized at either of
the restaurants where I worked.

[3]
I could find no statistics on the number of employed people living in cars or
vans, but according to a 1997 report of the National Coalition for the Homeless,
“Myths and Facts about Homelessness,” nearly one-fifth of all homeless people
(in twenty-nine cities across the nation) are employed in full- or part-time
jobs.

[4]
In Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy (Verso, 1997),
Kim Moody cites studies finding an increase in stress-related workplace injuries
and illness between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s. He argues that rising
stress levels reflect a new system of “management by stress” in which workers
in a variety of industries are being squeezed to extract maximum productivity,
to the detriment of their health.

[5]
Until April 1998, there was no federally mandated right to bathroom breaks.
According to Marc Linder and Ingrid Nygaard, authors of Void Where Prohibited:
Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time (Cornell University Press,
1997), “The right to rest and void at work is not high on the list of social
or political causes supported by professional or executive employees, who enjoy
personal workplace liberties that millions of factory workers can only dream
about. . . While we were dismayed to discover that workers lacked an acknowledged
right to void at work, [the workers] were amazed by outsiders' naïve belief
that their employers would permit them to perform this basic bodily function
when necessary. . . A factory worker, not allowed a break for six-hour stretches,
voided into pads worn inside her uniform; and a kindergarten teacher in a school
without aides had to take all twenty children with her to the bathroom and line
them up outside the stall door while she voided.”

[6]
A few weeks after I left, I heard ads on the radio for housekeeping jobs at
this hotel at the amazing rate of “up to $9 an hour.” When I inquired, I found
out that the hotel had indeed started paying by the room, and I suspect that
Carlie, if she lasted, was still making the equivalent of $6 an hour or quite
a bit less.

[7]
In 1996 the number of persons holding two or more jobs averaged 7.8 million,
or 6.2 percent of the workforce. It was about the same rate for men and for
women (6.1 versus 6.2). About two-thirds of multiple jobholders work one job
full-time and the other part-time. Only a heroic minority—4 percent of men and
2 percent of women—work two full-time jobs simultaneously (John E Stinson Jr.,
“New Data on Multiple Jobholding Available from the CPS,” Monthly Labor Review,
March 1997).

[8]
On Cape Cod, too, rising rents for apartments and houses are driving the working
class into motels, where a room might go for $880 a month in winter but climbs
to $1,440 a month in the tourist season. The Cape Cod Times describes families
of four living squeezed into one room, cooking in microwaves, and eating on
their beds (K. C. Myers, “Of Last Resort,” Cape Cod Times, June 25, 2000).

[9]
Margaret Talbot reports in the New York Times Magazine that “personality testing
in the workplace is at an all-time high” and now supports a $400-milliona-year
industry (October 17, 1999, p. 28).

[10]
The Bureau of Labor Statistics found full-time “private household workers and
servants” earning a median income of $223 a week in 1998, which is $23 a week
below the poverty level for a family of three. For a forty-hour week, our pay
at The Maids would amount to $266, or $43 above the poverty level.

[11]
Nationwide and even international cleaning services like Merry Maids, Molly
Maids, and The Maids International, all of which have arisen since the seventies,
now control 20-25 percent of the housecleaning business. In a 1997 article about
Merry Maids, Franchise Times reported tersely that “category is booming, niche
is hot too, as Americans look to outsource work even at home” (“72 Merry Maids,”
Franchise Times, December 1997). Not all cleaning services do well, with a high
rate of failure among the informal, mom-and-pop services, like the one I applied
to by phone that did not even require a cursory interview—all I had to do was
show up at seven the next morning. The “boom” is concentrated among the national
and international chains—outfits like Merry Maids, Molly Maids, Mini Maids,
Maid Brigade, and The Maids International—all named, curiously enough, to highlight
the more antique aspects of the industry, although the “maid” may occasionally
be male. Merry Maids claimed to be growing at 15-20 percent a year in 1996,
while spokesmen for Molly Maids and The Maids International each told me in
interviews conducted after I left Maine that their firms' sales are growing
by 25 percent a year.

[12]
The maids' wages, their Social Security taxes, their green cards, backaches,
and child care problems—all these are the sole concern of the company, meaning
the local franchise owner. If there are complaints on either side, they are
addressed to the franchise owner; the customer and the actual workers need never
interact. Since the franchise owner is usually a middle-class white person,
cleaning services are the ideal solution for anyone still sensitive enough to
find the traditional employer-maid relationship morally vexing.

[13]
I don't know what proportion of my fellow workers at The Maids in Portland had
been on welfare, but the owner of The Maids' franchise in Andover, Massachusetts,
told me in a phone interview that half his employees are former welfare recipients
and that they are as reliable as anyone else.

[14]
When I described the methods employed by The Maids to housecleaning expert Cheryl
Mendelson, author of Home Comforts, she was incredulous. A rag moistened with
disinfectant will not get a countertop clean, she told me, because most disinfectants
are inactivated by contact with organic matter—i.e., dirt—so their effectiveness
declines with each swipe of the rag. What you need is a detergent and hot water,
followed by a rinse. As for floors, she judged the amount of water we used—one
half of a small bucket, which was never any warmer than room temperature—to
be grossly inadequate, and, in fact, the water I wiped around on floors was
often an unsavory gray. I also ran The Maids' cleaning methods by Don Aslett,
author of numerous books on cleaning techniques and self-styled “number one
cleaner in America.” He was hesitant to criticize The Maids directly, perhaps
because he is, or told me he is, a frequent speaker at conventions of cleaning
service franchise holders, but he did tell me how he would clean a countertop.
First, spray it thoroughly with an all-purpose cleaner, then let it sit for
three to four minutes of “kill time,” and finally wipe dry with a clean cloth.
Merely wiping the surface with a damp cloth, he said, just spreads the dirt
around. But the point at The Maids, apparently, is not to clean so much as to
create the appearance of having been cleaned, not to sanitize but to create
a kind of stage setting for family life. And the stage setting Americans seem
to prefer is sterile only in the metaphorical sense, like a motel room or the
fake interiors in which soap operas and sitcoms take place.

[15]
The women I worked with were all white and, with one exception, Anglo, as are
the plurality of housecleaners in America, or at least those known to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics. Of the “private household cleaners and servants” it managed
to locate in 1998, the BLS reports that 36.8 percent were Hispanic, 15.8 percent
black, and 2.7 percent “other.” However, the association between housecleaning
and minority status is well established in the psyches of the white employing
class. When my daughter, Rosa, was introduced to the father of a wealthy Harvard
classmate, he ventured that she must have been named for a favorite maid. And
Audre Lorde reported an experience she had in 1967: “I wheel my two-year-old
daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket. . . and a little white girl
riding past in her mother's cart calls out excitedly, 'Oh look, Mommy, a baby
maid”' (quoted in Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A.: Perspectives on Gender [New
York: Routledge, 1992], p. 72). But the composition of the household workforce
is hardly fixed and has changed with the life chances of the different ethnic
groups. In the late nineteenth century, Irish and German immigrants served the
urban upper and middle classes, then left for the factories as soon as they
could. Black women replaced them, accounting for 60 percent of all domestics
in the 1940s, and dominated the field until other occupations began to open
up to them. Similarly, West Coast maids were disproportionately Japanese American
until that group too found more congenial options (see Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity
and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 [Temple
University Press, 1989], pp. 12-13). Today, the color of the hand that pushes
the sponge varies from region to region: Chicanas in the Southwest, Caribbeans
in New York, native Hawaiians in Hawaii, native whites, many of recent rural
extraction, in the Midwest and, of course, Maine.

[16]
For the affluent, houses have been swelling with no apparent limit. The square
footage of new homes increased by 39 percent between 1971 and 1996, to include
“family rooms,” home entertainment rooms, home offices, bedrooms, and often
a bathroom for each family member (“Détente in the Housework Wars,” Toronto
Star, November 20, 1999). By the second quarter of 1999, 17 percent of new homes
were larger than three thousand square feet, which is usually considered the
size threshold for household help, or the point at which a house becomes unmanageable
to the people who live in it (“Molding Loyal Pamperers for the Newly Rich,”
New York Times, October 24, 1999).