Posted: April 12th, 2015

Nickled and Dimed (argument)n (not) getting by in America.Barbara Ehrenreich**

Nickled and Dimed (argument)n (not) getting by in America.Barbara Ehrenreich**

The thinking behind welfare reform was that even the humblest jobs are morally uplifting and psychologically buoying. In reality they are likely to be fraught with insult and stress. But I did discover one redeeming feature of the most abject low-wage work – the camaraderie of people who are, in almost all cases, far too smart and funny and caring for the work they do and the wages they’re paid. The hope, of course, is that someday these people will come to know what they’re worth, and take appropriate action.

(1) According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the “fair-market rent” for an efficiency is $551 here in Monroe County, Florida. A comparable rent in the five boroughs of New York City is $704; in San Francisco, $713; and in the heart of Silicon Valley, $808. The fair-market rent for an area is defined as the amount that would be needed to pay rent plus utilities for “privately owned, decent, safe, and sanitary rental housing of a modest (non-luxury) nature with suitable amenities.”

(2) According to the Monthly Labor Review (November 1996), 28 percent of Work sites surveyed in the service industry conduct drug tests (corporate workplaces have much higher rates), and the incidence of testing has risen markedly since the Eighties. The rate of testing is highest in the South (56 percent of work sites polled), with the Midwest in second place (50 percent). The drug most likely to be detected – marijuana, which can be detected in urine for weeks – is also the most innocuous, while heroin and cocaine are generally undetectable three days after use. Prospective employees sometimes try to cheat the tests by consuming excessive amounts of liquids and taking diuretics and even masking substances available through the Internet.

(3) 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.

(4) I could find no statistics on the number of employed people living in cars or vans, but according to the National Coalition for the Homeless’s 1997 report “Myths and Facts About Homelessness,” nearly one in five homeless people (in twenty-nine cities across the nation) is employed in a full- or part-time job.

(5) 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.

(6) 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 daydream about…. While we were dismayed to discover that workers lacked an acknowledged legal right to void at work, [the workers] were amazed by outsiders’ naive 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 when she voided.”

(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), though the kinds of jobs differ by gender. 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. (From John F. Stinson Jr., “New Data on Multiple Jobholding Available from the CPS,” in the Monthly Labor Review, March 1997.)
**Barbara Ehrenreich is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author of twelve books, including Fear of Falling and Blood Rites. She also contributes to the magazine The Progressive.
*Harper’s Magazine, Jan 1999 v298 i1784 p37(1).