“What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re really selling is your life.”
After I graduated from law school and passed the bar in 2010, I couldn’t find a job. I spent months polishing my resume, crafting cover letters, and sending them to anyone I thought might have me. It was right in the middle of the recession, so this didn’t work out the way I’d hoped it would. I was living at Chez Dad (who was helping cover my loan payments), so my monetary needs were not as pressing as they would have otherwise been, but it sucked to be broke. Eventually I took a job at the college bookstore during textbook rush to get some money into my pocket. It was awful. My feet and back ached terribly by the middle of the shift, never mind the end. It was so busy that taking a bathroom break was just not an option at certain times of the day. And the paycheck it yielded was pitiful. I remember how ashamed I would feel when law students came through the line. The first time I saw a book I’d used in class I almost blurted out that I’d taken something similar but stopped myself, only imagining what that person would think of me, someone who went to law school and couldn’t get a “real” job.
A relatively brief experience of living on a tight budget is about as close as many middle-class people get to being poor. This, of course, is nothing like actually living in poverty. About 25 years ago now, as the Clinton-era “welfare-to-work” push was underway, writer Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Nickel and Dimed, in which she (as a woman of means) went “undercover” to experience what it’s like to actually live on minimum wage in America. She lived in three different areas (Florida, Maine, and Minnesota), experiencing several different kinds of jobs: waitressing, hotel housekeeping, maid service cleaning, working at a nursing home, and retail at Walmart. She gives herself a couple thousand dollars to start with and to cover any true emergencies, and then gets to it.
In what should not have been but seems to be a surprise, being poor is really hard. There’s no getting ahead. There’s barely even keeping her head above water. Being on your feet all day is physically exhausting and trying to figure out whether she can make her body get through a second job or if she can afford not to is a constant struggle. Housing absorbs nearly all of her income, and it’s a constant struggle to find something cheap enough that she can afford, but close enough to work to not drain her resources (her Rent-A-Wreck car and gasoline, not to mention time) excessively. At her price range, these apartments often lack full kitchens, so fast and packaged foods are her only real options. She can’t absorb the cost of unscheduled time off, so feeling like she might be getting sick just means pushing through.
There has been a lot of criticism of this book over the years, some of it very valid and other parts of it less so. Ehrenreich admits to some unattractive and classist beliefs as she begins her experiment, like that her education (she holds a Ph.D.) and other markers of her status will somehow be recognized, that it will be obvious that she doesn’t really belong among the working poor…which of course never happens. And it’s hard to believe she’s as surprised as she claims to be at how difficult getting by on minimum wage actually is, but her whole life experience has worked to shelter her from that knowledge. Generally, I found that she acknowledged the privileges she brought with her, like the ability to have any sort of savings and a lifetime of straightforward access to health care. Her interest in and concern for her coworkers seems genuine, if a bit shallow because she doesn’t stay any one place long enough to form strong bonds.
Reading this in 2019, ultimately, meant that the initial shock and/or surprise about the insights that it offers aren’t really to be had anymore. The issues she highlights (the difficulty of putting together a security deposit while living paycheck-to-paycheck, workplace injuries covered up by shady employers, the inane “personality tests” that are often required for retail work) are long since old news to anyone paying even cursory attention. This isn’t a bad place to start, if you are a person who has never been poor wanting information about what poverty might be like to experience. But if you’ve already got a firm grasp on the basics of why life below the poverty line might be challenging, you won’t find anything new or paradigm-changing here.