This reminded of another good review of Ehrenreich's book I've run across:
How To Be Poor
by Robert Watts Lamon
Barbara Ehrenreich's recent contribution to social thought, "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," has reached book stardom. It is "impassioned, fascinating, profoundly significant, and wildly entertaining," according to Oprah's chronicle. "Captivating," adds The New York Times. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill urges all incoming freshmen to read it.
Robert Watts Lamon is an army veteran and a retired research chemist.
"Nickel and Dimed" is an account of Ehrenreich's adventures in the low-wage world in which she worked in hotel housekeeping and restaurants in Florida, at a maid service and a nursing home in Maine, and at a Wal-Mart in Minnesota, living more or less on what she earned. As a sort of right-wing beatnik, I spent many years in low-paying jobs and found her book remarkable for its defects. It's little more than a Marxist tract whose author had her mind made up before she entered the penny-pinching drama.
Ehrenreich often demonstrates, perhaps unwittingly, that people's woes can spring from their own choices. She just didn't know how to live as a poor person. She chose to stage her poverty experience in a resort area and two northern states with a lot of cold weather. Resort areas and the Cold Country are two places to avoid if you're actually going to live poor. Better to choose a place in the Sun Belt, away from the ocean, where a single wardrobe and minimal housing suffice to maintain body heat. And don't follow her example and get stuck in one of those residential motels or rooming houses. They are often inhabited by criminals, drug addicts, and a corpse or two. Temporary employment agencies are useful for finding work in a hurry, and an unfurnished apartment is the best choice for living quarters. She could have furnished such an apartment, bit by bit, by visiting used furniture stores and, yes, by shopping at Wal-Mart. An apartment need only be functional. It doesn't need an interior decorator.
Women appear to make friends faster than men, and I don't see why Ehrenreich didn't end up renting a house with a few of her acquaintances. A thousand a month gets enough house for three, and with rent thus divided, she would have been pretty well off, at least financially. Perhaps such an arrangement might have proved awkward, given her role as covert agent for the left-wing literati.
As a sort of right-wing beatnik, I spent many years in low-paying jobs and found Nickel and Dimed remarkable for its defects.
One choice Ehrenreich and many of her co-workers made is bewildering. Cigarette smoking is especially bad for people in low paying jobs. A pack-a-day habit can cost $1,000 or more every year. Think of what someone in a low-paying job could do with that kind of money — furnish an apartment, pay off a car, buy an air-conditioner or a computer, or even enroll in a modest health plan. Smoking lowers the energy levels, increases susceptibility to colds, and worsens allergy symptoms. It's a terrible habit for anyone who can't afford to lose a day's pay. Yet she justifies smoking with imbecilities about rebellion or easing of pain. "I don't know why," she writes, "the anti-smoking crusaders never grasped the element of self-nurturence that makes the habit so endearing to it victoms [sic] — as if, in the American workplace, the only thing people have to call their own is the tumors they are nourishing and the spare moments they devote to feeding them." In other worlds, the system makes people smoke. Come on — sometimes a cigarette is just a cigarette.
And a personality test is just a personality test, not a tool used by the employer to rob the perspective employee of his innermost self, demonstrating to him that he is possessed in his entirety, as she asserts. I felt awkward taking such tests and once flunked one given by an insurance company, whose hires, I later noticed, were palpable nitwits. Nevertheless, the tests represent an attempt to deal with real problems — they are attempts to avoid hiring determined criminals and others who may be hiding a troubled past.
So, too, with drug tests. Her experiences with them are amusing, but again, she ignores the valid reasons for requiring them. Thanks to the genius of our drug laws, people who work in low-paying jobs and are addicted to, say, cocaine or heroin may very likely steal to pay for their dope. Such people may take a job just for the chance it offers to do so.
She fails to observe what a blessing Wal-Mart has been for low-income people. Joe Sixpack can take the wife and kids to one of its stores and, for a song, outfit them from head to toe.
She claims she never saw a drug addict, thief, or slacker on the job. I wonder whether that attests to the value of drug and personality tests. I worked in businesses where such tests weren't given and saw any number of slackers and drug users, and a few thieves as well. Drug users serve two masters, their employer and their criminal connection. Slackers encourage sloth in the people around them, and when people won't work, they tend to turn on one another. The weapon they use is gossip. Those who suffer the sting most often are the best, most industrious employees — the Confederacy of Dunces is real. Wal-Mart recognizes these human tendencies and, to its credit, formulates policies to deal with them.
Practices Ehrenreich bitches about are hardly unique to low level jobs. Interviewing for a job as, say, a research scientist at a mature company involves a lengthy process. People you speak with for any length of time will send a written evaluation up the chain of command — not exactly a personality test, but pretty close to one. And such companies require a complete physical examination for all professional hires. The physical includes a urinalysis and a blood test — not a supervised drug test, but close.
One thing most humble wage-earners know is that people seldom hate their bosses. At the very least, they respect the boss' position and understand his problems. This confounds Ehrenreich who, like any devoted Marxist, thinks the working class aches for the chance to arise and sweep away the capitalists.
But for the time being, she'll settle for sweeping away consequences. Single parenthood, for example, she treats as if it were a congenital deformity, rather than the result of imprudent reproduction. Single mothers who get that way through ill-advised marriage or sex outside of marriage often suffer — especially if they have children before they acquire the marketable skills needed to support them. Prudence is a virtue, and virtue is the good reduced to practice. The absence of virtue leads to sorrow. Isn't this all elementary?
One day, while walking along a dirt road northeast of Munsan, I passed a farmer working in his small rice field. He had no ox, so he had hitched his wife to the plow. Together they were wading knee-deep in the water and muck.
Ehrenreich wants a world without Wal-Mart. I find it remarkable that she fails to observe what a blessing Wal-Mart has been for low-income people. Joe Sixpack can take the wife and kids to one of its stores and, for a song, outfit them from head to toe. Lamps, tables, and microwaves can be had for little money — a big help in creating a comfortable place to live. There is a grand irony in her Wal-Mart critique — the customers she ridicules for throwing merchandise all over the store are, by and large, the same class of people she champions as exploited employees.
She worked mainly in big companies and national franchises, perhaps because she thought they were riper targets for her book. In smaller businesses, I found some very kind people to work for. One of my employers regularly loaned trucks to employees to help them move. Another worked in my place, while I went to run in a road race. I'm amazed that Ehrenreich found so little generosity among her employers. I wonder whether she looked for it as carefully as she might have. It's hard to imagine any employer who refuses to allow his employees to make a phone call when a pressing personal problem requires it. One of my employers provided phones specifically for the use of his employees. Yet Ehrenreich recognizes few virtues in her employers or their supervisors. Like her mentor, Karl Marx, she sees the workers as angelic victims and their employers as evil oppressors — and any generosity shown by the latter, as a device to hoodwink the former.
I had one experience she might find interesting because it involved voiding on the job — one of her favorite concerns. I spent a number of years as a security guard. At one of my sites, a factory in Durham, the client locked the guard out of the building on weekends, leaving us with only the ground for a toilet. Fortunately, in my 13 months at the site, I never suffered a crisis of the bowels. If I had, I would have considered making my deposit on the steps of the executive offices.
In any event, I persuaded the building engineer to leave a door open for us when the plant was closed — a risky thing in that neighborhood. All went well until one of the guards failed to show up for a weekend shift, leaving the plant unguarded. From then on, until I left the site, the factory doors remained locked, and we never did get a key. As Burke said, we forge our own chains.
Ehrenreich disdains everyone's materialism except her own.
Ehrenreich's solution to such problems — which many of the employees themselves view with amused forbearance — is to have a "work stoppage," start a union, make demands: "Arise ye prisoners of starvation! Arise ye wretched of the earth!" Never mind that unions hurt low-wage earners by stimulating unemployment and have helped drive one company after another overseas or into bankruptcy. The less affluent would benefit from a repeal of the wage-and-hour laws. Instead of working two jobs, as many of them do, they could work more hours at the same job and save travel time and gasoline.
"Nickel and Dimed" radiated a stream of carpings. Homeowners affluent while the maids have little? Those nice homes reflect the value of the owners' professional skills. Homeowners spending more on houses? They want to live in a neighborhood that won't, as they say, fall into decline. That's why they form homeowner's associations and bite their nails when a neighbor gets a string of visitors at two in the morning. Feel lost or bounced around on a new job? It's a common problem at any income level — stick with it. Get reamed out by the manager? Doesn't Lewis Lapham ever ream anybody out? Khaki trousers cost $30? Wal-Mart sells them for $10. Watch battery costs $11? Who needs a watch? The only timepiece a wage earner needs is a reliable alarm clock. As long as you get up and get to work on time, who cares what time it is? Security deposit too high? Security deposits for apartments were once trifling amounts. Today, the usual requirement is the equivalent of a month's rent. The reason is simple — to avoid paying extra rent, many people quit their apartments without notice. Again, Burke.
I suspect Ehrenreich entered Wal-Mart intent on addressing the "worldwide working class," the sweatshops in Kukuland, all the foreign labels on the merchandise. Thus she writes, "Those exotic places aren't exotic anymore. . . . They've all been eaten up by the great blind profit-making global machine." She then lists some of these places, among them, South Korea.
Let me tell you about South Korea when it was exotic. In the late 1950s, after graduating from college, I spent a year with an infantry unit there. One day, while walking along a dirt road northeast of Munsan, I passed a farmer working in his small rice field. He had no ox, so he had hitched his wife to the plow. Together they were wading knee-deep in the water and muck that included their own excrement. Their children sat nearby, crying in pain, their abdomens distended by the parasitic worms that infested them.
Into this exotic world with its exotic diseases — hemorrhagic fever, schistosomiasis, hepatitis, malaria, tuberculosis — came the cruel capitalists. They created those awful sweatshops where people could work, sheltered from the cold and filth and contagion. The workers made more money than they had ever made in their respective crapholes. And strange things happened. The standard of living began to rise. People exchanged their tatters for warm clothing and sound shoes, becoming healthier, happier, and far more comfortable. Concrete highways replaced the dirt roads I traveled, and modern houses replaced the shacks along the dirt roads. Funny thing — wherever that great, blind profit-making global machine touches down, similar miracles occur.
But Ehrenreich disdains everyone's materialism except her own. She judges the quality of Americans' lives by the proximity of their incomes to some invention called the poverty line. Perhaps her Marxism led her to do so. In any event, she encouraged her fellow workers to judge themselves and others by the number and quality of their possessions. How bourgeois!
Her book is just another volley in the Culture Wars. It may fool a few students at UNC, but the kids coming to school from farm and factory towns will pay it no mind. Meanwhile, reviewers and blurbists compare Ehrenreich to Orwell and Mencken. But I think of her as a modern Beatrice Webb in her opulent sitting room with its shrine to Lenin, complete with burning candle.
One small moment in Nickel and Dimed was genuinely moving. The author asked one of the other maids how she felt about the homeowners who had so much more than the maids had, and the maid replied: "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 where they are."
How fine — that she lives without rancor or envy, and that she has her own dreams. Ehrenreich likes to talk about dignity. Perhaps she should learn to recognize it when she sees it.
libertyunbound.com |
