19 “Study: More Go Hungry since Welfare Reform,” Boston Herald, January 21, 2000; “Charity Can’t Feed All while Welfare Reforms Implemented,” Houston Chronicle, January 10, 2000; “Hunger Grows as Food Banks Try to Keep Pace,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, November 26, 1999.
20 “Rise in Homeless Families Strains San Diego Aid,” Los Angeles Times, January 24, 2000.
21 “Hunger Problems Said to Be Getting Worse,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 15, 1999.
22 Deborah Leff, the president and CEO of the hunger-relief organization America’s Second Harvest, quoted in the National Journal, op. cit.; “Hunger Persists in U.S. despite the Good Times,” Detroit News, June 15, 2000.
23 “A National Survey of American Attitudes toward Low-Wage Workers and Welfare Reform,” Jobs for the Future, Boston, May 24, 2000.
Afterword: Nickel and Dimed
I completed the manuscript for this book in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some hi-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, “Make love, not war,” and then—down at the bottom—“Screw it, just make money.”
When Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001, the dot-com bubble was about to burst and the stock market had begun to falter, but the book still evidently came as a surprise, even a revelation, to many. Again and again, in that first year or two after publication, people came up to me and opened with the words “I never thought . . .” or “I hadn’t realized . . .” To my amazement, Nickel and Dimed quickly ascended the bestseller list and began winning awards, including, I am proud to say, the Christopher Award, from a Catholic group, for books that “affirm the highest values of the human spirit.” It inspired an A&E documentary called Wage Slaves and was transformed into a fast, funny play that has been performed in major theaters as well as many smaller venues throughout the country. It has been adopted as a “community read” in dozens of places around the country, including Rochester, Minnesota; Appleton, Wisconsin; Concord, New Hampshire; and Peoria, Illinois.
I was braced for criticism when the book came out, but very little of any substance came to my attention and the only controversy the book stirred up was laughably off-target. In 2003, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assigned Nickel and Dimed to all incoming students, prompting a group of conservative students and state legislators to hold a press conference denouncing it as a “classic Marxist rant” and a work of “intellectual pornography with no redeeming characteristics.” The group proceeded to take out a full-page ad in the Raleigh News and Observer that had little to say about the book but charged me with being a Marxist, an atheist, and a dedicated enemy of the American family—this last proven by my long-standing conviction that families headed by single mothers are as deserving of support as those headed by married couples. I was greeted on North Carolina radio talk shows by hosts asking, “What does it feel like to be the Antichrist of North Carolina?” and similarly challenging inquiries.
But while I was enjoying the free publicity, housekeepers on the UNC-CH campus put the brouhaha to good use by showing up at work wearing T-shirts and buttons saying, “Ask ME about being nickel and dimed.” The housekeepers, it turned out, had been fighting for union recognition for years—against the very administration that had apparently approved Nickel and Dimed as freshman reading material. My involvement came to a glorious conclusion when the housekeepers and graduate student employees invited me to come to campus—on my own dime, of course—to speak at rallies for campus workers, although these unfortunately did not lead to union recognition.
In the years since the book was published, a question I’ve been asked hundreds of times is: How do you account for its success? I always credit the $100 cash rebate my publisher gives to each purchaser, which is to say, who knows? But in this case I think I partially understand the book’s popularity among middle-class people—at least its popularity compared with that of anything else I had written on the subject of poverty. In Nickel and Dimed, the more affluent reader can identify with the main character, which is me, and imagine that I am much like themselves—a person with rights, who is used to being treated with some modicum of respect. They could flinch at my mistakes, cringe at the humiliations, and vicariously share my exhaustion.
There is no question that the book has changed some minds within the more comfortable classes. A Florida woman wrote to tell me that, before reading it, she’d always been annoyed at the poor for what she saw as their self-inflicted obesity. Now she understood that a healthy diet wasn’t always an option. Another woman told me she’d always assumed that “unskilled” workers earned at least $15 an hour, which is what she paid her housekeeper. My sister in Colorado, who is by no means “affluent” herself, was so struck by the homeless workers I wrote about that she organized a local chapter of Habitat for Humanity. And if I had a quarter for every person who’s told me he or she now tips more generously, I would be able to start my own foundation.
What is even more gratifying to me, the book has been widely read among low-wage workers themselves. In the last few years, hundreds of people have written to tell me their stories: the new mother whose electricity had just been turned off, the woman who had just been given a diagnosis of cancer and has no health insurance, the homeless man who writes from a library computer. To quote from a few recent e-mails:
Nickled and Dimed is far from fiction. It is pretty much my life. With 2 college degrees, I have struggled, and with no health insurance, I’ve incurred a ton of debt. I have not done as well as my parents, who came out of the Depression. Our government says there are jobs, but they are low-pay jobs with no benefits. Not livable wage jobs. Not jobs that will give you a house and savings for retirement. Nothing glimmers in this dust.
Hello, Barbara, I am a downsized federal employee, not white collar, blue collar [whose] income was less than $20,000. . . . After my 20 years in Data with the I.R.S. for $10.00 an hour, $6000.00 in 401K I can’t locate, I took a job as a Direct Care Counselor, sort of like the nursing aide position you had in Nickel & Dimed. Well, I was hurt 4 months into this horrible, physical degrading job basically cleaning up after the Mentally Ill/Disabled population while doing a Take Down for violent clients as we called them, and I messed up my knee, three surgeries later needing knee replacement and out of work for almost 5 years now I collect $65.75 a week from worker’s compensation insurance, from originally $256.00 a week after surgery #1. Now I have to find a job that I can do with a bad knee, because I can’t survive any longer.
I just finished reading your book entitled “Nickel and Dimed.” I appreciate the fact that you were willing to experience first hand what many of us live with day to day. . . . You witnessed the “pariah” syndrome the working poor experience daily. Very few people get the chance to delve into that other realm where you feel like a lesser being just for being.
At the time I wrote Nickel and Dimed, I wasn’t sure how many people it directly applied to—only that the official definition of poverty was way off the mark, since it defined an individual earning $7 an hour, as I did on average, as well out of poverty. But three months after the book was published, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., issued a report entitled “Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families,” which found an astounding 29 percent of American families living in what could be more reasonably defined as poverty. At least this was the percentage of families earning less than a bare-bones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes—though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small on
e, and other studies have since come up with similar figures.
The big question, seven years later, is whether things have improved or worsened for those in the bottom third of the income distribution, the people who clean hotel rooms, work in warehouses, wash dishes in restaurants, care for the very young and very old, and keep the shelves stocked in our stores. I wish I could update the reader on all the people I worked with while researching this book—not that that would provide a very meaningful sample—but most of the addresses and phone numbers I took away with me proved to be inoperative within a few months, probably due to moves and telephone difficulties. I did see “Gail” about six months after working with her; she was still waitressing and had, mercifully, gained a little weight. When I last heard of “Caroline,” I was told she had followed her worthless husband to California and was living in a homeless shelter with her children. Two years ago, “Melissa” was still working at Wal-Mart but facing harassment from management for hurting herself by falling from a ladder while stocking shelves.
For low-wage workers in general the trajectory has tended downwards, as employers have found ever more diabolical ways to suppress the earnings of their already underpaid workers. In early 2007, for example, Circuit City laid off 3,400 employees because they had been around too long and had seen their wages creep up to $10–20 an hour. They were allowed to reapply for their old jobs after a ten-week “cooling off” period—during which they would presumably overcome any resentment occasioned by the layoff—but their new jobs would be paid at the minimum wage.
Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, presents a mixed but largely discouraging picture. In the early 2000s, it was revealed to be abusing its workers in ways that I had not imagined in my stint as a Wal-Mart associate. I had been warned by a coworker of the company’s refusal to pay overtime, but I hadn’t then understood that this could mean no pay at all for hours of work. In the two years following the publication of Nickel and Dimed, employees in a number of states sued the company for falsifying time records and even locking workers into stores at midnight, forcing them to remain for hours of unpaid work. These are, by any reasonable standard, sweatshop conditions of the kind we might expect to find in the Third World factories that are Wal-Mart’s suppliers, and they helped inspire the creation of new pressure groups like Wal-Mart Watch and Wake-Up Wal-Mart. In Chicago, Los Angeles, and other places around the country, Wal-Mart began to face lively community resistance to the opening of new stores.
Adding to the pressure on Wal-Mart were state governments tired of indirectly subsidizing the company by covering its employees on Medicaid. In 2007, the company relented and broadened its health benefits. But like Circuit City, Wal-Mart also capped wages for longtime employees and started working to transform its workforce from 20 to 40 percent part-time. Some Wal-Mart “associates” reported that as part of the effort to drive out long-term, and possibly unhealthy, employees, “managers have suddenly barred older employees with back or leg problems from sitting on stools.”1
In the past, American workers could sometimes turn to the federal government for relief or as a counterforce to abusive corporations. But in the Bush administration, no one was listening. Student loans, which have traditionally provided a way out for some of the working poor, were slashed by $12.7 billion in 2006, the largest cut in history. Other programs are being whittled away more subtly. Simply because of understaffing, it can now take waits of up to three years to qualify for disability benefits, during which time the claimant may die or lose her home. I can only hope that “Joanne,” my coworker at The Maids, was able to qualify for disability after her knee operation. Even meaner, if possible, has been the administration’s attack on the Earned Income Tax Credit, which offers tax refunds to working-poor families with children. In 2003, the IRS tightened the eligibility requirements for the EITC, asking for marriage certificates, past leases, school and medical records—none of which are easy to assemble. On its Web site, for example, the state of California warned that the issuance of a replacement marriage certificate could take two or three years due to “budgetary constraints.”2
There was another development in the years since this book was first published—a short-lived expansion of easy credit for the poor. Rent-to-buy furniture scams and payday loans, the interest for which can balloon to hundreds of percent of the original sum, had been around for a long time. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, major companies like Countrywide Mortgage and Wells Fargo Bank also leaped into what Business Week, in a May 2007 cover story, called “the poverty business,” tempting low-wage workers and even the unemployed with dodgy mortgages and refinancing schemes. Easy credit became a kind of substitute for decent wages. Where once people might have saved up enough to buy a home, now they could only hope to borrow enough, and at rates that seemed to escalate over time arbitrarily. We’ve seen how all that ended—in massive foreclosures and chaos in the global financial markets. No one has so far assessed the impact of the credit crisis on America’s poor, but it certainly didn’t help that in 2005 Congress had passed a bill making it much more difficult for an individual to wipe out debt by declaring bankruptcy.
Finally, prices have been rising, and not only for gas, which has gone up by 37 percent in the last year, further limiting the mobility and job-seeking range of low-income people. In the last chapter of this book, I criticized the federal definition of poverty for being overly reliant on food prices, which, I stated, had been relatively immune from inflation. But this immunity has broken down: Food prices are suddenly rising, with milk up 21 percent and eggs up 36 percent in one year.3 At the same time, the bursting of the housing bubble has not led to marked decreases in rent. No wonder that, as I write this in December 2007, a majority of Americans profess to be gloomy about the economy, with 57 percent opining that we’re already in a recession. Of course, low-wage workers have been in a recession of their own for years. For them, things have simply gotten more desperate.
But in at least one way the last few years have been a time of rising hopes and even modest gains. When Nickel and Dimed was published, the federal minimum wage was $5.15 an hour and had remained stuck at that niggardly level since 1997. Despairing of any change at the federal level and discouraged by the weakness of unions, activists had begun turning to the cities and states, pressuring city councils to adopt “living wage” ordinances and state legislatures to raise the states’ minimum wages. The activists were a scattered, grassroots bunch, including union staffers, church members, students, current low-wage workers, and a few national groups like ACORN, a scrappy advocate for the poor. But by 1999, they were strong enough to be labeled a “movement” by the New York Times and had succeeded in passing living wage ordinances in New York City, Los Angeles, and Baltimore, among other cities. Few workers were covered by the original living wage ordinances—only ones employed by companies doing business with the city government—but the idea that work should pay at least enough to get by on was beginning to win broad public support.
I’d been a supporter before, but Nickel and Dimed plunged me into the thick of the living wage battle. Local coalitions bought up copies of the book to distribute to their city council members and state legislators; in some cities, the opening of the play based on the book featured receptions benefiting either the living wage movement or affordable-housing groups. But books don’t bring about social change; only a movement can do that, and I was gratified to be able to help build this one. Thanks to Nickel and Dimed, I found myself in demand as a speaker at living wage rallies and fund-raising events. In Portland, Oregon, I suited up as a waitress again and served the food at a lunch organized to consolidate support for raising the state’s minimum wage. On a street corner in Santa Monica, I spoke to hotel workers rallying to raise that city’s minimum. In Santa Fe, over eight hundred people filled a local theater to hear me speak, and the size of the crowd alone helped persuade local businesspeople to ease their resistance to raising the city’s minimum wage. In Miami
, I visited the tent city set up by striking janitors at the University of Miami, who, after weeks of camping out and fasting, won union recognition, health insurance, and an improvement in wages that had been a little over $6 an hour.
As Nickel and Dimed was adopted as a reading in more and more college courses, I hit the lecture circuit, always emphasizing that “you don’t have to go off campus to find the working poor.” At Harvard in April 2001, students had taken over an administration building to protest the low wages paid to Harvard janitors, and more and more campuses were seeing the emergence of “student labor alliances” through which students joined with underpaid housekeepers, maintenance workers, food service workers, and other campus employees to demand a better deal. I was in a good position to help spread the word, despite what was sometimes the visible displeasure of my hosts in the college administration. After addressing a freshman convocation at Miami University of Ohio, I had the thrill of marching with a portion of the crowd out of the hall and to a rally in support of campus workers. At Yale, I got arrested with 100 campus workers protesting the university’s failure to provide child care. When the town where I was then living—Charlottesville, Virginia—was rocked by a building takeover at the University of Virginia in support of a living wage for campus workers, I joined students handing out flyers in town. For an old activist like me, these were peak moments, charged with solidarity and hope.
Business interests, especially hotel and restaurant owners, doggedly resisted the living wage movement, even prevailing on some state legislatures to pass laws forbidding cities from adopting living wage ordinances. Their argument, articulated by any number of academic economists, was that attempts to raise wages at the bottom would only hurt the people they were intended to help, since employers would be forced to cut costs by laying people off. The response of living wage activists, which may have seemed feckless to the economists, was essentially damn the consequences. As Carol Oppenheimer of the Santa Fe Living Wage Network told the New York Times: “What really got the other side was when we said, ‘It’s just immoral to pay people $5.15, they can’t live on that.’ . . . It made the businesspeople furious. And we realized then that we had something there, so we said it over and over again. Forget the economic argument. This was a moral one. It made them crazy.”4
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