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| Mike Lukovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution |
This cartoon really impacted me
because I saw it just after finishing Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in
America.
This book was inspired by the
welfare-to-work reform of the 1990s; it attempts to answer the question: can a person
live on minimum wage? Ms. Ehrenreich courageously endeavored to find out by
actually living the life of a low-wage worker (she was in her 50s which makes
her willingness to undergo the humiliations and physical strain even more
admirable). She spent a month in three different cities, working as a chain
restaurant waitress, maid, and Wal-Mart associate. She lived in housing and ate
the food that was affordable at her wages. She lived in horrible places—a tiny
trailer, a squalid motel, and ate fast food because of a lack of kitchen
facilities. Working one job full-time, she could barely afford to cover her
most basic expenses, and she had a lot of advantages: no children, and because
this was a short-term experiment, she didn’t have to worry about medical
expenses or things like clothing (other than what she had to purchase for the
job).
This experiment was done in 1999
and 2000, before the bursting of the dot-com bubble, when the country was
experiencing prosperity and jobs were easy to get. This was also before
corporations learned that they could save money by not hiring people as
full-time workers. Ms. Ehrenreich tried to work two jobs so she could afford a
better apartment; she just didn’t have the stamina required to pull off
cleaning hotel rooms in the morning and waiting tables in the evening.
She also discusses the
psychological effect of low-income work, that it encourages submissiveness and
lack of initiative. At the same time, she makes clear that these are
hard-working people, doing their best with the pitiful resources at their
disposal.
In the aftermath of the Great
Recession, things are much worse, which after reading her account, is hard to
imagine. Certainly, jobs are much harder to get. Ms. Ehrenreich was able to get
a job almost instantly in 1999; today she might have spent her entire 30-day
allotment just finding a job (if she was lucky).
