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Feb. 24th, 2007 06:04 pmToday I finished Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. This is about a woman who made the mistake of wondering aloud to an editor how people can live on the wages of the unskilled.
I am a big sucker for this Black Like Me sort of book where some sort of clueless person goes somewhere completely alien and then tells us all about it so that we can learn the easy way from the comfort of our own homes. This is why I got a degree in sociology, after all, and why I never became a sociologist (these most interesting studies are too scary).
The book starts very well. It's so well written, you want to read it aloud. She's interesting and funny and not afraid to use big words.
Still, she makes some good observations. She finds jobs, finds housing, and gets tired. She bursts some of my beliefs.
The title, Nickel and Dimed is a poor title. She doesn't talk much about nickels and dimes. The main problem was rent. She never quite could afford the barely acceptable places she found except once when she was able to hang on to two jobs. She talked to her co-workers, hoping that they would have secret skills, but they didn't. They lived with parents, grown children, or lovers or lived in their car.
I had always thought that the poor in America at least are not hungry. I'd also thought that all living places came with kitchens, but they don't. It costs more for food when you can't cook your own. I've cooked using just a large toaster oven and a hot plate, but I had a refrigerator and didn't have to fit everything on a dresser.
I had always thought that even if you start with a minimum wage job, you can move up as time goes by. She mentions one person who started at $7.00 an hour and two years later was up to $7.45. Yee-haw.
People always talk about emergency funds and how you should have six or even twelve months of expenses saved. The general idea is that you might get laid off and it might take a while to find a new job. And since this amount is so huge, it will also be enough to cover other emergencies like having your car break down or having to take a plane flight for a funeral.
But one thing that's really important is always having enough money that you can pay the deposit and first-month's rent somewhere. The places that don't require this charge more over the long term.
**
After reading this book, my house feels very spacious and my job very cushy.
Then I said something that I have since had many opportunities to regret: "Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism--you know, go out there and try it for themselves." I meant someone much younger than myself, some hungry neophyte journalist with time on her hands.And so she spends three months in three towns, trying to see if can house and feed herself on the highest unskilled wages she can get.
I am a big sucker for this Black Like Me sort of book where some sort of clueless person goes somewhere completely alien and then tells us all about it so that we can learn the easy way from the comfort of our own homes. This is why I got a degree in sociology, after all, and why I never became a sociologist (these most interesting studies are too scary).
The book starts very well. It's so well written, you want to read it aloud. She's interesting and funny and not afraid to use big words.
Still, when I wake at 4 A.M. in my own cold sweat, I am not thinking about the writing deadlines I'm neglecting; I'm thinking of the table where I screwed up the order and one of the kids didn't get his kiddie meal until the rest of the family had moved on to the Key lime pies. That's the other powerful motivation--the customers, or "patients," as I can't help thinking of them on account of the mysterious vulnerability that seems to have left them temporarily unable to feed themselves.Then she gets a job with a housecleaning service. There is no health insurance, only the advice to "work through it." One of her very thin, very hungry co-works trips and sprains her ankle and insists on working through it. That's the last straw for her. She heads into the territories of paranoia and socialism--not as bad as Upton Sinclair at the end of The Jungle, but then she only waits half-way through the book to do it instead of 80% of the way through.
Still, she makes some good observations. She finds jobs, finds housing, and gets tired. She bursts some of my beliefs.
The title, Nickel and Dimed is a poor title. She doesn't talk much about nickels and dimes. The main problem was rent. She never quite could afford the barely acceptable places she found except once when she was able to hang on to two jobs. She talked to her co-workers, hoping that they would have secret skills, but they didn't. They lived with parents, grown children, or lovers or lived in their car.
I had always thought that the poor in America at least are not hungry. I'd also thought that all living places came with kitchens, but they don't. It costs more for food when you can't cook your own. I've cooked using just a large toaster oven and a hot plate, but I had a refrigerator and didn't have to fit everything on a dresser.
I had always thought that even if you start with a minimum wage job, you can move up as time goes by. She mentions one person who started at $7.00 an hour and two years later was up to $7.45. Yee-haw.
People always talk about emergency funds and how you should have six or even twelve months of expenses saved. The general idea is that you might get laid off and it might take a while to find a new job. And since this amount is so huge, it will also be enough to cover other emergencies like having your car break down or having to take a plane flight for a funeral.
But one thing that's really important is always having enough money that you can pay the deposit and first-month's rent somewhere. The places that don't require this charge more over the long term.
**
After reading this book, my house feels very spacious and my job very cushy.
