October 2001 - VOLUME 22 - NUMBER 10
An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich
B arbara Ehrenreich is the author of a number of books, including Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Blood Rites and The Worst Years of Our Lives. In Nickel and Dimed, she reports on her experiences trying to live on the income she earned while working at various entry-level jobs.
I had to struggle to learn every job. It wasn�t easy. I was prepared to work hard physically, but I was not prepared for how much I had to struggle to learn these jobs. In some it was quite overwhelming, like the Wal-Mart job. |
Multinational Monitor: What kind of groundrules did you impose
upon yourself for the project that resulted in your book? MM: In the book, housing emerges as a central concern. In the Twin Cities area, I could find nothing affordable. I discovered
there and in Portland, Maine that its the lucky people who can get
into a trailer park. Trailers are high-rent. For example, it costs $625
a month to rent a one-person trailer in the area that serves the Key West
hotel industry. In Maine and Minnesota, I didnt find anything less
than $800 a month. I found that people ended up in residential hotels, which I guess are
okay if you dont mind living in one little room with a kitchenette.
Im speaking now of families for me that wasnt
a problem. But some of those places were appalling, and extremely expensive.
Like the creepy one I lived in for a while in Minnesota, which charged
$250 a week. That was more than I was earning. It was filthy and unsafe
and didnt have a kitchenette or even a microwave or a fridge. MM: If you had stayed in these cities longer than a month, could
you have found more permanent arrangements that would have been cheaper? MM: Did your co-workers also have these kind of temporary housing
arrangements? MM: How did housing arrangements limit your food alternatives? MM: Whats the cost of that? MM: Would you go hungry at times? MM: What was the range of jobs that you did during this stint? I had to struggle to learn every job. It wasnt easy. I was prepared
to work hard physically, but I was not prepared for how much I had to
struggle to learn these jobs. In some it was quite overwhelming, like the Wal-Mart job. I was in ladies wear. Its a very hard job, because thats where things are constantly taken off the shelves and racks and tried on or just dumped on the floor. My job was to constantly return them to their exact places, by size, color, style, etc. That meant memorizing the exact location of hundreds of items. I cant describe to you how difficult that was. The Jordache clam-diggers with the embroidered fringe where do they go? Hundreds of items like that. Every few days those items would be rotated around to new locations because thats part of retailing. You dont have everything in the same location, because customers return and they want to be surprised. So there was not a lot of daydreaming time in these jobs. It was all
hard. Thats why I no longer use the word unskilled to
describe any job. MM: None of the jobs you did were construction work, but you encountered
real physical challenges and potential for injury. At first, I was pretty proud of myself for keeping up with everyone else.
A lot of them were a lot younger than me. I could carry the buckets and
the backpack vacuum cleaner. But then I began to realize that I shouldnt
be so proud, because the only reason I was so strong and in such good
shape was because I hadnt done it for long. Even women who had been
doing it for a few months had some sort of injury back or
knee or repetitive stress injuries, such as in their scrubbing arms. MM: How did the employers respond to injuries? During that time, hed lecture us on themes like, working
through it. Dont call in with a migraine. Take a couple of
Excedrin. Whatever it is, you could work through it. That was one place
where I broke my rule about always being a good and obedient and cheerful
worker. I blew up at this boss. He was saying this to a young woman who
had really hurt herself on the job. MM: How did the employees respond when they were injured? I said, Weve got to get you to an emergency room. This is
ridiculous, we cant go on to the next house. The other two
women on the team looked at me blankly. The one who was hurt was ambivalent. She was a team leader that day.
She really wanted to work. She couldnt afford to lose a few hours
of work. She would not be paid if we had gone to get medical help. The
other question that hadnt entered my middle-class mind was who would
pay if we went to an emergency room. I think that question was very much
on her mind. I lost the argument entirely, and she ended up hopping around on one
foot cleaning some rich persons bathrooms. I felt as helpless as
I have ever felt in my life. I knew this was wrong. I tried all kinds
of things. I told her to let me do her work for the day and sit down.
She refused. She couldnt afford the time off, and she was under
pressure from her husband not to take time off. MM: Who would have paid for medical coverage? What kind of insurance
was available at the jobs you had? MM: One of the interesting themes in the book is the concept of
time. Leaving aside the time on the job, how much time do the people in
entry-level positions have to do what they want with the rest of their
lives? My life was a little odd. If I was working an eight or nine-hour shift,
I still had to go home and make my notes for the day on my laptop. Other people very frequently went home to children that needed attention,
or to their own houses that needed cleaning, that sort of thing. I didnt get a sense that people had a lot of leisure time. Just
from conversations with people, very few were talking about fun things
they did on the weekend. Movies were not mentioned. Weirdly enough, not
even television was mentioned. Shopping was certainly not a recreational
activity. MM: What about the issue of time on the job, and the struggle for
control over time between employees and employers? My typical shift was nine hours. There was a one-hour dinner break, because
this was an evening shift, and two 10-minute breaks one before
and one after the dinner break. You had to walk all the way to the back
of the store and punch out on the time clock for your 10-minute break.
Then you had to punch back in. They were watching that closely. I actually
engaged in time theft, in that I would go to the ladies room on my way
to punch out. I dont know what problems would have ensued if I had
been detected. That ten minutes was a big deal. For a lot of people, that was time to
call home and see how the kids were doing. They had pay phones in the
back of the store, and people had to hope that one would be free. I had a very strong desire to get out of doors. Nine hours is a long
time to spend in a fluorescent-lit, stale-air atmosphere. You couldnt just stand in front of the store. They had a fenced-off
area that the smokers could go to. You could sit back there
there was a picnic table and so on. It was very important to be able to
sit down. You had been on your feet for hours. I even begrudged the 75
seconds that it took me to walk outside from where I punched out. I wanted
to be outdoors and off my feet. I needed to drink something. You dont
even drink water when youre working. Sometimes I needed a snack
to keep going. So you had all these things you had to do in your 10 minutes.
That was also my big occasion to talk with people from other departments,
which was important and interesting to me as a journalist, because break-time
is the only time to talk. MM: What were your relationships like with your supervisors? But the person above her was an asshole. He was a guy in his mid-twenties
who delighted in exerting his authority. He was constantly calling us
together for absolutely useless meetings. A lot of employees wouldnt
even bother going, even though it was said to be mandatory. People would
just sneer, Okay you can go, Barb, if you want to go. The
meetings were to give some kind of lecture or remind us of some rule.
In the restaurants, there were good supervisors who were not paid a lot
themselves maybe $20,000 a year. Some of them work very hard
and understand that their role is to pitch in if we were short-handed.
A manager at a restaurant should be able to cook or serve or do many other
things if necessary to provide backup. Others didnt see themselves that way and thought that their role
was to sit in a booth with their feet up and watch us. Some of them were
rude and harassing and abusive. I remember one manager who put her face
right up to mine and yelled at me about how I wasnt being fast enough
and I was talking to the customers too much. She was also really rude
to the immigrant dishwashers. MM: At Wal-Mart what did you find out about the Wal-Mart
family? Its very cult-like. Theres a lot of talk about how this is
one big family and how important you, the associate, are. There are lots
of messages from beyond the grave of Sam Walton preserved in videotape,
who exhorted us to new peaks of retail enthusiasm. A lot of emphasis is put on smiling and going up to customers and speaking
to them, which I found on day one you dont do, because you dont
have the time. Also, the customers get annoyed if you do it. MM: But generally, you didnt find that employees internalized
the idea of family? MM: At Wal-Mart and some of the other employers you encountered
drug testing and personality tests. What was the purpose of that? The personality tests are a joke. Anybody who was both literate and reasonably
hypocritical could pass them. A question you encounter again and again,
for example, is the proposition, In the last year I have stolen
(check dollar amount below) worth of goods from my employers. Nobodys
going to put down $55 or whatever. My theory is that the purpose of these tests is to send a message to
the worker that Look, we own you, we control you, youll have
no secrets from us. MM: To what extent are people working in support of each other
or in solidarity, and to what extent do they work against each other? One of the things that made me work harder than I might have otherwise
was the fear of letting down the people I was working with. If you dont
hold up your end, someone else was going to have to do it, and that puts
a lot of psychological pressure on you to do your best. I saw examples of solidarity in small ways people looking
out for each other, warning each other about the particular manager on
duty, or covering for each other when someone wanted to sneak off for
a bathroom break. I was also disappointed at times. In that confrontation I had with the
housecleaning boss, my two other co-workers didnt seem to be behind
me in doing something for the woman who was hurt. They just kind of were
ready to go back to work. What is that about? It could be some kind of
regional cultural thing about rural white people in Maine. I dont
know. But on the whole, apart from the fact that there are intimate frictions
that develop on any job, you know that you depend on each other. That
kind of built-in solidarity could be the basis for confronting management
and demanding a better break. MM: Everything would seem to point to the interests of these workers
in joining together formally in unions, or at least informally to stand
up to some of the abuses you experienced. But it doesnt seem to
happen. What is the explanation for that? I always thought that these jobs werent worth taking any abuse that you could walk down the street and get another, which was certainly true between 1998 and 2000 when I was doing this. But although these jobs dont pay much, what I came to appreciate is that to change jobs is to lose at least two weeks pay. That could be a crippling blow. |
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There was health insurance available at almost all these jobs, but most of the people I talked to didnt bother taking it because the employee contribution was too high. | ||
The more highly-organized employers like Wal-Mart are watching your time down to an interval thats probably less than a minute. They warn you in the beginning during your orientation about time theft meaning time when youre doing anything other than working. | The workplace is a totalitarian setting. Its an atmosphere of fear. You can be fired at will in the American workplace, unless it is unionized or you have a contract. You can be fired because you have a funny look on your face. You can certainly be fired for being a troublemaker and, although its completely illegal, people are fired all the time for union activity. |