Calling Norma Rae

One way to measure the difference between the prosperous 1980s and the prosperous 1990s is to note how anecdotal evidence found itself roundly abused in each. In the sneering junk-bond ‘80s, the political sketch of choice focused on the undeserving poor, “the welfare queen” with a different Cadillac for each of her illegitimate brood. (Net effect: draconian cuts in social programs and a larger slice of the pie going to the wealthy.) Not so in the no-muss ‘90s, whose tidy New Economy homilies often featured the deserving rich--the insight, daring and the grueling hours of the entrepreneur, followed by the inevitable Croesus-like payoff. (Net effect: cuts in social programs, cleverly disguised as humane, and a larger slice of the pie going to the wealthy.)

Every so often the cheapening effect of rumor gets put on the defensive by the inconvenient truth. One such moment may have arrived with the publication of Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed.” Over lunch with her editor at Harper’s a couple of years ago, Ehrenreich mused out loud about how “[s]omeone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism” and discover what it is really like to be not a welfare cheat or the winner in a dot-com lottery but a working American at the low end of the wage scale.

No sooner are the words out of her mouth than Ehrenreich finds herself a kind of agitprop George Plimpton, in successive months waiting tables in the Florida Keys, cleaning houses in Maine and working the Kathie Lee collection at a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis. Her goal is to see if the 4 million women about to enter the labor market via welfare reform can survive on near-minimum wage salaries. To that end, Ehrenreich drops out of her life as a sociologist-essayist of upper-middle-class means, out of the ranks of the well-connected and the well-to-do--and into the universe of the working poor.

She might as well have airdropped into Bhutan. Images of gangstas, of cubicle jockeys in their cat glasses, of stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors and of course the nightly squadrons of opinionati on TV give Americans a rather skewed vision of themselves; so much so that their own labor force is like an alien land. The actual numbers are thus: Nearly 30% of our labor force works for less than eight bucks an hour. About 60% make less than $14 an hour. Other than an occasional cameo in a political bromide, those who we might classify as “bargain labor”--the people who clean up and lift heavy things, whose work is dull, repetitive and necessary--remain invisible.

“Nickel and Dimed” loosely follows in the tradition of Jacob Riis, Charles Dickens and George Orwell, but it is a lighter, less outraged exercise, and we ought to immediately acknowledge why: The reality confronted is less severe. When Orwell wrote “Road to Wigan Pier” in the late ‘30s, he was documenting savage privation on a mass scale among Northern English coal miners. Ehrenreich’s experiences can best be summed up as indignity--all the little soul-degrading privations of being poor while working like an ox in the world’s richest country. “There are no secret economies that nourish the poor,” she tells us, “on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can’t put up the two months’ rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for a week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store.”

On the niggardly compensation from each of her employers, Ehrenreich discovers that no amount of creative frugality can make ends meet, so she adds second jobs, constantly looks for cheaper digs and even ends up taking charitable handouts from a food bank. Co-workers are apparently doing no better: They live in cars or dry-docked boats, stay on with abusive boyfriends, while one or two lucky ones cadge off parents. Nobody seems to have health insurance to speak of, while almost everyone is in a persistent state of mild disrepair, or worse. Ehrenreich herself subsists mostly on fast food and aspirin, her fiftysomething body breaking down under the strain of multiple jobs.

So it may come as a surprise that this book is thoroughly enjoyable, written with an affable, up-your-nose brio throughout. Ehrenreich is a superb and relaxed stylist, and she has a tremendous sense of rueful humor, especially when it comes to the evils of middle-management, absentee own-ership and all the little self-consecrating bourgeois touches gracing the homes she sterilizes, inch-by-square-inch, as a maid in Maine. Social critics often sting but just as often lack real antiseptic power. Not so Ehrenreich, an old-time southpaw, a leftie without a trace of the apologetic squeak that’s recently crept into the voice of the left--and crept in while conservatives have stertorously monopolized phrases like “civilized society.” Let’s indeed pick up that standard, Ehrenreich tells us, rescue it from bogeys like squeegee men or outlandish art, and start applying it to reality: “Most civilized nations compensate for the inadequacy of wages,” she reminds us, while the United States “leaves its citizens to fend for themselves,” to find affordable housing and cobble together a living wage, a situation that only promises to deteriorate as the welfare bill kicks in over the coming years.

In the end, one is grateful for the whiffs of unreconstructed Marxism and pot smoke drifting through “Nickel and Dimed,” if only for rescuing the author from the vast, conciliatory middle-muddle afflicting too much political discourse. (A holdover presumably from her sit-in days, Ehrenreich will even wave around the occasional loaded gun: “Abortion is wasted on the unborn,” she thinks to herself as rug rats bring mayhem into her section of Wal-Mart.) While she’s often spiky, she’s rarely angry: Her hillbilly roots, a copper miner father and a husband who was a warehouse coolie when they met allow Ehrenreich to write with an easy, non-patronizing authority about the lives of blue-collar workers.

That said, Ehrenreich has always had a troubled heart, as if she can never let herself fully adjust to the cushy life of the columnist-prof, jetting into conferences, trafficking in cultural capital. She tells us she would never hire someone to clean her own house, because “this is just not the kind of relationship I want to have with another human being.” In a similar vein, Ehrenreich suggested at the end of the otherwise tremendous “Fear of Falling,” her Christopher Lasch-style genealogy of the anxious professional classes, that eventually everyone ought to be part of the vast professional middle class. Say again? It’s as if the division of labor itself, with its unequal distribution of prestige, is too painful for her to contemplate.

This same problem burdened Marx, who could never decide whether subsistence farming or worker-owned factories were the key to human dignity; and a related ambivalence has started to creep up on recent social criticism in America. Eric Schlosser’s fine “Fast Food Nation” wavered between a pragmatic meliorism, devoted to reforming the meatpacking and restaurant industry, and a visionary despair over the conditions of modern American life. Should we improve McDonald’s--or raze every last one? Should we treat maids better, pay them more, provide adequate benefits? Or should we not hire them at all, because dividing up work, and thus social esteem, in this way is inherently degrading?

Looking back on his time as a young pauper in France, Hemingway once wrote, “Work could cure almost anything, I believed then, and I believe now.” Where in America now do we find work with an intimate purpose, Ehrenreich seems to be asking, between our workaholic professionals and the support staff they seem so content to abuse or ignore? “Nickel and Dimed” raises the specter of the Big Question, even though, in the end, Ehrenreich falls back on her pet theme: that the professional middle classes have acted as political breakwaters for the rich in this country, aspiring to and identifying with their lifestyle and thus abandoning the interests of their fellow workers, the blue-collar poor. And for now, this is inspiring enough: As she concludes, the working poor are “the major philanthropists in our society.” The day will come when “they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth .... But the sky will not fall, and we shall all be better off for it in the end.”