When Sam Meets Barbara

For the last few years, students at hundreds of U.S. college campuses have been assigned “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America,” social critic Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 bestseller about her undercover stints as a minimum-wage worker in three cities and the grueling life of the working poor. But last month, when the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill put the book on a required summer reading list for incoming freshmen (with group discussions to be held later), outrage ensued.

State legislators suggested that the university was more interested in “liberal indoctrination” than education. In interviews, members of a vocal student group, “The Committee for a Better Carolina,” blasted Ehrenreich as a “renowned socialist” and ran an $8,000 full-page student-newspaper ad that denounced the book as a “Marxist rant.”

The school was “intellectually dishonest” in offering students information about only “one side” of the U.S. economy, activist senior Michael McKnight told a local reporter. He and others seemed particularly upset by Ehrenreich’s grim description of her time at a Minneapolis Wal-Mart. A smarter university, the students said, would have balanced “Nickel and Dimed’s” negativity by pairing it with a required book that had something more positive to say about free enterprise. They suggested Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton’s 1992 autobiography, “Made in America: My Story.”

The suggestion is brilliant. Simultaneously reading Ehrenreich’s descriptions of her time working at Wal-Mart and Walton’s memoir is extremely educational, though perhaps not in the way the “Better Carolina” group intended -- it’s like examining a general’s grandiose war strategy, with running commentary by one of the grunts who actually did the fighting.

Walton: “More than anything [our story] proves there’s absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they’re given the opportunity and the encouragement and the incentive to do their best.”

Ehrenreich: “When Isabelle praises my work a second time(!), I take the opportunity to say I really appreciate her encouragement, but I can’t afford to live on $7 an hour, and how does she do it? The answer is that she lives with her grown daughter, who also works, plus the fact that she’s worked here two years, during which her pay has shot up to $7.75 an hour. She counsels patience: It could happen to me.”

Walton: “It’s sort of a ‘whistle while you work’ philosophy, and we not only have a heck of a good time with it, we work better because of it. “

Ehrenreich: “We are all ‘ladies’ here [in the women’s-wear section], forbidden, by storewide rule, to raise our voices or cuss.”

Walton: “If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores.”

Ehrenreich: “[Assistant manager] Howard shows up and announces that there are no reductions and no employee discounts on clearanced items. Those are the rules. Alyssa looks crushed, and I tell her, when Howard’s out of sight, that there’s something wrong when you’re not paid enough to buy a Wal-Mart shirt, a clearanced Wal-Mart shirt with a stain on it. ‘I hear you,’ she says, and admits Wal-Mart isn’t working for her either, if the goal is to make a living.”

Walton: “Take care of your people, treat them well, involve them, and you won’t spend all your time and money hiring labor lawyers to fight the unions.”

Ehrenreich: “Suddenly [a co-worker] dives behind the rack that separates the place where we’re standing, in the Jordache/No Boundaries section, from the Faded Glory region.... ‘Howard,’ she whispers. ‘Didn’t you see him come by? We’re not allowed to talk to each other, you know.’ ”

Walton: “For the last 10 years ... we have averaged sales of, say, $13 billion a year. So that’s about $130 billion in sales. If we only saved our customers 10% over what they would be paying if we weren’t there -- and I think that’s very conservative -- that would be $13 billion we saved them.... The truth is that Wal-Mart has been a powerful force for improving the standard of living in our mostly rural trade areas, and our customers recognize it.”

Ehrenreich: “I do make one last attempt [to find affordable housing], seeking help one morning at a charitable agency ... At one point toward the end of the interview, the [agency] lady had apologized for forgetting almost everything I said about myself ... She was mixing me up with someone else who worked at Wal-Mart, she explained, someone who had been in just a few days ago.”

My advice to the Committee for a Better Carolina: Be careful what you ask for. A reading requirement that exposes just how different are the views from the top and bottom of a corporation like Wal-Mart might get students asking even more uncomfortable questions -- such as why the company, the nation’s largest private employer with close to 1 million workers, is being investigated by California labor officials for allegedly failing to comply with state wage and hour laws. Or why Wal-Mart is being sued here for alleged widespread sexual discrimination. Or why it was convicted by an Oregon jury of having managers who forced employees to work unpaid hours to avoid overtime. Or why it has been sued in 28 other states on similar grounds. (In Colorado, one suit was reportedly settled for $50 million.)

The committee might even start thinking about inequality closer to home. Not long after the anti-Ehrenreich forces held a press conference, a group of students and legislators held one in support of her book. With them were housekeepers from several North Carolina universities and state agencies, who are in the midst of their own labor struggle. “Ask us,” said the stickers they wore, “about being Nickel and Dimed.”

Now there’s a radical notion.