23 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America BARBARA EHRENREICH Major changes in welfare legislation in 1996 eliminated cash payments to millions of America's poor, requiring them to find employment in order to support them- selves and their families. This change in the law, though popular, raised questions for many people, including Barbara Ehrenreich, who had doubts about the "uplift- ing benefits" of working in the low-wage economy. One of America's most popular sociological writers, Ehrenreich traveled to the heart of the low-wage economy to see firsthand what it has to offer. t the beginning of June 1998 I leave behind everything that normally Asoothes the ego and sustains the body-home, career, companion, repu- tation, ATM card-for a plunge into the low-wage workforce. There, I become another, occupationally much diminished "Barbara Ehrenreich"-depicted on job-application forms as a divorced homemaker whose sole work experi- ence consists of housekeeping in a few private homes. I am terrified, at the beginning, of being unmasked for what I am: a middle-class journalist set- ting out to explore the world that welfare mothers are entering, at the rate of approximately 50,000 a month, as welfare reform* kicks in. Happily, though, my fears turn out to be entirely unwarranted: during a month of poverty and toil, my name goes unnoticed and for the most part unuttered. In this parallel universe where my father never got out of the mines and I never got through college, I am "baby," "honey," "blondie," and, most commonly, "girl.' My first task is to find a place to live. I figure that if I can earn $7 an hour- which, from the want ads, seems doable-I can afford to spend $500 on rent, or maybe, with severe economies, $600. In the Key West area, where I live, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes-like the one, a pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, and, by way of diversion, only the challenge of evading the landlord's Doberman pinscher. The big problem with this place, though, is the rent, which at $675 a month is well beyond my reach. All right, *On the basis of 1996 federal legislation, states were required to adopt new guidelines for providing social assistance. The most important program providing cash assistance, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), was eliminated and replaced by requirements that poor adults work or participate in job training in order to quality for cash assistance. [Editor's note].246 . BARBARA EHRENREICH Nickel and Dimed _ 247 Key West is expensive. But so is New York City, or the Bay Area, or Jack- or Jack- But is it really possible to make a living on the kinds of jobs currently avail- son Hole, or Telluride, or Boston, or any other place where tourists and the and the able to unskilled people? Mathematically, the answer is no, as can be shown wealthy compete for living space with the people who clean their toilets and ilets and by taking $6 to $7 an hour, perhaps subtracting a dollar or two an hour for fry their hash browns.' Still, it is a shock to realize that "trailer trash" has ash" has child care, multiplying by 160 hours a month, and comparing the result to the become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to. prevailing rents. According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, for So I decide to make the common trade-off between affordability and con- and con- example, in 1998 it took, on average nationwide, an hourly wage of $8.89 to venience, and go for a $500-a-month efficiency thirty miles up a two-lane wo-lane afford a one-bedroom apartment, and the Preamble Center for Public Policy highway from the employment opportunities of Key West, meaning forty-five orty-five estimates that the odds against a typical welfare recipient's landing a job at minutes if there's no road construction and I don't get caught behind some d some such a "living wage" are about 97 to 1. If these numbers are right, low-wage sun-dazed Canadian tourists. I hate the drive, along a roadside studded with led with work is not a solution to poverty and possibly not even to homelessness. white crosses commemorating the more effective head-on collisions, but it's but it's It may seem excessive to put this proposition to an experimental test. As a sweet little place-a cabin, more or less, set in the swampy backyard of the d of the certain family members keep unhelpfully reminding me, the viability of low- converted mobile home where my landlord, an affable TV repairman, lives an, lives wage work could be tested, after a fashion, without ever leaving my study. I with his bartender girlfriend. Anthropologically speaking, a bustling trailer g trailer could just pay myself $7 an hour for eight hours a day, charge myself for room park would be preferable, but here I have a gleaming white floor and a firm d a firm and board, and total up the numbers after a month. Why leave the people and mattress, and the few resident bugs are easily vanquished. work that I love? But I am an experimental scientist by training. In that busi- Besides, I am not doing this for the anthropology. My aim is nothing so hing so ness, you don't just sit at a desk and theorize; you plunge into the everyday mistily subjective as to "experience poverty" or find out how it "really feels" to feels" to chaos of nature, where surprises lurk in the most mundane measurements. be a long-term low-wage worker. I've had enough unchosen encounters with ers with Maybe, when I got into it, I would discover some hidden economies in the poverty and the world of low-wage work to know it's not a place you want u want world of the low-wage worker. After all, if 30 percent of the workforce toils to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear. And with all with all for less than $8 an hour, according to the EPI, they may have found some my real-life assets-bank account, IRA, health insurance, multiroom home- home- tricks as yet unknown to me. Maybe-who knows?-I would even be able to waiting indulgently in the background, I am, of course, thoroughly insulated sulated detect in myself the bracing psychological effects of getting out of the house, from the terrors that afflict the genuinely poor. as promised by the welfare wonks at places like the Heritage Foundation. Or, No, this is a purely objective, scientific sort of mission. The humanitarian itarian on the other hand, maybe there would be unexpected costs-physical, mental, rationale for welfare reform-as opposed to the more punitive and stingy stingy or financial-to throw off all my calculations. Ideally, I should do this with impulses that may actually have motivated it-is that work will lift poor women women two small children in tow, that being the welfare average, but mine are grown out of poverty while simultaneously inflating their self-esteem and hence their ce their and no one is willing to lend me theirs for a month-long vacation in penury. future value in the labor market. Thus, whatever the hassles involved in find- n find- So this is not the perfect experiment, just a test of the best possible case: an ing child care, transportation, etc., the transition from welfare to work will rk will unencumbered woman, smart and even strong, attempting to live more or less end happily, in greater prosperity for all. Now there are many problems with s with off the land. this comforting prediction, such as the fact that the economy will inevitably vitably On the morning of my first full day of job searching, I take a red pen to the undergo a downturn, eliminating many jobs. Even without a downturn, the rn, the want ads, which are suspiciously numerous. Everyone in Key West's boom- influx of a million former welfare recipients into the low-wage labor market market ing "hospitality industry" seems to be looking for someone like me-trainable, could depress wages by as much as 11.9 percent, according to the Economic onomic flexible, and with suitably humble expectations as to pay. I know I possess Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington, D.C. certain traits that might be advantageous-I'm white and, I like to think, well- spoken and poised-but I decide on two rules: One, I cannot use any skills derived from my education or usual work-not that there are a lot of want ads for satirical essayists anyway. Two, I have to take the best-paid job that 1. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the "fair-market rent" cet rent" five bor- is offered me and of course do my best to hold it[.] * * * In addition, I rule for an efficiency is $551 here in Monroe Counly, Florida. A comparable rent in the five bor- oughs of New York City is $704; in San Francisco, $713; and in the heart of Silicon Valley, 1 Valley, out various occupations for one reason or another: Hotel front-desk clerk, for $808. The fair-market rent for an area is defined as the amount that would be needed to pay d to pay example, which to my surprise is regarded as unskilled and pays around $7 an rent plus utilities for "privately owned, decent, safe, and sanitary rental housing of a modest modest hour, gets eliminated because it involves standing in one spot for eight hours a (non-luxury) nature with suitable amenities." day. Waitressing is similarly something I'd like to avoid, because I rememberit leaving me bone tired when I was eighteen, and I'm decades of varicosities and-back pain beyond that now. Telemarketing, one of the rst refuges of the suddenly indigent, can be dismissed on grounds of personality. This leaves , certain supermarket jobs, such'as deli clerk, or housekeeping in Key West's thousands of hotel and guest rooms. Housekeeping is especially appealing, for reasons both atavistic and practical: it's what my mother did before I came along, and it can't be too different from what I've been doing part-time, in my ' own home, all my life. So I put on what I take to be a respectil-looking outt of ironed Bermuda shorts and scoopedneck Tshirt and set out for a tour of the local hotels and I supermarkets. Best Western, Econo Lodge, and HoJo's all let me ll out appli , cation forms, and these are, to my relief, interested in little more than whethe I am a legal resident of the United States and have committed any felonies , My next stop is Winn-Dixie, the supermarket, which turns out to have a par ticularly onerous application process, featuring a fteen-minute \"interview' by computer since, apparently, no human on the premises is deemed capabl of representing the corporate point of view. I am conducted to a large room decorated with posters illustrating how to look \"professional\" (it helps to be white and, if female, permed) and warning of the slick promises that union V organizers might try to tempt me with. The interview is multiple choice: Do I have anything, such as childcare problems, that might make it hard for me ' to get to work on time? Do I think safety on the job is the responsibility 0 management? Then, popping up cunningly out of the blue: How many dollars' worth of stolen goods have I purchased in the last year? Would I turn in a fel- low employee if I caught him stealing? Finally, \"Are you an honest person?\" Apparently, I ace the interview, because I am told that all I have to do is show up in some doctor's ofce tomorrow for a urine test. This seems to be a fairly general rule: if you want to stack Cheerio boxes or vacuum hotel rooms * * * you have to be willing to squat down and pee in front of some health worker (who has no doubt had to do the same thing herself). The wages Winn- Dixie is offering$6 and a couple of dimes to start withare not enough, I decide, to compensate for this indignity.2 I lunch at Wendy's, where $4.99 gets you unlimited rells at the Mexican part of the Superbar, a comforting surfeit of refried beans and \"cheese sauce." A teenage employee, seeing me studying the want ads, kindly offers me an application form, which I ll out, though here, too, the pay is just $6 and change 2. According to the Monthly LaborReview (November 1996), 28 percent of work sites sur- veyed in the service industry conduct drug tests (corporate workplaces have much higher rates), and the incidence of testing has risen markedly since the Eighties. The rate of testing is highest in the South (56 percent of work sites polled), with the Midwest in second place (50 percent). The drug most likely to be detectedmarijuana, which can be detected in urine for weeksis also the most innocuous, while heroin and cocaine are generally unde- tectable three days after use. icosities ,ml hour. Then it's off for a round of the locally owned inns and guesthouses. es of the , At \"The Palms," let's call it, a bouncy. manager actually takes me around to , is leaves gee the rooms and meet the existing housekeepers, who, I note with satisfac y West's tion, look pretty much like mefadedexhippie types in shorts with longxhair ing, for pulled back in braids. Mostly, though, no one speaks to me or even looks at a I came me except to proffer an application form. At my last stop, a palatial B&B, I la, in my ' wait twenty minutes to meet \"Max," only to be told that there are no jobs now but there should be one soon, since \"nobody lasts more than a couple weeks.\" (Because none of the people I talked to knew I was a reporter, I have changed heir names to protect their privacy and, in some cases perhaps, their jobs.) Three days go by like this, and, to my chagrin, no one out of the approzdmately wenty places I've applied calls me for an interview. I had been vain enough to worry about coming across as too educated for the jobs I sought, but no one even seems interested in nding out how overqualied I am. Only later will I eaiize that the want ads are not a reliable measure of the actual jobs available at any particular time. They are, as I should have guessed from Max's comment, ' the employers' insurance policy against the relentless turnover of the lowwage work force. Most of the big hotels run ads almost continually, just to build a sup- ly of applicants to replace the current workers as they drift away or are red, so nding a job is just a matter of being at the right place at the right time and exible enough to take whatever is being offered that day. This nally happens to me at one of the big discount hotel chains, where I go, as usual, for house- eeping and am sent, instead, to try out as a waitress at the attached \"family maul-ant," a dismal spot with a counter and about thirty tables that looks out on a parking garage and features such tempting fare as \"Pollish [sic] sausage and BBQ sauce\" on Fi-degree days. Phillip, the dapper young West Indian who 5 to be a ,mtroduces himself as the manager, interviews me with about as much enthusi- 21 rooms - asm as if he were a clerk processing me for Medicare, the principal questions 3 health . being what shis can I work and when can I start. I mutter something about s W'mn , ' being woefully out of practice as a waitress, but he's already on to the uniform: enough, ' I'm to show up tomorrow wearing black slacks and black shoes; he'll provide the : rust-colored polo shirt with hearthside embroidered on it, though I might want _ to wear my own shirt to get to work, ha ha. At the word \"tomorrow,\" something between fear and indignation rises in my chest. I want to say, \"Thank you for ' your time, air, but this is just an experiment, you know, not my actual life.\" 5 So begins my career at the Hearthside, I shall call it, one small prot cen- ' ter within a global discount hotel chain, where for two weeks I work from 2:00 till 10:00 p.m. for $2.43 an hour plus tips.\" In some futile bid for gentility, Iermuda itels and at appli- whether felonies. re a par- :erview" capable ge room ps to be it union oice: Do i for me bility of dollars' in a fel- ."son?\" to do is viexican sauce.\" 5 me an change sites sur- i higher _ )ftesiing 3. According to the-Fair Labor Standards Act, employers are not required to pay "tipped ind place employees," such as restaurant servers, more than $2.13 an hour in direct wages. However, tected in if the sum of tips plus $2.13 an hour falls below the minimum wage, or $5.15 an hour, the lly unde- employer is required to make up the difference. This fact was not mentioned by managers or otherwise publicized at either of the restaurants where I worked. 250 - BARBARA EHRENREICH Nickel and Dimed _ 251 the management has barred employees from using the front door, so my first my first talking about because he managed to pull himself, and us with him, up from day I enter through the kitchen, where a red-faced man with shoulder-length length the mile-deep copper mines of Butte to the leafy suburbs of the Northeast, blond hair is throwing frozen steaks against the wall and yelling, "Fuck this Ick this ascending from boilermakers to martinis before booze beat out ambition. As shit!" "That's just Jack," explains Gail, the wiry middle-aged waitress who is ; who is in most endeavors I have encountered in my life, doing it "better than anyone" assigned to train me. "He's on the rag again -a condition occasioned, in this in this is not a reasonable goal. Still, when I wake up at 4:00 A.M. in my own cold instance, by the fact that the cook on the morning shift had forgotten to thaw to thaw sweat, I am not thinking about the writing deadlines I'm neglecting; I'm think- out the steaks. For the next eight hours, I run after the agile Gail, absorbing sorbing ing about the table whose order I screwed up so that one of the boys didn't bits of instruction along with fragments of personal tragedy. All food must be must be get his kiddie meal until the rest of the family had moved on to their Key Lime rayed, and the reason she's so tired today is that she woke up in a cold sweat d sweat pies. That's the other powerful motivation I hadn't expected-the customers, thinking of her boyfriend, who killed himself recently in an upstate prison. No son. No or "patients," as I can't help thinking of them on account of the mysterious refills on lemonade. And the reason he was in prison is that a few DUIs caught caught vulnerability that seems to have left them temporarily unable to feed them- up with him, that's all, could have happened to anyone. Carry the creamers eamers selves. After a few days at the Hearthside, I feel the service ethic kick in like a to the table in a monkey bowl, never in your hand. And after he was gone she one she shot of oxytocin, the nurturance hormone. The plurality of my customers are spent several months living in her truck, peeing in a plastic pee bottle and tle and hardworking locals-truck drivers, construction workers, even housekeepers reading by candlelight at night, but you can't live in a truck in the summer, ummer, from the attached hotel-and I want them to have the closest to a "fine din- since you need to have the windows down, which means anything can get in, i get in, ing" experience that the grubby circumstances will allow. No "you guys" for from mosquitoes on up. me; everyone over twelve is "sir" or "ma'am." I ply them with iced tea and At least Gail puts to rest any fears I had of appearing overqualified. From i From coffee refills; I return, mid-meal, to inquire how everything is; I doll up their the first day on, I find that of all the things I have left behind, such as home and ime and. salads with chopped raw mushrooms, summer squash slices, or whatever bits identity, what I miss the most is competence. Not that I have ever felt utterly utterly of produce I can find that have survived their sojourn in the cold-storage room competent in the writing business, in which one day's success augurs nothing nothing mold-free. at all for the next. But in my writing life, I at least have some notion of pro- of pro- cedure: do the research, make the outline, rough out a draft, etc. As a server, server, * * * though, I am beset by requests like bees: more iced tea here, ketchup over up over Ten days into it, this is beginning to look like a livable lifestyle. I like Gail, there, a to-go box for table fourteen, and where are the high chairs, anyway? nyway? who is "looking at fifty" but moves so fast she can alight in one place and then Of the twenty-seven tables, up to six are usually mine at any time, though on ugh on another without apparently being anywhere between them. I clown around slow afternoons or if Gail is off, I sometimes have the whole place to myself. myself. with Lionel, the teenage Haitian busboy, and catch a few fragments of con- There is the touch-screen computer-ordering system to master, which is, I ich is, I versation with Joan, the svelte fortyish hostess and militant feminist who is suppose, meant to minimize server-cook contact, but in practice requires equires the only one of us who dares to tell Jack to shut the fuck up. I even warm up constant verbal fine-tuning: "That's gravy on the mashed, okay? None on the on the to Jack when, on a slow night and to make up for a particularly unwarranted meatloaf," and so forth-while the cook scowls as if I were inventing these g these attack on my abilities, or so I imagine, he tells me about his glory days as refinements just to torment him. Plus, something I had forgotten in the years le years a young man at "coronary school"-or do you say "culinary"?-in Brooklyn, since I was eighteen: about a third of a server's job is "side work" that's invis- 's invis- where he dated a knock-out Puerto Rican chick and learned everything there ible to customers-sweeping, scrubbing, slicing, refilling, and restocking. If it ing. If it is to know about food. I finish up at 10:00 or 10:30, depending on how much isn't all done, every little bit of it, you're going to face the 6:00 P.M. dinner rush ier rush side work I've been able to get done during the shift, and cruise home[.] * * * defenseless and probably go down in flames. I screw up dozens of times at the s at the To bed by 1:30 or 2:00, up at 9:00 or 10:00, read for an hour while my uniform beginning, sustained in my shame entirely by Gail's support-"It's okay, baby, y, baby, whirls around in the landlord's washing machine, and then it's another eight everyone does that sometime"-because, to my total surprise and despite the bite the hours spent following Mao's central instruction, as laid out in the Little Red scientific detachment I am doing my best to maintain, I care. Book, which was: Serve the people The whole thing would be a lot easier if I could just skate through it as Lily tas Lily I could drift along like this, in some dreamy proletarian idyll, except for Tomlin in one of her waitress skits, but I was raised by the absurd Booker Booker two things. One is management. If I have kept this subject on the margins T. Washingtonian precept that says: If you're going to do something, do it ig, do it thus far it is because I still flinch to think that I spent all those weeks under well. In fact, "well" isn't good enough by half. Do it better than anyone has one has the surveillance of men (and later women) whose job it was to monitor my ever done it before. Or so said my father, who must have known what he was he was behavior for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. Not that managersNickel and Dimed = 253 252 . BARBARA EHRENREICH and especially "assistant managers" in low-wage settings like this are exactly are exactly ends when Andy, one of the cooks, gets up, muttering about breaking up his the class enemy. In the restaurant business, they are mostly former cooks or er cooks or day off for this almighty bullshit. servers, still capable of pinch-hitting in the kitchen or on the floor, just as in , just as in Just four days later we are suddenly summoned into the kitchen at 3:30 P.M., hotels they are likely to be former clerks, and paid a salary of only about $400 about $400 even though there are live tables on the floor. We all-about ten of us-stand a week. But everyone knows they have crossed over to the other side, which side, which around Phillip, who announces grimly that there has been a report of some is, crudely put, corporate as opposed to human. Cooks want to prepare tasty epare tasty "drug activity" on the night shift and that, as a result, we are now to be a ere for only "drug-free" workplace, meaning that all new hires will be tested, as will pos- meals; servers want to serve them graciously; but managers are there for only one reason-to make sure that money is made for some theoretical entity that entity that sibly current employees on a random basis. I am glad that this part of the exists far away in Chicago or New York, if a corporation can be said to have aid to have kitchen is so dark, because I find myself blushing as hard as if I had been a physical existence at all. Reflecting on her career, Gail tells me ruefully that lefully that caught toking up in the ladies' room myself: I haven't been treated this way- she had sworn, years ago, never to work for a corporation again. "They don't They don't lined up in the corridor, threatened with locker searches, peppered with care- cut you no slack. You give and you give, and they take." lessly aimed accusations-since junior high school. Managers can sit-for hours at a time if they want-but it's their job to heir job to it * * see that no one else ever does, even when there's nothing to do, and this is and this is start drag- The other problem, in addition to the less-than-nurturing management why, for servers, slow times can be as exhausting as rushes. You start drag- ging out each little chore, because if the manager on duty catches you in an you in an style, is that this job shows no sign of being financially viable. You might imag- idle moment, he will give you something far nastier to do. So I wipe, I clean, be, I clean, ine, from a comfortable distance, that people who live, year in and year out, on I consolidate ketchup bottles and recheck the cheesecake supply, even tour even tour $6 to $10 an hour have discovered some survival stratagems unknown to the the tables to make sure the customer evaluation forms are all standing perk- ding perk- middle class. But no. It's not hard to get my co-workers to talk about their liv- ily in their places-wondering all the time how many calories I burn in these rn in these ing situations, because housing, in almost every case, is the principal source of strictly theatrical exercises. When, on a particularly dead afternoon, Stu finds , Stu finds disruption in their lives, the first thing they fill you in on when they arrive for me glancing at a USA Today a customer has left behind, he assigns me to vac- me to vac- their shifts. After a week, I have compiled the following survey uum the entire floor with the broken vacuum cleaner that has a handle only andle only Gail is sharing a room in a well-known downtown flophouse for which two feet long, and the only way to do that without incurring orthopedic dam- edic dam- she and a roommate pay about $250 a week. Her roommate, a male age is to proceed from spot to spot on your knees. friend, has begun hitting on her, driving her nuts, but the rent would be On my first Friday at the Hearthside there is a "mandatory meeting for all ing for all restaurant employees," which I attend, eager for insight into our overall mar- erall mar- impossible alone. cal twist?) Claude, the Haitian cook, is desperate to get out of the two-room apart- keting strategy and the niche (your basic Ohio cuisine with a tropical twist?) ment he shares with his girlfriend and two other, unrelated, people. As we aim to inhabit. But there is no "we" at this meeting. Phillip, our top man- top man- ager except for an occasional "consultant" sent out by corporate headquar headquar far as I can determine, the other Haitian men (most of whom only speak ers, opens it with a sneer: "The break room-it's disgusting. Butts in the ash- in the ash- Creole) live in similarly crowded situations. Annette, a twenty-year-old server who is six months pregnant and has trays, newspapers lying around, crumbs." This windowless little room, which om, which also houses the time clock for the entire hotel, is where we stash our bags and bags and been abandoned by her boyfriend, lives with her mother, a postal clerk. m is not a Marianne and her boyfriend are paying $ 170 a week for a one-person civilian clothes and take our half-hour meal breaks. But a break room is not a right, he tells us. It can be taken away. We should also know that the lockers e lockers trailer. in the break room and whatever is in them can be searched at any time. Then ime. Then Jack, who is, at $10 an hour, the wealthiest of us, lives in the trailer he comes gossip; there has been gossip; gossip (which seems to mean employ- n employ- owns, paying only the $400-a-month lot fee. ees talking among themselves) must stop. Off-duty employees are henceforth .enceforth The other white cook, Andy, lives on his dry-docked boat, which, as far barred from eating at the restaurant, because "other servers gather around r around as I can tell from his loving descriptions, can't be more than twenty them and gossip." When Phillip has exhausted his agenda of rebukes, Joan kes, Joan feet long. He offers to take me out on it, once it's repaired, but the offer complains about the condition of the ladies' room and I throw in my two bits two bits comes with inquiries as to my marital status, so I do not follow up on it. about the vacuum cleaner. But I don't see any backup coming from my fellow my fellow Tina and her husband are paying $60 a night for a double room in a Days servers, each of whom has subsided into her own personal funk; Gail, my role il, my role Inn. This is because they have no car and the Days Inn is within walk- model, stares sorrowfully at a point six inches from her nose. The meeting meeting ing distance of the Hearthside. When Marianne, one of the breakfast.254 I BARBARA EHRENREICH servers, is tossed out of her trailer for subletting (which is against trailer~park rules), she leaves her boyfriend and moves'in with Tina a her husband. I Joan, who had fooled me with her numerous and tasteful outts (ho esses wear their own cldthes), lives in a van she parks behind a shopping center at night and showers in Tina's motel room. The clothes are from It strikes me, in my middle~class solipsism, that there is gross impro dence in some of these arrangements. When Gail and I are wrapping silve ware in napkins~the only task for which we are permitted to sitshe tells she is thinking of escaping from her roommate by moving into the Days Inn, herself. I am astounded: How can she even think of paying between $40 and, $60 a day? But if I was afraid of sounding like a social worker, I come out ju . sounding like a fool. She squints at me in disbelief, \"And where am I suppos ' to get a month's rent and a month's deposit for an apartment?" I'd been fee ing pretty smug about my $500 efciency, but of course it was made possibl ' only by the $1,300 I had allotted myself for start~up costs when I began in low-wage life: $1,000 for the rst month's rent and deposit, $100 for initi groceries and cash in my pocket, $200 stuffed away for emergencies. In pov-. erty, as in certain propositions in physics, starting conditions are everything. There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; 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 the week ahead. You eat fast food, or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store. If you have no money for health insuranceand the Hearthside's niggardly plan kicks in only after three monthsyou go without routine care or prescription drugs and end up paying the price. 'k** My own situation, when I sit down to assess it after two weeks of work, would not be much better if this were my actual life. The seductive thing about waitressing is that you don't have to wait for payday to feel a fewbills in your pocket, and my tips usually cover meals and gas, plus something left over to stuff into the kitchen drawer I use as a bank. But as the tourist business slows in the summer heat, I sometimes leave work with only $20 in tips (the gross is K . 4. I could nd no statistics on the number of employed people living in cars or vans, but according to the National Coalition for the Homeless's 1997 report \"Myths and Facts About Homelessness," nearly one in ve homeless people (in twenty~nine cities across the nation) is employed in a full- or part-time job. ' work, about i your ver to slows *oss is is, but About scion) Nickel and Dimed I 255 her, but servers share about 15 percent of their tips with the busboys and artenders). With wages included, this amounts to about the minimum wage $5.15 an hour. Although the sum in the drawer is piling up, at the present te of accumulation it will be more than a hundred dollars short of my rent when the end of the month comes around. Nor can I see any expenses to cut. True, I haven't gone the lentil-stew route yet, but that's because I don't have a large cooking pot, pot holders, or a ladle to stir with (which cost about $30 \"at Kmart, less at thrift stores), not to mention onions, carrots, and the indis- pensable bay leaf. I do make my lunch almost every dayusually some slow- burning, highprotein combo like frozen chicken patties With melted cheese on top and canned pinto beans on the side. Dinner is at the Hearthmde, which offers its employees a choice of BLT, sh sandwich, or hamburger tor only $2. The burger lasts longest, especially if it's heaped With gut-puckering Jalape- os, but by midnight my stomach is growling again. ' So unless I want to start using my car as a residence, I have to nd a sec- ond, or alternative, job. I call all the hotels where I lled out housekeeping applications weeks agothe Hyatt, Holiday Inn, Econo Lodge, HoJo s, Best Western, plus a halfdozen or so locally run guesthouses. Nothing. Then I start making the rounds again, wasting whole mornings waiting for some aSSLstant manager to show up, even dipping into places so creepy that the front-desk clerk greets you from behind bulletproof glass and sells pints of liquor over the counter. But either someone has exposed my real-life housekeeping habits which are, shall we say, mellowor I am at the wrong end of some mt'alhble ethnic equation: most, but by no means all, of the working housekeepers I see on my job searches are African Americans, Spanishspealnng, or imrmgrants from the Central European post-Communist world, whereas servers are almost invariably white and monolingually English-speaking. When I nally get a positive response, I have been identied once again as server material. J erry's, which is part of a well-known national family restaurant chain and ', physically attached here to another budget hotel chain, is ready to use me at ', once. The prospect is both exciting and terrifying, because, With about the , same number of tables and counter seats, Jerry's attracts three or four times the vohnne of customers as the gloomy old Hearthside. Picture a fat person's hell, and I don't mean a place with no food. Instead there is everything you might eat if eating had no bodily consequences cheese fries, chicken-fried steaks, fudge-laden dessertsonly here every bite must be paid for, one way or another, in human discomfort. The kitchen is a cavern, a stomach leading to the lower intestine that is the garbage and dishwashing area, from which issue bizarre smells combining the edible and the offal: creamy carrion, pizza barf, and that unique and enigmatic Jerry s scentcitrus fart. The oor is slick with spills, forcing us to walk through the kitchen with tiny steps[.] * * * Sinks eyerywhere are clogged With scraps of lettuce, decomposing lemon wedges, waterlogged toast crusts. Put your hand down on any counter and you risk being stuck to it by the lm of anoient 256 . BARBARA EHRENREICH Nickel and Dimed _ 257 syrup spills, and this is unfortunate, because hands are utensils here, used for ere, used for though. When during the 3:00 to 4:00 P.M. dead time I finally sit down to wrap scooping up lettuce onto salad plates, lifting out pie slices, and even moving ven moving silver, my flesh seems to bond to the seat. I try to refuel with a purloined cup of hash browns from one plate to another. The regulation poster in the single n the single soup, as I've seen Gail and Joan do dozens of times, but a manager catches me unisex restroom admonishes us to wash our hands thoroughly and even offers even offers and hisses "No eating!" though there's not a customer around to be offended instructions for doing so, but there is always some vital substance missing- e missing- by the sight of food making contact with a server's lips. So I tell Gail I'm going soap, paper towels, toilet paper-and I never find all three at once. You learn . You learn to quit, and she hugs me and says she might just follow me to Jerry's herself. to stuff your pockets with napkins before going in there, and too bad about bad about But the chances of this are minuscule. She has left the flophouse and her the customers, who must eat, though they don't realize this, almost literally ost literally annoying roommate and is back to living in her beat-up old truck. But guess out of our hands. what? she reports to me excitedly later that evening: Phillip has given her The break room typifies the whole situation: there is none, because there cause there permission to park overnight in the hotel parking lot, as long as she keeps are no breaks at Jerry's. For six to eight hours in a row, you never sit except r sit except out of sight, and the parking lot should be totally safe, since it's patrolled by to pee. Actually, there are three folding chairs at a table immediately adjacent ly adjacent a hotel security guard! With the Hearthside offering benefits like that, how to the bathroom, but hardly anyone ever sits here, in the very rectum of the :tum of the could anyone think of leaving? gastro-architectural system. Rather, the function of the peritoilet area is to area is to Gail would have triumphed at Jerry's, I'm sure, but for me it's a crash house the ashtrays in which servers and dishwashers leave their cigarettes cigarettes course in exhaustion management. Years ago, the kindly fry cook who trained burning at all times, like votive candles, so that they don't have to waste time waste time me to waitress at a Los Angeles truck stop used to say: Never make an unnec lighting up again when they dash back for a puff. Almost everyone smokes as smokes as essary trip; if you don't have to walk fast, walk slow; if you don't have to walk, if his or her pulmonary well-being depended on it-the multinational melange al melange stand. But at Jerry's the effort of distinguishing necessary from unnecessary of cooks, the Czech dishwashers, the servers, who are all American natives- natives- and urgent from whenever would itself be too much of an energy drain. The creating an atmosphere in which oxygen is only an occasional pollutant. My lutant. My only thing to do is to treat each shift as a one-time-only emergency; you've first morning at Jerry's, when the hypoglycemic shakes set in, I complain to omplain to got fifty starving people out there, lying scattered on the battlefield, so get one of my fellow servers that I don't understand how she can go so long with- long with- out there and feed them! Forget that you will have to do this again tomorrow, out food. "Well, I don't understand how you can go so long without a ciga- but a ciga- forget that you will have to be alert enough to dodge the drunks on the drive rette," she responds in a tone of reproach-because work is what you do for you do for home tonight-just burn, burn, burn! Ideally, at some point you enter what others; smoking is what you do for yourself. I don't know why the anti-smok- anti-smok- servers call "a rhythm" and psychologists term a "flow state," in which signals ing crusaders have never grasped the element of defiant self-nurturance that rance that pass from the sense organs directly to the muscles, bypassing the cerebral makes the habit so endearing to its victims-as if, in the American workplace, vorkplace, cortex, and a Zen-like emptiness sets in. * * * the only thing people have to call their own is the tumors they are nourishing nourishing But there's another capacity of the neuromuscular system, which is pain. I and the spare moments they devote to feeding them. start tossing back drugstore-brand ibuprofen pills as if they were vitamin C, Now, the Industrial Revolution is not an easy transition, especially when ally when four before each shift, because an old mouse-related repetitive-stress injury you have to zip through it in just a couple of days. I have gone from craft work craft work in my upper back has come back to full-spasm strength, thanks to the tray straight into the factory, from the air-conditioned morgue of the Hearth-side earth-side carrying. In my ordinary life, this level of disability might justify a day of ice directly into the flames. Customers arrive in human waves, sometimes dis- times dis- packs and stretching. gorged fifty at a time from their tour buses, peckish and whiny. Instead of two ad of two 'girls" on the floor at once, there can be as many as six of us running around g around in our brilliant pink-and-orange Hawaiian shirts. I make friends, over time, with the other "girls" who work my shift: Nita, the tattooed twenty-something who taunts us by going around saying brightly, * * * "Have we started making money yet?" Ellen, whose teenage son cooks on the I start out with the beautiful, heroic idea of handling the two jobs at once, s at once, graveyard shift and who once managed a restaurant in Massachusetts but and for two days I almost do it: the breakfast/lunch shift at Jerry's, which goes hich goes won't try out for management here because she prefers being a "common till 2:00, arriving at the Hearthside at 2:10, and attempting to hold out until out until worker" and not "ordering people around." Easy-going fiftyish Lucy, with the 10:00. In the ten minutes between jobs, I pick up a spicy chicken sandwich sandwich raucous laugh, who limps toward the end of the shift because of something that at the Wendy's drive-through window, gobble it down in the car, and change d change has gone wrong with her leg, the exact nature of which cannot be determined from khaki slacks to black, from Hawaiian to rust polo. There is a problem, problem, without health insurance. We talk about the usual girl things-men, children,258 . BARBARA EHRENREICH Nickel and Dimed = 259 and the sinister allure of Jerry's chocolate peanut-butter cream pie-though -though weeks to absorb. (I had combed the town's two downscale department stores no one, I notice, ever brings up anything potentially expensive, like shopping hopping hoping for something cheaper but decided in the end that these marked-down or movies. As at the Hearthside, the only recreation ever referred to is party- s party- Dockers, originally $49, were more likely to survive a daily washing.) Of my ing, which requires little more than some beer, a joint, and a few close friends. friends. fellow servers, everyone who lacks a working husband or boyfriend seems Still, no one here is homeless, or cops to it anyway, thanks usually to a working working o have a second job: Nita does something at a computer eight hours a day; husband or boyfriend. All in all, we form a reliable mutual-support group: If roup: If another welds. Without the forty-five-minute commute, I can picture myself one of us is feeling sick or overwhelmed, another one will "bev" a table or even or even working two jobs and having the time to shower between them. carry trays for her. If one of us is off sneaking a cigarette or a pee, the oth- the oth- " So I take the $500 deposit I have coming from my landlord, the $400 I ers will do their best to conceal her absence from the enforcers of corporate rporate have earned toward the next month's rent, plus the $200 reserved for emer- rationality. gencies, and use the $1,100 to pay the rent and deposit on trailer number 46 But my saving human connection-my oxytocin receptor, as it were-is vere-is in the Overseas Trailer Park, a mile from the cluster of budget hotels that George, the nineteen-year-old, fresh-off-the-boat Czech dishwasher. We get We get constitute Key West's version of an industrial park. Number 46 is about eight to talking when he asks me, tortuously, how much cigarettes cost at Jerry's. Jerry's. feet in width and shaped like a barbell inside, with a narrow region-because I do my best to explain that they cost over a dollar more here than at a regu- a regu- of the sink and the stove-separating the bedroom from what might opti- lar store and suggest that he just take one from the half-filled packs that are that are mistically be called the "living" area, with its two-person table and half-sized always lying around on the break table. But that would be unthinkable. Except Except couch. The bathroom is so small my knees rub against the shower stall when for the one tiny earring signaling his allegiance to some vaguely alternative :rnative I sit on the toilet, and you can't just leap out of the bed, you have to climb point of view, George is a perfect straight arrow-crew-cut, hardworking, and ing, and down to the foot of it in order to find a patch of floor space to stand on. Out- hungry for eye contact. "Czech Republic," I ask, "or Slovakia?" and he seems seems side, I am within a few yards of a liquor store, a bar that advertises "free beer delighted that I know the difference. "Vaclav Havel," I try. "Velvet Revolution, olution, tomorrow," a convenience store, and a Burger King-but no supermarket Frank Zappa!" "Yes, yes, 1989," he says, and I realize we are talking about g about or, alas, laundromat. By reputation, the Overseas park is a nest of crime and history. crack, and I am hoping at least for some vibrant, multicultural street life. But desolation rules night and day, except for a thin stream of pedestrian traf- fic heading for their jobs at the Sheraton or 7-Eleven. There are not exactly I make the decision to move closer to Key West. First, because of the drive. e drive. people here but what amounts to canned labor, being preserved from the Second and third, also because of the drive: gas is eating up $4 to $5 a day, " a day, heat between shifts. and although Jerry's is as high-volume as you can get, the tips average only ge only In line with my reduced living conditions, a new form of ugliness arises 10 percent, and not just for a newbie like me. Between the base pay of $2.15 of $2.15 at Jerry's. First we are confronted-via an announcement on the comput- an hour and the obligation to share tips with the busboys and dishwashers, ashers, ers through which we input orders-with the new rule that the hotel bar is we're averaging only about $7.50 an hour. Then there is the $30 I had to spend o spend henceforth off-limits to restaurant employees. The culprit, I learn through on the regulation tan slacks worn by Jerry's servers-a setback it could take ild take the grapevine, is the ultra-efficient gal who trained me-another trailer-home dweller and a mother of three. Something had set her off one morning, so she slipped out for a nip and returned to the floor impaired. This mostly hurts ccording Ellen, whose habit it is to free her hair from its rubber band and drop by the 5. Until April 1998, there was no federally mandated right to bathroom breaks. According to Marc Linder and Ingrid Nygaard, authors of Void Where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and the s and the bar for a couple of Zins before heading home at the end of the shift, but all Right to Urinate on Company Time (Cornell University Press, 1997), "The right to rest and rest and of us feel the chill. Then the next day, when I go for straws, for the first time void at work is not high on the list of social or political causes supported by professional or sional or I find the dry-storage room locked. Ted, the portly assistant manager who executive employees, who enjoy personal workplace liberties that millions of factory work- ry work- opens it for me, explains that he caught one of the dishwashers attempting ers can only daydream about. . . . While we were dismayed to discover that workers lacked s lacked to steal something, and, unfortunately, the miscreant will be with us until a an acknowledged legal right to void at work, [the workers] were amazed by outsiders' naive rs' naive on when replacement can be found-hence the locked door. I neglect to ask what he belief that their employers would permit them to perform this basic bodily function when nto pads had been trying to steal, but Ted tells me who he is-the kid with the buzz cut necessary. ... A factory worker, not allowed a break for six-hour stretches, voided into pads worn inside her uniform; and a kindergarten teacher in a school without aides had to take 1 to take and the earring [George]. all twenty children with her to the bathroom and line them up outside the stall door when or when she voided."Nickel and Dimed = 261 260 . BARBARA EHRENREICH nally land my the bathroom to study Amanda's troubled face. "You take it, girl," she advises. l office of the I would for sure." When my month-long plunge into poverty is almost over, I finally land my led to Jerry's, dream job-housekeeping. I do this by walking into the personnel office of the The tourists' rooms that we clean and, beyond them, the far more expen- ) pay my rent only place I figure I might have some credibility, the hotel attached to Jerry's, sively appointed interiors in the soaps, begin after a while to merge. We have el lady fairly and confiding urgently that I have to have a second job if I am to pay my rent entered a better world-a world of comfort where every day is a day off, wait et Maria, the and, no, it couldn't be front-desk clerk. "All right," the personnel lady fairly ing to be filled up with sexual intrigue. We, however, are only gate-crashers greets me as spits, "So it's housekeeping," and she marches me back to meet Maria, the in this fantasy, forced to pay for our presence with backaches and perpetua tive attitude. housekeeping manager, a tiny, frenetic Hispanic woman who greets me as thirst. The mirrors, and there are far too many of them in hotel rooms, contain an hour, and "babe" and hands me a pamphlet emphasizing the need for a positive attitude. the kind of person you would normally find pushing a shopping cart down a th insurance The hours are nine in the morning till whenever, the pay is $6.10 an hour, and city street-bedraggled, dressed in a damp hotel polo shirt two sizes too large, 1 who will be there's one week of vacation a year. I don't have to ask about health insurance and with sweat dribbling down her chin like drool. I am enormously relieved ler top front once I meet Carlotta, the middle-aged African-American woman who will be when Carla announces a half-hour meal break, but my appetite fades when I training me. Carla, as she tells me to call her, is missing all of her top front see that the bag of hot-dog rolls she has been carrying around on our cart is re project- not trash salvaged from a checkout but what she has brought for her lunch. teeth. e have been On that first day of housekeeping and last day of my entire project- When I request permission to leave at about 3:30, another housekeeper sed to "stay- although I don't yet know it's the last-Carla is in a foul mood. We have been warns me that no one has so far succeeded in combining housekeeping at the uming, and given nineteen rooms to clean, most of them "checkouts," as opposed to "stay- hotel with serving at Jerry's: "Some kid did it once for five days, and you're no d as a stay- overs," that require the whole enchilada of bed-stripping, vacuuming, and kid." With that helpful information in mind, I rush back to number 46, down it of course bathroom-scrubbing. When one of the rooms that had been listed as a stay- four Advils (the name brand this time), shower, stooping to fit into the stall, nd I do the over turns out to be a checkout, Carla calls Maria to complain, but of course and attempt to compose myself for the oncoming shift. So much for what out a break to no avail. "So make up the motherfucker," Carla orders me, and I do the Marx termed the "reproduction of labor power," meaning the things a worker queen-sized beds while she sloshes around the bathroom. For four hours without a break has to do just so she'll be ready to work again. The only unforeseen obstacle We try to I strip and remake beds, taking about four and a half minutes per queen-sized to the smooth transition from job to job is that my tan Jerry's slacks, which ten there is bed, which I could get down to three if there were any reason to. We try to had looked reasonably clean by 40-watt bulb last night when I handwashed bout thirty avoid vacuuming by picking up the larger specks by hand, but often there is my Hawaiian shirt, prove by daylight to be mottled with ketchup and ranch- imes Carla nothing to do but drag the monstrous vacuum cleaner-it weighs about thirty dressing stains. I spend most of my hour-long break between jobs attempting hat begins, pounds-off our cart and try to wrestle it around the floor. Sometimes Carla to remove the edible portions with a sponge and then drying the slacks over lets me do the hood of my car in the sun. hands me the squirt bottle of "BAM" (an acronym for something that begins, of perfor- ominously, with "butyric"; the rest has been worn off the label) and lets me do I can do this two-job thing, is my theory, if I can drink enough caffeine and athtubs, or the bathrooms. No service ethic challenges me here to new heights of perfor- avoid getting distracted by George's ever more obvious suffering. mance. I just concentrate on removing the pubic hairs from the bathtubs, or aning the * * * at least the dark ones that I can see. strangers. I had looked forward to the breaking-and-entering aspect of cleaning the I resolve to give him all my tips that night and to hell with the experiment :t-zipped stay-overs, the chance to examine the secret, physical existence of strangers. in low-wage money management. At eight, Ellen and I grab a snack together :ts), flyers But the contents of the rooms are always banal and surprisingly neat-zipped standing at the mephitic end of the kitchen counter, but I can only manage two TV that up shaving kits, shoes lined up against the wall (there are no closets), flyers the soaps. for snorkeling trips, maybe an empty wine bottle or two. It is the TV that Answer" keeps us going, from Jerry to Sally to Hawaii Five-O and then on to the soaps. as if this 6. In 1996, the number of persons holding two or more jobs averaged 7.8 million, or If there's something especially arresting, like "Won't Take No for an Answer" s are the 6.2 percent of the workforce. It was about the same rate for men and for women (6.1 versus 6.2), on Jerry, we sit down on the edge of a bed and giggle for a moment as if this anything though the kinds of jobs differ by gender. About two thirds of multiple jobholders work were a pajama party instead of a terminally dead-end job. The soaps are the confronts one job full-time and the other part-time. Only a heroic minority-4 percent of men and best, and Carla turns the volume up full blast so that she won't miss anything ill, Helen 2 percent of women-work two full-time jobs simultaneously. (From John F. Stinson Jr., from the bathroom or while the vacuum is on. In room 503, Marcia confronts 'New Data on Multiple Jobholding Available from the CPS," in the Monthly Labor Review, rge from March 1997.) Jeff about Lauren. In 505, Lauren taunts poor cuckolded Marcia. In 511, Helen offers Amanda $10,000 to stop seeing Eric, prompting Carla to emerge from262 . BARBARA EHRENREICH Nickel and Dimed = 263 or three mozzarella sticks and lunch had been a mere handful of Mc-Nuggets Juggets. I am saved by a yuppie (mercifully not one of mine) who chooses this moment I am not tired at all, I assure myself, though it may be that there is simply no imply no to charge into the kitchen to bellow that his food is twenty-five minutes late. more "I" left to do the tiredness monitoring. What I would see, if I were more re more Joy screams at him to get the hell out of her kitchen, please, and then turns on alert to the situation, is that the forces of destruction are already massing massing Jesus in a fury, hurling an empty tray across the room for emphasis against me. There is only one cook on duty, a young man named Jesus ("Hay s ("Hay- I leave. I don't walk out, I just leave. I don't finish my side work or pick up Sue," that is) and he is new to the job. And there is Joy, who shows up to take to take my credit-card tips, if any, at the cash register or, of course, ask Joy's permis- over in the middle of the shift, wearing high heels and a long, clingy white gy white sion to go. And the surprising thing is that you can walk out without permis- dress and fuming as if she'd just been stood up in some cocktail bar. sion, that the door opens, that the thick tropical night air parts to let me pass, Then it comes, the perfect storm. Four of my tables fill up at once. Four ce. Four that my car is still parked where I left it. There is no vindication in this exit, tables is nothing for me now, but only so long as they are obligingly staggered. aggered no fuck-you surge of relief, just an overwhelming, dank sense of failure press- As I bev table 27, tables 25, 28, and 24 are watching enviously. As I bev 25 bev 25, ing down on me and the entire parking lot. I had gone into this venture in the 24 glowers because their bevs haven't even been ordered. Twenty-eight is -eight is spirit of science, to test a mathematical proposition, but somewhere along the our yuppyish types, meaning everything on the side and agonizing instruc- instruc- line, in the tunnel vision imposed by long shifts and relentless concentration, tions as to the chicken Caesars. Twenty-five is a middle-aged black couple, couple, it became a test of myself, and clearly I have failed. Not only had I flamed out who complain, with some justice, that the iced tea isn't fresh and the tabletop tabletop as a housekeeper/server, I had even forgotten to give George my tips, and, for s sticky. But table 24 is the meteorological event of the century: ten British British reasons perhaps best known to hardworking, generous people like Gail and tourists who seem to have made the decision to absorb the American expe an exper Ellen, this hurts. I don't cry, but I am in a position to realize, for the first time rience entirely by mouth. Here everyone has at least two drinks-iced tea iced tea in many years, that the tear ducts are still there, and still capable of doing and milk shake, Michelob and water (with lemon slice, please)-and a huge I a huge their job. promiscuous orgy of breakfast specials, mozz sticks, chicken strips, quesa- , quesa- When I moved out of the trailer park, I gave the key to number 46 to Gail dillas, burgers with cheese and without, sides of hash browns with cheddar, cheddar, and arranged for my deposit to be transferred to her. She told me that Joan is with onions, with gravy, seasoned fries, plain fries, banana splits. Poor Jesus! r Jesus! still living in her van and that Stu had been fired from the Hearthside. I never Poor me! Because when I arrive with their first tray of food-after three prior ee prior found out what happened to George. trips just to refill bevs-Princess Di refuses to eat her chicken strips with her with her In one month, I had earned approximately $1,040 and spent $517 on food, pancake-and-sausage special, since, as she now reveals, the strips were meant e meant gas, toiletries, laundry, phone, and utilities. If I had remained in my $500 effi- to be an appetizer. Maybe the others would have accepted their meals, but Di, , but Di, ciency, I would have been able to pay the rent and have $22 left over (which is who is deep into her third Michelob, insists that everything else go back while ck while $78 less than the cash I had in my pocket at the start of the month). During this they work on their "starters." Meanwhile, the yuppies are waving me down for lown for time I bought no clothing except for the required slacks and no prescription more decaf and the black couple looks ready to summon the NAACP. drugs or medical care (I did finally buy some vitamin B to compensate for Much of what happened next is lost in the fog of war. Jesus starts going is going the lack of vegetables in my diet). Perhaps I could have saved a little on food under. The little printer on the counter in front of him is spewing out orders t orders if I had gotten to a supermarket more often, instead of convenience stores, faster than he can rip them off, much less produce the meals. Even the invin- e invin- but it should be noted that I lost almost four pounds in four weeks, on a diet cible Ellen is ashen from stress. I bring table 24 their reheated main courses, courses, weighted heavily toward burgers and fries. which they immediately reject as either too cold or fossilized by the micro- : micro- How former welfare recipients and single mothers will (and do) survive in wave. When I return to the kitchen with their trays (three trays in three trips), e trips), the low-wage workforce, I cannot imagine. Maybe they will figure out how to Joy confronts me with arms akimbo: "What is this?" She means the food-the od-the condense their lives-including child-raising, laundry, romance, and meals- plates of rejected pancakes, hash browns in assorted flavors, toasts, burgers, urgers, into the couple of hours between full-time jobs. Maybe they will take up res- sausages, eggs. "Uh, scrambled with cheddar," I try, "and that's . . ." "NO," " "NO," idence in their vehicles, if they have one. All I know is that I couldn't hold she screams in my face. "Is it a traditional, a super-scramble, an eye-opener?" pener?" two jobs and I couldn't make enough money to live on with one. And I had I pretend to study my check for a clue, but entropy has been up to its tricks, tricks, advantages unthinkable to many of the long-term poor-health, stamina, a not only on the plates but in my head, and I have to admit that the original original working car, and no children to care for and support. Certainly nothing in order is beyond reconstruction. "You don't know an eye-opener from a tradi- a tradi- my experience contradicts the conclusion of Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, tional?" she demands in outrage. All I know, in fact, is that my legs have lost ave lost in their recent book Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare interest in the current venture and have announced their intention to fold. to fold. and Low-Wage Work, that low-wage work actually involves more hardship264 . BARBARA EHRENREICH and deprivation than life at the mercy of the welfare state. In the coming months and years, economic conditions for the working poor are bound to worsen, even without the almost inevitable recession. As mentioned earlier, the influx of former welfare recipients into the low-skilled workforce will have a depressing effect on both wages and the number of jobs available. A general economic downturn will only enhance these effects, and the working poor will of course be facing it without the slight, but nonetheless often saving, protec tion of welfare as a backup. The thinking behind welfare reform was that even the humblest jobs are morally uplifting and psycholo