Working Enough to be Behind
Matthew Ghent
Introduction
America has a poverty problem, and it is not the number of people on welfare. The problem is that some people and families that do work are still poor. In many cases the family would be better off accepting welfare but their benefits have expired or more commonly, their pride prevents them from accepting government assistance. There are millions of people throughout America who toil as maids, waiters, food service workers, sales clerks and many other types of work that are still poor. These jobs tend to be monotonous and the work is hard and offers little benefit other that the minimum wage that it pays. The families cannot afford health insurance or child-care, let alone higher education. In many cases, when a son or daughter is old enough to work they drop out of school to help the family pay bills. This lack of education creates a vicious cycle with the children of the poor ending up poor as well. While researching this paper, I found that there is no easy way out of this cycle either. To reach above the poverty line there needs to be at least two wage earners in a house. While this is a stretch for a couple it is almost impossible for a single parent household. This problem is not going to go away either. There are a number of factors that conspire to keep the poor as they are; downward mobility, a labor surplus, and an overall lack of jobs in poor neighborhoods.
The ethnography Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich presents one view of the plight of the working poor. Barbara Ehrenreich is a writer for Harper’s Magazine and The New Republic. This was a critically acclaimed book, being both a New York Times bestseller and the New York Times Notable Book of the Year. What makes this book special and so worthy of praise is the fact the Ehrenreich becomes a member of the working poor and chronicles her experiences. She is not an anthropologist by definition, but she approaches her situation like one, utilizing participant observation as her chief mode of research. She travels from Key West, Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking minimum wage jobs and trying to survive from month to month. She experiences the life of the working poor from their perspective, and comes to some unique revelations.
No Shame In My Game by Katherine S. Newman is a true ethnography. At the time she wrote the book Newman was a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in Harlem, which is one of the boroughs of New York City. Harlem is one of the poorest sections in the United States, and Colombia University is an island of wealth and privilege in the middle of it. This social and economic divide led to the writing of this book. The book studies the people working in the fast food industry of Harlem and the trouble they have making ends meet. The book as a true study of the poor with well-defined research methods, thorough research, and well developed conclusions.
Research Methods
The research methods are the main difference between the two books. As stated before No Shame In My Game is a true ethnographic study while Nickel and Dimed takes a much more intimate look at the subject through participant observation. These studies also differ in scale, as “No Shame In My Game” has a much larger scope, having hundreds of participants. Another large difference is the subjects of the studies. While Katherine Newman focuses on the working poor in the inner cities, Barbara Ehrenreich’s study deals with the poverty-stricken working class in the smaller cities and towns. It also needs to be said that both of these studies took place in the late 1990’s, a period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. The findings of these studies would undoubtedly be much different in the current economic climate, making the present-day plight of the working poor all the worse.
Nickel and Dimed, as stated before, is an ethnographic study relying completely on participant observation. From Florida to Maine to Minnesota, Barbara Ehrenreich worked as a maid, a waitress, nursing home aid, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She carefully crafted a way of studying the working poor by laying down strict rules to follow. Rule one was that she could not fall back on any skills she had gained in her professional career, although humorously she claims that there were not many want ads for an essayist. Rule two was to take the highest paying job possible and to do her best to hold on to it. Rule three was to take the cheapest accommodations possible allowing for safety and privacy (Ehrenreich; 2001, 4). To make up for her lack of work experience, she claimed that she was recently divorced and just entering the workforce. She would also allow herself a car and a first month’s rent. The purpose of her study was “to spend a month in each setting and see whether I could find a job and earn, in that time, the money to pay a second month’s rent” (Ehrenreich; 2001, 5-6). She goes on to say that after these restrictions she still maintained a large advantage over the rest of the working poor, as she is a white native-English speaker but this didn’t affect getting a job as she had thought, it affected the types of job that she was offered; instead of housecleaning she was steered into waitressing. She made no attempt to conform to the stereotype of the working woman and kept her style of dress, hair and makeup the same as it was (Ehrenreich; 2001, 9). Using these guidelines she was able to study the working poor by becoming one of them.
No Shame In My Game by Katherine S. Newman is an in-depth study of the working poor in Harlem. Her research methods are well documented and fall in the lines of what I would expect from an anthropological study. She found her participants from a random sample of applicants to fast-food restaurant that she refers to as “burger barn”. Her sample size was around three hundred applicants, which she surveyed. She interviewed half of those and went really in depth with around ten of those interviewed. As a professor at Colombia, Newman had access to a fleet of graduate students so the scope of her survey was much more than Barbara Ehrenreich’s. She would also have these same graduate students work behind the grill at fast food restaurants in Harlem for a type of participant observation, although their stories are strangely absent from the ethnography (Newman, 1999, Preface XVI-XVII).
Findings
As different as the methods of the two ethnographies are, the findings of the two surveys are remarkably consistent. Most of their findings serve to shatter the stereotype of the working poor. A common view of the working poor is that they aren’t trying hard enough to get a good job and they could be making more if they tried harder. Both surveys take on this myth in great detail and show that there are many more factors involved. Another myth is that people are better off having a job than welfare. Both ethnographies delve into this with great detail proving that actually welfare is better in some respects.
The findings of Nickel and Dimed are powerful because of the first hand experience of Barbara Ehrenreich. I was really struck by her encounters in Florida and they really drew me into the story. For instance, she lives in a town near Key West, Florida and decided to start her working experience there. She was initially worried that someone that she knew would recognize her. She soon realizes that she is now anonymous. She states, “No one recognizes my face or my name, which goes unnoticed and for the most part unuttered . . . I am “baby,” “honey,” “blondie,” and, most commonly, “girl.” (Ehrenreich; 2001, 11-12). I believe that this dehumanizing view of minimum wage workers is accurate. She also describes developing a “service ethic”, where she develops a sense of responsibility for her customers and a sense of pride in the work that she does. She goes on to describe a transformation that she undergoes from optimism to pessimism. She analogies this as undergoing a transformation from Barbara to Barb. She describes Barb as “... meaner and slyer than I am, more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I had hoped. (Ehrenreich; 2001, 169)”. She has a doctorate in Biology and this is evident in her writings and conversations with her fellow workers. As someone who studies biology I found these observations fascinating. Throughout the story she comments on the health of her fellow workers as well as her own deteriorating health. She describes the work as hard and very taxing on her body and mind. Her largest complaint is the fact that no one that she works with is given health insurance, which is a benefit under welfare. Ehrenreich tried in three places to try and survive on minimum wage and failed each time. She determined that she had to work two jobs in order to live a decent life. The one place that she could have made it a second month, Maine, she was working seven days a week, cleaning houses during the week and working in an Alzheimer’s ward on the weekends, and that was only until the summer tourist season started and the rents increased. Ehrenreich mainly implies that the working poor are doomed to be poor, but she sees a silver lining, describing the closeness of the families that she observed. Much of these tight families are of necessity though, as family members need to band together for food and childcare.
No Shame In My Game takes a large-scale view of the predicament of the working poor. She delves into the causes of poverty, which Ehrenreich neglected to do. First, as cities sprawl, the inner city, which is the main domicile of the poor, is neglected. The jobs and new developments now are centered in the suburbs and the outlying sprawl of the city. There is still a large population in the inner cities, now fighting for a smaller number of jobs. This has a dual effect on prospective job seekers. There is a labor surplus in the now neglected inner cities, where there are a large number of applicants competing for a small number of jobs. This labor surplus depresses wages because the jobs that are available (fast food and other service industry jobs) require little training and there are always more applicants waiting, so why give someone a raise when there are hundreds outside that will work for minimum wage.
Another problem observed is as quality jobs erode families tend to do worse and worse. This problem is defined as “downward mobility” and is powerfully illustrated with kinship charts of two of her subject’s families. You can see in the chart the quality jobs that the grandparent’s had and a disproportionate amount of “unemployed” and “jail” listed for the grandchildren (Newman; 1999, 165). Newman also eloquently explains the drawbacks of working versus receiving welfare. One of her subjects would “earn” two hundred dollars a month more if she received welfare, but pride keeps her from accepting it (Newman; 1999, 137). Welfare recipients are first in line for state-sponsored child-care and receive Medicaid. Most of her interview subjects claimed that they were too proud to receive Welfare although they were well aware of the double standard. This pride must be swallowed again with the stigma of having a “McJob”(Newman; 1999, 92). Even in the face of no employment and no other jobs being available, a job flipping burgers carries the same stigma that it does in an affluent society.
Newman also describes elaborate social structures that the inner city poor have created to assist each other. In these societies welfare recipients provide under the table child-care and large extended families live together providing cleaning, cooking and other support services for each other. Most surprisingly to me, the working poor have very conservative views on welfare, with most eliciting a “They could get a job if they weren’t so lazy” attitude (Newman; 1999, 226). Newman’s final wrap-up is more pessimistic that Barbara Ehrenreich’s, and this could be due to her not being as intimately involved with the predicament as Ehrenreich was. Newman states that nothing will solve the problems unless as she says “we fix the labor problems of the working poor. No amount of moralizing, proselytizing, or punishment will shore up declining families if they do not have jobs, especially jobs that pay a living wage (Newman; 1999, 298)”. On the positive side she claims most problems in the inner city would be cured by an increase in wages, but is pessimistic on when this will actually occur.
Conclusion
If I was to suggest further research that could be done on the topic of the working poor, I would like these same studies to be repeated at this time. They were both done in the late 1990’s, with the economy enjoying a decade of unequalled growth. I would be interested to see how much worse people would be doing with our present economy. I would also like a study where participants would be paid double the current minimum wage and have their lives observed. This study would be an excellent way to test the theories set forth in these two ethnographies.
Reading these ethnographies really put a face on the problems that the poor cope with everyday in this country. There seems to be something wrong in America when people can work a full time job and still be poor at the end of the day. Both authors preach for a higher minimum wage, pointing out the fact that the only way that average wages have gone up in the last ten years was when the minimum wages were increased, and I agree wholeheartedly. Politicians are always calling for “welfare reform” trying to reduce the benefits that welfare recipients receive, to try and make public assistance unappealing to the poor. I choose to call for “wage reform” increasing wages and the standard of living for the working poor, making work appealing to those on welfare. Although the implications of a large wage increase on the economy would be almost impossible to estimate without a team of economists and number crunchers, but if we do nothing to assist the working poor it doesn’t take a brilliant mind to see this downward spiral they are in will only continue to worsen.
Bibliography
Ehrenreich, Barbara
2001 Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America
New York: Henry Holt and Company
Newman, Katherine S.
1999 No Shame In My Game The Working Poor in the Inner City
New York: The Russell Sage Foundation