Reviews From Our Customers
A compulsively readable book that exposes a national scandal
I found this book completely riveting. I could not tear myself away - even while I was walking down the street I continued to read it!
What makes this book so compelling?
Well, the premise is almost irresistible. You've heard of "reality TV?" This is "reality journalism." Acclaimed journalist Barbara Ehrenreich goes "undercover" in a variety of low-wage jobs: waitress, maid, health care worker, sales "associate." How will she survive? What is it like to do work at one of these jobs? What kind of living and working conditions must she and her fellow employees endure?
But it's more than the premise. The writing is also quite wonderful. Ehrenreich has a great BS detector, and she's wickedly funny in describing bizarre, quasi-totalitarian corporate rituals such as training videos and drug and personality tests. She writes with grit, humor and compassion about a sector of society that is virtually invisible in mainstream media: the nearly one-third of the workers who can be classified as "working poor."
You'll learn a lot from reading this book. I never realized, for example, how physically difficult low-wage labor often is (it frequently leads to serious chronic health problems). Nor did I understand how mentally challenging it can be (YOU try to remember dinner and drink orders for a table of ten different people!). Nor did I realize the disturbing degree to which corporate America has perfected the techniques of surveillance and control, and the shocking extent to which workers are forced to relinquish their rights in the workplace (do you know that an employer has the legal right to search your purse at any time for any reason?)
Ehrenreich makes abundantly clear that even at wages slightly above the minimum, it is impossible to live at even a basic level of decency. She shows us that the condition of low-wage workers in this country is a scandal. While reading, I keep asking myself, why? From my studies and my work, I know that it doesn't have to be this way.
Many other countries have much stronger, more highly unionized workforces that fight for workers' rights. They also have public policies - such as universal health care; universal, high-quality child care; family allowances; wage supplements, etc. - that step in and give much-needed support to workers and families when the free market fails. All of these countries - and I'm speaking mainly of Western Europe and Scandinavia - are democracies, and none of them are poor. On the contrary, they enjoy some of the highest standards of living in the world and are the home to countless thriving businesses and many, many very wealthy people (in spite of tax rates that in the U.S. would be considered unacceptably high).
These policies exist, and they work - citizens in countries from France to Denmark are healthy, well-educated, and productive. These societies don't have the truly breathtaking degree of income inequality that we have here in the U.S. (which, as the economist Robert H. Frank has pointed out, has been disastrous not only for the poor but for the middle class, in areas that range from education to housing). We are the wealthiest country in the world. Why have we failed so abysmally in the simple task of treating our poor and low-wage workers honorably and humanely?
Ehrenreich will not answer that question for you (and, in truth, it's probably impossible to answer it persuasively). Ehrenreich's gift is in telling stories, and showing you how people actually live. You can go to other sources for details on statistics and policy. I do hold out some hope that this book may help change the condition of low-wage workers in this country. It seems to be hitting a chord, to be getting people where they live: in their hearts, in their basic sense of fairness and decency. At the very least, Ehrenreich has succeeded in getting a debate going. The next step will be changing the reality.
A Skewed But Interesting Look at the Working Poor
We usually think of the Third World as Africa, Asia or Central America, but in this book Barbara Ehrenreich shows how closely much of America is starting to resemble the Third World in terms of income inequality and living conditions for the working poor. I recommend this book mainly because it will inform many members of the middle class and above about things they commonly ignore and may in fact prefer not to know. I wasn't completely enamored of the book's style. For one thing, Ehrenreich brings to the enterprise a strong left-liberal bias that colors all of her pereceptions. And, while her experiences working at low wage jobs was interesting to read about, the nature of her experiment was a bit disengenous. She was supposedly trying to determine whether these low wage jobs such as waitressing, housecleaning and retail sales would enable her to meet normal living expenses. In fact, as a writer who specializes in such topics, it's fairly certain that she knew the answer to these questions prior to going into the field. The experiences were more of a way to illustrate and dramatize what she already knew. And her observations and interactions with co-workers at these jobs is necessarily artificial. Like many members of her social class, she is unable to discard the persona of a privileged, white, educated, upper-middle class professional. Like many such people, her feelings regarding this identity are ambivalent, a mixture of pride and guilt. This causes her to bend over backwards in an effort to show her liberalism and lack of condescension to the poor people she meets. In the introduction, for example, she goes out of her way to point out that the working poor are fundamentally no different from the educated and prosperous. This, as Ehrenreich's experiences clearly show, is simply not true. This isn't to say that poor people are inferior, but it's a basic sociological fact that a person's job, income and environment greatly influence their beliefs and behavior. At the end of some of her assignments, Ehrenreich reveals her true motives for taking the jobs. In all of the cases she relates, the people were almost indifferent to, and clearly not very interested in this revelation. I cannot imagine such a lack of a reaction among more affluent people. The reason is clear enough; these people are struggling so much that they don't have the time or energy to be interested in abstract ideas. This is not a criticism of them, simply an observation, but one that Ehrenreich's ideology prevents her from looking at too closely. One of the fascinating subjects explored in this book is the culture of corporate propaganda, in which companies like Walmart use a sophisticated combination of techniques to ensure that their workforce remains docile and unrebellious. From the moment you fill out the job application, you are made to feel like, if not a prisoner, an institutionalized drone. Several of the places she applied to required personality tests that measure one's willingness to completely conform and turn in co-workers if necessary. I find it interesting how some of the consequences of capitalism have come to resemble communism.I was most impressed by the Evaluation chapter, the one that follows her work experiences. Here she points out that the working poor today are mostly invisible to those who live comfortably. In an increasingly fragmented and vicarious world, it's all too easy to live entirely within the sheltered cocoon of your milieu. This trend may be reversing, as the economy in general has taken a fall since Ehrenreich wrote this book. The basic points she brings up here are extremely important, and go beyond questions of politics and ideology. You don't have to be a socialist to agree with Ehrenreich that people who work hard should be able to pay their bills.
The Working Poor of America get a voice
This case study in, as the subtitle says "(Not) Getting by in America" was in many ways surprising. I thought I had a pretty good handle on the fact that there are people in desperate straits out there, that being in desperate straights is awful, and that it would be better if no one had to do it. But some of the problems that are described in this book were things I had never even thought of. One of her main contentions is that many of the working poor are borderline homeless, living, ironically, in expensive motels because they can never get far enough ahead to save the deposit for a real apartment. The lack of medical care and desperate penny-pinching wasn't surprising, but what struck me was that the author, daughter of a union organizer and left wing journalist, was consistently surprised at the importance that her co-workers placed on the jobs they were doing, quite apart from the monetary rewards or managerial incentives.
This struck me as especially tragic, because it just reinforces the fact that most people take satisfaction in doing something well, and it's obvious from the lives these people lead that they aren't in the habit of shirking work. Shouldn't hard, quality work bring you a life with the basics we should all have? A thought provoking, if not especially surprising book.
