Nickled and Dimed - a must read! -- Final End

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, [7], 8, 9, 10 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 18:14:05 06/26/02 Wed
Author: Drummond
Subject: Nickled and Dimed - a must read!

This book by Barbara Ehrenreich reads like a novel, but it's an incredible piece of journalism, an approach out of vogue in a media that pretty much just processes and regurgitates press statements these days. She basically went undercover in several areas of the country posing as a divorced middle aged woman who's been out of the job market looking for a way to make ends meet. She immerses herself in a lifestyle affordable at $6 or $7 per hour, and writes with a great deal of wit her account of the indignities working class people face on the job everyday. Obviously, she can leave and return to her material comforts any day, but her observations of other workers and their interactions with management trigger a post-traumatic stress syndrome in me when I was forced to work those jobs for a brief period of time. I don't think it's in paperback yet, but it should be in most libraries as it's selling pretty well. I scanned in the following teasers (fair use doctrine, besides, the only effect it can have is to sell some of her books).

The following passages deal with her job search in Portland, Maine, followed by an amusing account of her visit to a tent revival in the same city.

"At a suburban Wal-Mart that is advertising a "job fair" I am seated at a table with some balloons attached to it (this is the "fair" part) to wait for Julie. She is flustered, when she shows up after about a ten-minute wait, because, as she explains, she just works on the floor and has never interviewed anyone before. Fortunately for her, the interview consists almost entirely of a four-page "opinion survey," with "no right or wrong answers," Julie assures me, just my own personal opinion in ten degrees from "totally agree" to "totally disagree." (Footnote - Margaret Talbot reports in the New York Times Magazine that "personality testing in the workplace is at an all time high" and now supports a $400-million-a-year industry (October 17, 1999, p. 28).

As with the Winn-Dixie preemployment test I took in Key West, there are the usual questions about whether a coworker observed stealing should be forgiven or denounced, whether management is to blame if things go wrong, and if it's all right to be late when you have a "good excuse." The only thing that distinguishes this test is its obsession with marijuana, suggesting that it was authored by a serious stoner struggling to adjust to the corporate way of life. Among the propositions I am asked to opine about are, "Some people work better when they're a little bit high," "Everyone tries marijuana," and bafflingly, "Marijuana is the same as a drink." Hmm, what kind of drink? I want to ask, "The same" how - chemically or morally? Or should I write in something flippant like, "I wouldn't know because I don't drink." The pay is $6.50, Julie tells me, but can shoot up to $7 pretty fast. She thinks I would be great in the ladies' department, and I tell her I think so too.

What these tests tell employers about potential employees is hard to imagine, since the "right" answers should be obvious to anyone who has ever encountered the principle of hierarchy and subordination. Do I work well with others? You bet, but never to the point where I would hesitate to inform on them for the slightest infraction. Am I capable of independent decision making? Oh yes, but I know better than to let this capacity interfere with a slavish obedience to orders. At The Maids, a housecleaning service, I am given something called the "Accutrac personality test," which warns at the beginning that "Accutrac has multiple measures which detect attempts to distort or �psych out' the questionnaire." Naturally , I "never" find it hard "to stop moods of self-pity," nor do I imagine that others are talking about me behind my back or believe that "management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different sets of goals. The real function of these tests, I decide, is to convey information not to the employer but to the potential employee, and the information being conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us. We don't just want your muscles and that portion of your brain that is directly connected to them, we want your most innermost self.

The main thing I learn from the job hunting process is that despite all the help-wanted ads and job fairs, Portland (Maine) is just another $6-$7-an-hour town. This should be as startling to economists as a burst of exotic radiation is to astronomers. If the supply (of labor) is low relative to demand, the price should rise, right? That is the "law." At one of the maid services I apply at - Merry Maids - my potential boss keeps me for an hour and fifteen minutes, most of which is spent listening to her complaining about the difficulty of finding reliable help. It's easy enough to think of a solution, because she's offering "$200 to $250" a week for an average of forty hours' work. "Don't try to put that into dollars per hour," she warns, seeing my brow furrow as I tackle the not-very-long division. "We don't calculate it that way." I do, however, and $5 to $6 an hour for what this lady freely admits is heavy labor with a high risk of repetitive-stress injuries seems guaranteed to repel all mathematically able job seekers. But I am realizing that, just as in Key West, one job will never be enough. In the new version of the law and supply and demand, jobs are so cheap - as measured by the pay - that worker is encouraged to take on as many of them as she possibly can.

After two days of sprinkling job applications throughout the greater Portland area, I force myself to sit in my room at the 6, where I am marooned until the Blue Haven will let me in on Sunday, and wait for the phone to ring. This takes more effort that you might think, because the room is too small for pacing and too dingy for daydreaming, should I have been calm enough to give that a try. Fortunately, the phone rings twice before noon, and - more out of claustrophobia than any serious economic calculation - accept the first two jobs that are offered. A nursing home wants me on weekends for $7 an hour, starting tomorrow; The Maids is pleased to announce that I "passed" the Accutrac test and can start on Monday at 7:30 a.m. This is the friendliest and best-paying maid service I have encountered - $6.65 an hour, though as a punishment this will drop to $6 for two weeks if I fail to show up for a day. (Footnote - The Bureau of Labor Statistics found full-time "private household workers and servants" earning a median income of $223 a week in 1998, which is $23 a week below the poverty level for a family of three. For a forty hour week, our pay at The Maids would amount to $266, or $43 above the poverty level.).

I don't understand exactly what maid services do and how they are different from agencies, but Tammy, the office manager at The Maids, assures me that the work will be familiar and easy, since "cleaning is in our blood." I'm not so sure about the easy part after the warning I got at Merry Maids, but I figure my back should be able to hold out for a week. We're supposed to be done at about 3:30 every day, which will leave plenty of time for job hunting on weekday afternoons. I have my eye on a potato chip factory a ten-minute drive from the Blue Haven, for example, or I can always search out L.L. Bean and fill catalog orders from what I hope will be an ergonomically congenial seat. This is beginning to look like a plan: from maid's service to something better, with the nursing home tiding me over during the transition. To celebrate, I eat dinner at Appleby's - a burger and a glass of red wine for $11.95 plus tip, consumed at the bar while involuntarily watching ESPN."

A little bit later, she describes the "entertainment" she can afford....

"Saturday, my last night at the 6, and I refuse to spend it crushed in my room. But what is a person of limited means and no taste for "carousing" to do? Several times during the week, I have driven past the "Deliverance" church downtown, and the name alone exerts a scary attraction. Could there really be a whole congregation of people who have never heard of the James Dickey novel and subsequent movie? Or, worse yet, is this band of Christians thoroughly familiar with that story of homosexual rape in the woods? The marquee in front of the church is advertising a Saturday night "tent revival," which sounds like the perfect entertainment for an atheist out on her own. I drive through a menacing area filled with deserted warehouses - Dickey, be gone! - until the tent comes looming up out of the dusk. Unfortunately, from an entertainment point of view, only about sixty of the approximately three hundred folding chairs are populated. I count three or four people of color - African and, I would guess, Mexican Americans; everyone else is a tragic-looking hillbilly type, my very own people, genetically speaking (Ehrenreich is a name acquired through marriage; my maiden name, Alexander, derives directly from Kentucky).

I chat with a woman sitting near me - "Nice night," "You come from far?" and things like that - and she lends me her Bible since I seem to be the only one present without a personal copy. It's a relief when one of the ten or so men on the stage orders us to stand and start singing, because the folding chair is torturing my overworked back. I even join in the rhythmic clapping and swaying, which seems to define a minimal level of participation. There are a few genuine adepts present who throw themselves rapturously into the music, eyes shut, arms upraised, waiting, no doubt, for the onset of glossolalia.

But before anything interesting can happen, the preaching commences. A man in shortsleeves tells us what a marvelous book the Bible is and bemoans the fact that people buy so many inferior books when you really need just the one. Someone on TV tells you to read some (secular) book and then "it goes up, you know - what's the word?" I think "sales" is the word he wants, but no one can figure out how to help him. Anyway, "it" could be three hundred, and then it's a ratio of ten to one. Huh? Next a Mexican American fellow takes over the mike, shuts his eyes tight, and delivers a rapid-fire summary or our debt to the crucified Christ. Then it's an older white guy attacking "this wicked city" for its heretically inadequate contribution of souls to the revival - which costs money you know, this tent didn't just put itself up. We're talking overhead, he goes on, not someone making money for themselves, and when you consider what Jesus gave so that we could enjoy eternal life with him in Heaven...

I can't help letting my mind wander to the implications of Alzheimer's disease for the theory of an immortal soul. Who wants an afterlife if the immediate pre-afterlife is spent clutching the arms of a wheelchair, head bent back at a forty-five degree angle, eyes and mouth wide open and equally mute, like so many of my charges at the Woodcrest? Is the "soul" that lives forever the one we possess at the moment of death, in which case heaven must look something like the Woodcrest with plenty of CNAs and dietary aides to take care of those who died in a state of mental decomposition? Or is it out personally best soul - say, the one that indwells in us at the height of our cognitive powers and moral aspirations? In which case, it can't possibly matter whether demented diabetics eat cupcakes or not, because from a purely soteriological standpoint, they're already dead.

The preaching goes on, interrupted with dutiful "amens." It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth. I would like to stay around for the speaking in tongues, should it occur, but the mosquitoes, worked into a frenzy by all this talk of his blood, are launching a full-scale attack. I get up to leave, timing my exit fro when the preacher's metronomic head movements have him looking the other way, and walk out to search for my car, half expecting to find Jesus out there in the dark, gagged and tethered to a tent pole."

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]