FIRST POST (50 points)
•
Have you had any personal experience with the type of work Ehrenreich
describes (or know of anyone)? Describe your/their experience(s). [20
points]
Objective
Possible PointsTotal Points
Define the type of work Ehrenreich describes10
Describe your personal experience
•
10
How would you respond to each of the Op-Ed writers essays on the state of
the economy and the state of America's workers? Do you agree or disagree
with any of them? What is your argument? Provide outside factual
evidence to prove your argument (cite your evidence). By outside evidence,
we mean evidence outside the assigned readings (i.e. through a Google
search). [30 points]
Possible
Total
Points
Points
Objective
Define what Harold Meyerson says about the state of the
economy and the state of America’s workers.
5
Define what Robert Reich says about the state of the
economy and the state of America’s workers.
5
Identify whether you agree or disagree.
5
Explain why.
5
Use outside evidence to prove your argument.
10
SECOND POST (50 points)
Possible
Total
Points
Points
Objective
Identifying your reaction (agreement, disagreement, etc.) 10
Focusing on a group member or members or the group
10
as a whole
Providing a substantive response
10
Providing evidence or anecdotal evidence
10
Quality of the writing
10
b o o k
e xc e r p t
Nickel and Dimed
On (not) getting by in America
B
Barbara Ehrenreich, pundit from the left
i l lu st r at i o n s by
fred ingram
and author of the best-selling Nickel and
Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
(Metropolitan Books),* is one of America’s most reliable critics of the rich and powerful. But even those who are inclined to think too much of money and power have been
heard to admit that Ehrenreich’s political medicine goes down easy, thanks in large part
to her delicious sense of humor and refreshing lack of self-importance. ¶ This excerpt
from Nickel and Dimed chronicles her initial effort to live as an unskilled worker in contemporary America. A stunt? Sure. But those tempted to write it off as an exercise in
bleeding-heart liberalism would be wise to reflect on
the embarrassing truth it explores: America may be
rich, but the fruits of its wealth are capriciously and
unevenly distributed.
by barbara ehrenreich
*© Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
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Mostly out of laziness, I decide to start my
low-wage life in the town nearest to where I actually live, Key West, Fla.,
which, with a population of about 25,000 is elbowing its way up to the status of a genuine city. The downside of familiarity, I soon realize, is that it’s
not easy to go from being a consumer, thoughtlessly throwing money
around in exchange for groceries and movies and gas, to being a worker in
the very same places. I am terrified, especially at the beginning, of being
recognized by some friendly business owner or erstwhile neighbor and
having to stammer out some explanation of my project. Happily, though,
my fears turn out to be entirely unwarranted: during a month of poverty
and toil, no one recognizes my face or my name, which goes unnoticed
and for the most part unuttered. In this parallel universe, I am “baby,”
“honey,” “blondie” and, most commonly, “girl.”
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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, and still have $400 or
$500 left over for food and gas. In the Key
West area, this pretty much confines me to
flophouses or trailer homes – like the one, a
pleasing 15-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, Key
West is expensive. Still, it is a shock to realize
that trailer trash has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to.
So I decide to make the common trade-off
between affordability and convenience and go
for a $500-a-month efficiency 30 miles up a
two-lane highway from the employment
opportunities of Key West, meaning 45 minutes if there’s no road construction and I
don’t get caught behind some sun-dazed
Canadian tourists. I hate the drive, along a
roadside studded with white crosses commemorating the more effective head-on collisions, but it leads to a sweet little place – a
cabin, more or less, set in the swampy backyard of the converted mobile home where my
landlord, an affable TV repairer, lives with his
bartender girlfriend.
The next piece of business is to comb
through the want ads and find a job. I rule out
various occupations for one reason or another: hotel front-desk clerk, for example, which
to my surprise is regarded as unskilled and
pays only $6 or $7 an hour, gets eliminated
because it involves standing in one spot for
eight hours a day. Waitressing is also something I’d like to avoid, because I remember it
leaving me bone-tired when I was 18, and I’m
decades of varicosities and back pain beyond
that now. Telemarketing, one of the first
refuges of the suddenly indigent, can be dismissed on grounds of personality. This leaves
certain supermarket jobs, such as deli clerk,
or housekeeping in the hotels and guest houses, which pays about $7 and, I imagine, is not
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 respectablelooking outfit of ironed Bermuda shorts and
scooped-neck T-shirt and set out for a tour of
the local hotels and supermarkets. Best
Western, Econo Lodge, and HoJo’s all let me
fill out application forms, and these are, to my
relief, mostly interested in whether I am a
legal resident of the United States and
whether I have committed any felonies. My
next stop is Winn-Dixie, the supermarket,
which turns out to have a particularly onerous application process, featuring a 20minute interview by computer since, apparently, no human on the premises is deemed
capable 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 about the slick
promises that union organizers might try to
tempt me with. The interview is multiplechoice: do I have anything, such as child-care
problems, that might make it hard for me to
get to work on time? Do I think safety on the
job is the responsibility of 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
fellow 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 office tomorrow for a urine
test. This seems to be a fairly general rule: if
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you want to stack Cheerios boxes or vacuum
hotel rooms in chemically fascist America,
you have to be willing to squat down and pee
in front of a 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 with – are not enough, I decide,
to compensate for this indignity.
I lunch at Wendy’s, where $4.99 gets you
unlimited refills at the Mexican part of the
Super-bar, a comforting surfeit of refried
able measure of the actual jobs available at
any particular time. They are the employers’
insurance policy against the relentless
turnover of the low-wage work force. Most of
the big hotels run ads almost continually, if
only to build a supply of applicants to replace
the current workers as they drift away or are
fired. So finding a job is just a matter of being
both in the right place at the right time and
flexible enough to take whatever is being
offered that day.
“ That’s just Billy. He’s on the rag again” —
a condition occasioned, in this instance,
by the fact that the cook on the morning shift
had forgotten to thaw out the steaks.
beans and cheese sauce. Then it’s off for a
round of the locally owned inns and guest
houses in Key West’s Old Town, which is
where all the serious sightseeing and guzzling
goes on, a couple of miles removed from the
functional end of the island, where the discount hotels make their homes. At The Palms,
let’s call it, a bouncy manager actually takes
me around to see the rooms and meet the
current housekeepers, who, I note with satisfaction, look pretty much like me – faded exhippie types in shorts with long hair pulled
back in braids. Mostly, though, no one speaks
to me or even looks at me except to proffer an
application form.
Three days go by like this and, to my chagrin, no one from the approximately 20 places
at which 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
finding out how overqualified I am. Only later
will I realize that the want ads are not a reli-
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This finally happens to me at one of the
big discount-chain hotels where I go, as usual,
for housekeeping and am sent instead to try
out as a waitress at the attached family restaurant, a dismal spot looking out on a parking
garage, which is featuring “Pollish sausage
and BBQ sauce” on this 95-degree day. Phillip, the dapper young West Indian who introduces himself as the manager, interviews me
with about as much enthusiasm as if he were
a clerk processing me for Medicare, the principal questions being what shifts I can work
and when I can start. I mutter about being
woefully out of practice as a waitress, but he’s
already on to the uniform. I’m to show up
tomorrow wearing black slacks and black
shoes; he’ll provide the rust-colored polo
shirt with Hearthside, as we’ll call the place,
embroidered on it, though I might want to
wear my own shirt to get to work, ha ha.
So begins my career at the Hearthside,
where for two weeks I work from 2 till 10 p.m.
for $2.43 an hour plus tips. Employees are
barred from using the front door, so I enter
the first day through the kitchen, where a redfaced man with shoulder-length blond hair is
throwing frozen steaks against the wall.
“That’s just Billy,” explains Gail, the wiry
middle-aged waitress who is assigned to train
me. “He’s on the rag again” – a condition
occasioned, in this instance, by the fact that
the cook on the morning shift had forgotten
to thaw out the steaks. For the next eight
hours, I run after the agile Gail, absorbing bits
of instruction along with fragments of personal tragedy. All food must be trayed, and
the reason she’s so tired today is that she woke
up in a cold sweat thinking of her boyfriend,
who was killed a few months ago in a scuffle
in prison. No refills on lemonade. And the
reason he was in prison is that a few DUIs
caught up with him, that’s all, could have
happened to anyone. Carry the creamers to
the table in a monkey bowl, never in your
hand. And after he was gone she spent several
months living in her truck, peeing in a plastic
bottle and reading by candlelight at night, but
you can’t live in a truck in the summer, since
you need to have the windows down, which
means anything can get in, from mosquitoes
on up.
At least Gail puts to rest any fears I had of
appearing overqualified. From the first day
on, I find that of all the things that I have left
behind, such as home and identity, what I
miss the most is my competence. I am beset
by requests as if by bees: more iced tea here,
ketchup over there, a to-go box for table 14,
and where are the high chairs, anyway? Of the
27 tables, up to 6 are usually mine at any time,
though on slow afternoons or if Gail is off, I
sometimes have the whole place to myself.
Then there is the touch-screen-computer
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77
ordering system to master, which I suppose is
meant to minimize server-cook contacts but
in practice requires constant verbal fine-tuning: “That’s gravy on the mashed, OK? None
on the meat loaf,” and so forth. And, something I had forgotten in the years since I was
18: about a third of a server’s job is side work
invisible to customers – sweeping, scrubbing,
slicing, refilling and restocking. If it isn’t all
done, every little bit of it, you’re going to face
the 6 p.m. dinner rush defenseless, and probably go down in flames. I screw up dozens of
times at the beginning, sustained in my
shame entirely by Gail’s support – “It’s OK,
baby, everyone does that sometime” –
because, to my total surprise and despite the
scientific detachment I am doing my best to
maintain, I care.
When I wake up at 4 a.m. in my own cold
sweat, I am not thinking about the writing
deadlines I’m neglecting; I’m thinking of the
table where I screwed up the order and one of
the kids didn’t get his kiddie meal until the
rest of the family had moved on to their Key
lime pies. That’s the other powerful motivation – the customers, or patients, as I can’t
help thinking of them, on account of a mysterious vulnerability that seems to have left
them temporarily unable to feed themselves.
After a few days at Hearthside, I feel the service ethic kick in like a shot of oxytocin, the
nurturance hormone. The plurality of my
customers are hard-working locals – truck
drivers, construction workers, even housekeepers from the attached hotel – and I want
them to have the closest to a fine dining experience that the grubby circumstances will
allow.
There is Benny, for example, a short, tightmuscled sewer repairman who cannot even
think of eating until he has absorbed a half
hour of air-conditioning and ice water. We
chat about hyperthermia and electrolytes
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until he is ready to order some finicky combination like soup of the day, garden salad, and
a side of grits. There are the German tourists
who are so touched by my pidgin “Wilkommen” and “Ist alles gut?” that they actually tip.
(Europeans, no doubt spoiled by their tradeunion-ridden, high-wage welfare states, generally do not know that they are supposed
to tip. Some restaurants, the Hearthside
included, allow servers to “grat” their foreign
customers, or add a tip to the bill. Since this
amount is added before the customers have
a chance to tip or not tip, the practice
amounts to an automatic penalty for imperfect English.)
At Hearthside, we utilize whatever bits of
autonomy we have to ply our customers with
the illicit calories that signal our love. It is our
job as servers to assemble the salads and
desserts, pour the dressings, and squirt the
whipped cream. We also control the number
of butter pats our customers get and the
amount of sour cream on their baked potatoes. So if you wonder why Americans are so
obese, consider the fact that waitresses both
express their humanity and earn their tips
through the covert distribution of fats.
Ten days into it, this is beginning to look
like a livable lifestyle. I like Gail, who says she
is looking at 50, age-wise, but moves so fast
she can alight in one place and then another
without apparently being anywhere between.
I clown around with Lionel, the teenage
Haitian busboy, though we don’t have much
vocabulary in common, and I loiter near the
main sink to listen to the older Haitian dishwashers’ musical Creole, which sounds, in
their rich bass voices, like French on testosterone. I bond with Timmy, the 14-year-old
white kid who clears tables at night, by telling
him I don’t like people putting their baby
seats right on the tables; it makes the baby
look too much like a side dish.
I especially like Joan, the svelte 40-ish
hostess who turns out to be a militant feminist, pulling me aside one day to explain that
“men run everything – we don’t have a chance
unless we stick together.” Accordingly, she
backs me up when I get overpowered on the
floor, and in return I give her a chunk of my
tips or stand guard while she sneaks off for an
unauthorized cigarette break.
I finish up every night at 10 or 10:30,
depending on how much of the side work I’ve
been able to get done during the shift, and
cruise home listening to the tapes I snatched
at random when I left my real home. To bed
by 1:30 or 2, up at 9 or 10, read for an hour
while my uniform whirls around in the landlord’s washing machine, and then it’s another
eight hours spent following Mao’s central
instruction as laid out in the Little Red Book,
which was: serve the people. I could drift
along like this, in some dreamy proletarian
idyll, except for two things. One is management. If I have kept this subject to the margins so far it is because I still flinch to think
that I spent all those weeks under the surveillance of men (and later women) whose job it
was to monitor my behavior for signs of sloth,
theft, drug abuse or worse.
Managers can sit – for hours at a time, if
they want – but it’s their job to see that no one
else ever does, even when there’s nothing to
do, and this is why, for servers, slow times can
be as exhausting as rushes. You start dragging
out each little chore because if the manager
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on duty catches you in an idle moment he will
give you something far nastier to do. So I
wipe, I clean, I consolidate ketchup bottles
and recheck the cheesecake supply, even tour
the tables to make sure the customer-evaluation forms are all standing perkily in their
places.
On my first Friday at Hearthside there is
a “mandatory meeting for all restaurant employees,” which I attend, eager for insight into
our overall marketing strategy and the niche
(your basic Ohio cuisine with a tropical
twist?) we aim to inhabit. But there is no “we”
at this meeting. Phillip, our top manager
except for an occasional consultant sent out
by corporate headquarters, opens it with a
sneer: “The break room – it’s disgusting. Butts
in the ashtrays, newspapers lying around,
crumbs.” This windowless little room, which
also houses the time clock for the entire hotel,
is where we stash our bags and civilian clothes
and take our half-hour meal breaks. But a
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break room is not a right, he tells us. It can be
taken away.
We should also know that the lockers in
the break room and whatever is in them can
be searched at any time. Then comes gossip:
there has been gossip; gossip (which seems to
mean employees talking among themselves)
must stop. Off-duty employees are henceforth
barred from eating at the restaurant, because
“other servers gather around them and gossip.” When Phillip has exhausted his agenda of
rebukes, Joan complains about the condition
of the ladies’ room and I throw in my two bits
about the vacuum cleaner. But I don’t see any
backup coming from my fellow servers, each
of whom has slipped into her own personal
funk.
Just four days later we are suddenly summoned into the kitchen at 3:30 p.m., even
though there are live tables on the floor. We
all – about 10 of us – stand around Phillip,
who announces grimly that there has been a
report of some “drug activity” on the night
shift and that, as a result, we are now to be a
drug-free workplace, meaning that all new
hires will be tested and possibly also current
employees on a random basis. I am glad that
this part of the kitchen is so dark because I
find myself blushing as hard as if I had been
caught toking up in the ladies’ room myself. I
haven’t been treated this way – lined up in the
corridor, threatened with locker searches,
peppered with carelessly aimed accusations –
at least since junior high school. Back on the
floor, Joan cracks, “Next they’ll be telling us
we can’t have sex on the job.”
When I ask Stu, the assistant manager,
what happened to inspire the crackdown, he
just mutters about “management decisions”
and takes the opportunity to upbraid Gail
and me for being too generous with the rolls.
From now on, there is to be only one per customer and it goes out with the dinner, not
with the salad. He’s also been riding the
cooks, prompting Andy to come out of the
kitchen and observe – with the serenity of a
man whose customary implement is a butcher knife – that “Stu has a death wish today.”
The other problem, in addition to the lessthan-nurturing management style, is that this
job shows no sign of being financially viable.
You might imagine, from a comfortable distance, that people who live, year in and year
out, on $6 to $10 an hour have discovered
some survival stratagems unknown to the
middle class. But no. It’s not hard to get my
coworkers talking about their living situations, because housing, in almost every case,
is the principal source of disruption in their
lives, the first thing they fill you in on when
they arrive for their shifts.
When Gail and I are wrapping silverware
in napkins – the only task for which we are
permitted to sit – she tells me she is thinking
of escaping from her roommate by moving
into the Days Inn. I am astounded: how can
she even think of paying $40 to $60 a day? But
if I was afraid of sounding like a social worker, I have come out just sounding like a fool.
She squints at me in disbelief: “And where am
I supposed to get a month’s rent and a
month’s deposit for an apartment?”
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 hotplate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for
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the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot
dogs and plastic-foam cups of soup that can
be microwaved in a convenience store. If you
have no money for health insurance – and
the Hearthside’s niggardly plan kicks in only
after three months – you go without routine
care or prescription drugs and end up paying
the price. Gail, for example, was doing fine,
health-wise anyway, until she ran out of money for estrogen pills. She is supposed to be
on the company health plan by now, but they
claim to have lost her application form and
say they are beginning the paperwork all over
again. So she spends $9 a pop for pills to control the migraines she wouldn’t have, she insists,if her estrogen supplements were covered.
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 few bills
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 higher, but servers
share about 15 percent of their tips with the
busboys and bartenders.) With wages included, this amounts to about the minimum wage
of $5.15 an hour. The sum in the drawer is
piling up, but at the present rate of accumulation will be more than $100 short of my rent
when the end of the month comes around.
Nor can I see any expenses to cut. I do make
my lunch almost every day – usually some
slow-burning, high-protein combo like
frozen chicken patties with melted cheese on
top and canned pinto beans on the side.
Dinner is at the Hearthside, which offers its
employees a choice of a BLT or fish sandwich,
or a hamburger, for only $2. The burger lasts
longest, especially if it’s heaped with gut-
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puckering jalapeños, but by midnight my
stomach is growling again.
So unless I want to start using my car as a
residence, I have to find a second or an alternative job. I call all the hotels at which I’d
filled out housekeeping applications weeks
ago – the Hyatt, Holiday Inn, Econo Lodge,
HoJo’s, Best Western, plus a half dozen locally run guest houses. When I finally get a positive response, I have been identified once
again as server material. Jerry’s – again, not
the real name – which is part of a well-known
national chain and physically attached to
another budget hotel, 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 number of customers
the gloomy old Hearthside does.
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 – the cheese fries, the
chicken-fried steaks, the fudge-laden desserts
– only 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 scent: citrus fart. The floor is
slick with spills, forcing us to walk through
the kitchen with tiny steps, like Susan
McDougal in leg irons.
The break room summarizes the whole situation: there is none, because there are no
breaks at Jerry’s. For six to eight hours in a
row, you never sit except to pee. Actually,
there are three folding chairs at a table immediately adjacent to the bathroom, but hardly
anyone ever sits in this, the very rectum of the
gastro-architectural system. Rather, the func-
tion of the pen-toilet area is to house the ashtrays in which servers and dishwashers leave
their cigarettes burning at all times, like votive
candles, so they don’t have to waste time
lighting up again when they dash back here
for a puff. Almost everyone smokes as if their
pulmonary well-being depended on it. I don’t
know why the antismoking crusaders have
never grasped the element of defiant
self-nurturance that makes the habit so
endearing to its victims – as if, in the
American workplace, the only thing people have to call their own is the tumors
they are nourishing and the spare
moments they devote to feeding them.
Now, the Industrial Revolution is not
an easy transition, especially, in my experience, when you have to zip through it
in just a couple of days. I have gone from
craft work straight into the factory, from
the air-conditioned morgue of the
Hearthside directly into the flames.
Customers arrive in human waves,
sometimes disgorged 50 at a time from
their tour buses, peckish and whiny.
Instead of two “girls” on the floor at
once, there can be as many as six of us
running around in our brilliant pinkand-orange Hawaiian shirts.
I start out with the beautiful, heroic idea of
handling the two jobs at once, and for two
days I almost do it: working the breakfast/
lunch shift at Jerry’s from 8 till 2, arriving at
the Hearthside a few minutes late, at 2:10, and
attempting to hold out until 10. In the few
minutes I have between jobs, I pick up a spicy
chicken sandwich at the Wendy’s drivethrough window, gobble it down in the car,
and change from khaki slacks to black, from
Hawaiian to rust-colored polo. There is a
problem, though. When, during the 3 to 4
p.m. dead time, I finally sit down to wrap silver, my flesh seems to bond to the seat. I try to
refuel with a purloined cup of clam chowder,
as I’ve seen Gail and Joan do dozens of time,
but Stu catches me and hisses, “No eating!”
although there’s not a customer around to be
offended by the sight of food making contact
with a server’s lips. So I tell Gail I’m going to
quit, and she hugs me and says she might just
follow me to Jerry’s herself.
Gail would have triumphed at Jerry’s, I’m
sure, but for me it’s a crash course in exhaustion management. Years ago, the kindly fry
cook who trained me to waitress at a Los
Angeles truck stop used to say, “Never make
an unnecessary trip; if you don’t have to walk
fast, walk slow; if you don’t have to walk,
stand.” But at Jerry’s the effort of distinguishing necessary from unnecessary and urgent
from whenever would itself be too much of
an energy drain. Ideally, at some point you
enter what servers call a “rhythm” and psychologists term a “flow state,” where signals
pass from the sense organs directly to the
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83
muscles, bypassing the cerebral cortex, and a
Zen-like emptiness sets in.
But there’s another capacity of the neuromuscular system, which is pain. I start tossing
back drugstore-brand ibuprofens as if they
were vitamin C, four before each shift, because an old computer-mouse related repeti-
tive-stress injury in my upper back has come
back to full-spasm strength, thanks to the tray
carrying. In my ordinary life, this level of disability might justify a day of ice packs and
stretching.
Management at Jerry’s is generally calmer
and more professional than at the Hearthside,
with two exceptions. One is Joy, a plump,
blowsy woman in her early 30s who once
kindly devoted several minutes of her time to
instructing me in the correct one-handed
method of tray carrying but whose moods
change disconcertingly from shift to shift and
even within one. The other is B.J., aka B.J. the
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Bitch, whose contribution is to stand by the
kitchen counter and yell, “Nita, your order’s
up, move it!” or, “Barbara, didn’t you see
you’ve got another table out there? Come on,
girl!”
Among other things, she is hated for having replaced the whipped cream squirt cans
with big plastic whipped-cream-filled
baggies that have to be squeezed with
both hands – reportedly because she
saw or thought she saw employees
trying to inhale the propellant gas
from the squirt cans, in the hope that
it might be nitrous oxide. On my
third night, she pulls me aside
abruptly and brings her face so close
that it looks like she’s planning to
butt me with her forehead. But
instead of saying, “You’re fired,” she
says, “You’re doing fine.” The only
trouble is I’m spending time chatting
with customers, “That’s how they’re
getting you.”
Chatting with customers is for the
good-looking young college-educated servers in the downtown carpaccio
and ceviche joints, the kids who can
make $70 to $100 a night. What had I
been thinking? Customers are in fact
the major obstacle to the smooth transformation of information into food and food
into money – they are, in short, the enemy.
And the painful thing is that I’m beginning to
see it that way myself. There are the traditional asshole types – frat boys who down multiple Buds and then make a fuss because the
steaks are so emaciated and the fries so sparse,
as well as the variously impaired – due to age,
diabetes, or literacy issues – who require
patient nutritional counseling.
The worst, for some reason, are the Visible
Christians – like the 10-person table, all jolly
and sanctified after Sunday night service, who
run me mercilessly and then leave me $1 on a
$92 bill. Or the guy with the crucifixion Tshirt (“Someone To Look Up To”) who complains that his baked potato is too hard and
his iced tea too icy (I cheerfully fix both) and
leaves no tip at all. As a general rule, people
wearing crosses or “WWJD?” (“What Would
Jesus Do?”) buttons look at us disapprovingly
no matter what we do, as if they were confusing waitressing with Mary Magdalene’s original profession.
I make friends, over time, with the other
“girls” who work my shift. As at the Hearthside, the only recreation ever referred to is
partying, which requires little more than
some beer, a joint, and a few close friends.
Still, no one is homeless, or cops to it, anyway,
thanks usually to a working husband or
boyfriend. All in all, we form a reliable mutual-support group; if one of us is feeling sick or
overwhelmed, another one will “bev” a table
or even carry trays for her. If one of us is off
sneaking a cigarette or a pee, the others will
do their best to conceal her absence from the
enforcers of corporate rationality.
I make the decision to move closer to Key
West. First, because of the drive. Second and
third, also because of the drive: gas is eating
up $4 to $5 a day, and although Jerry’s is as
high-volume as you can get, the tips average
only 10 percent, and not just for a newbie like
me. Between the base pay of $2.15 an hour
and the obligation to share tips with the busboys and dishwashers, we’re averaging only
about $7.50 an hour. Then there is the $30 I
had to spend on the regulation tan slacks
worn by Jerry’s servers – a setback it could
take weeks to absorb. Of my fellow servers,
everyone who lacks a working husband or
boyfriend seems to have a second job: Nita
does something at a computer eight hours a
day; another welds. Without the 45-minute
commute, I can picture myself working two
jobs and still having the time to shower
between them.
So I take the $500 deposit I have coming
from my landlord, the $400 I have earned
toward the next month’s rent, plus the $200
reserved for emergencies, and use the $1,100
to pay the rent and deposit on trailer number
46 in the Overseas Trailer Park, a mile from
the cluster of budget hotels that constitute
Key West’s version of an industrial park.
Number 46 is about eight feet in width and
shaped like a barbell inside, with a narrow
region – because of the sink and the stove –
separating the bedroom from what might
optimistically be called the living area, with
its two-person table and half-sized couch.
The bathroom is so small my knees rub
against the shower stall when I sit on the toilet, and you can’t just leap out of the bed, you
have to climb down to the foot of it in order
to find a patch of floor space to stand on.
Outside, I am within a few yards of a liquor
store, a bar that advertises “free beer tomorrow,” a convenience store, and a Burger King
– but no supermarket or, alas, laundromat.
When my month-long plunge into poverty was almost over, I finally landed my dream
job – housekeeping. I did this by walking into
the personnel office of the only place where I
figured I might have some credibility, the
hotel attached to Jerry’s, and confiding urgently that I had to have a second job if I was
to pay my rent and, no, it couldn’t be frontdesk clerk. “All right” the personnel lady fairly
spits, “so it’s housekeeping,” and marches me
back to meet Millie, the housekeeping manager, a tiny, frenetic Hispanic woman who
greets me as “babe” and hands me a pamphlet
emphasizing the need for a positive attitude.
The pay is $6.10 an hour and the hours are 9
in the morning till “whenever,” which I am
hoping can be defined as a little before 2. I
don’t have to ask about health insurance once
Fourth Quarter 2001
85
I meet Carlotta, the middle-aged AfricanAmerican woman who will be training me.
Carlie, as she tells me to call her, is missing all
of her top front teeth.
On that first day of housekeeping – and
the last day, although I don’t yet know it – in
my life as a low-wage worker in Key West,
Carlie is in a foul mood. We have been given
19 rooms to clean, most of them checkouts, as
opposed to stayovers, requiring the whole
enchilada of bed stripping, vacuuming and
bathroom scrubbing. When one of the rooms
that had been listed as a stayover turns out to
be a checkout, she calls Millie to complain,
but of course to no avail.
I do the beds while she sloshes around the
bathroom. For four hours without a break I
strip and remake beds, taking about four and
a half minutes per queen-sized bed, which I
could get down to three if there were any
reason to. We try to avoid vacuuming by picking up the larger specks by hand, but often
there is nothing to do but drag the monstrous
vacuum cleaner – it weighs about 30 pounds
– off our cart and try to wrestle it around the
floor. Sometimes Carlie lets me do the bathrooms. No service ethic challenges me here to
new heights of performance. I just concentrate on removing the pubic hairs from the
bathtubs, or at least the dark ones that I
can see.
It is the TV that keeps us going, from Jerry
to Sally to Hawaii Five-O and then on to the
soaps. If there’s something especially arresting, like “Won’t Take No for an Answer” on
Jerry, we sit down on the edge of a bed and
giggle for a moment, as if this were a pajama
party instead of a terminally dead-end job.
The soaps are the best, and Carlie turns the
volume up full blast so she won’t miss anything from the bathroom or while the vacuum is on.
The tourists’ rooms that we clean and,
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The Milken Institute Review
beyond them, the far more expensively
appointed interiors in the soaps, begin after a
while to merge. We have entered a better
world – a world of comfort where every day is
a day off, waiting to be filled with sexual
intrigue. We are only gate-crashers in this fantasy, however, forced to pay for our presence
with backaches and perpetual thirst. The mirrors, and there are far too many of them in
hotel rooms, contain the kind of person you
would normally find pushing a shopping cart
down a city street – bedraggled, dressed in a
damp hotel polo shirt two sizes too large, and
with sweat dribbling down her chin like
drool.
I don’t learn much about Carlie except that
she hurts. She moves slowly about her work,
muttering something about joint pain, and
this is probably going to doom her, since the
young immigrant housekeepers – Polish and
Salvadoran – like to finish their rooms by 2 in
the afternoon, while she drags the work out
till 6. Already, management has brought in a
woman to do what sounds like time-motion
studies and there’s talk about switching to
paying by the room.
When I request permission to leave at
about 3:30, another housekeeper warns me
that no one has so far succeeded in combining housekeeping with serving at Jerry’s:
“Some kid did it once for five days, and you’re
no kid.” With that helpful information in
mind, I rush back to number 46, down four
Advils (the name brand this time), shower,
stooping to fit into the stall, and attempt to
compose myself for the oncoming shift. So
much for what Marx termed the “reproduction of labor power,” meaning the things a
worker has to do just so she’ll be ready to
labor again. I spend most of my hour-long
break between jobs attempting to remove the
edible portions of the slacks with a sponge
and then drying them over the hood of my
car in the sun.
I can do this two-job thing, is my theory, if
I can drink enough caffeine. I am not tired at
all, I assure myself, though it may be that
there is simply no more “I” left to do the
tiredness monitoring.
Then it comes, the perfect storm. Four of
my tables fill up at once. Four tables is nothing for me now, but only so long as they are
obligingly staggered. As I bev table 27, tables
25, 28 and 24 are watching enviously. As I bev
25, 24 glowers because their bevs haven’t even
been ordered. Twenty-eight is four yuppies,
meaning everything on the side and agonizing instructions as to the chicken Caesars.
Twenty-five is a middle-aged black couple
who complain, with some justice, that the
iced tea isn’t fresh and the tabletop is sticky.
But table 24 is the meteorological event of the
century: ten British tourists who seem to have
made the decision to absorb the American
experience entirely by mouth.
Here, everyone has at least two drinks –
iced tea and a milkshake, Michelob and water
(with a lemon slice in the water, please) – and
a huge, promiscuous orgy of breakfast specials, mozzarella sticks, chicken strips, quesadillas, burgers with cheese and without, sides
of hash browns with cheddar, with onions,
with gravy, seasoned fries, plain fries, banana
splits. When I arrive with their first tray of
food – after three prior trips just to refill bevs
– Princess Di refuses to eat her chicken strips
with her pancake-and-sausage special since,
as she now reveals, the strips were meant to be
an appetizer. Maybe the others would have
accepted their meals, but Di, who is deep into
her third Michelob, insists that everything
else go back while they work on their starters.
Meanwhile, the yuppies are waving me down
for more decaf and the black couple looks
ready to summon the NAACP.
Much of what happens next is lost in the
fog of war. A menacing restlessness rises from
the tables, all of which are full. Even the invincible Ellen is ashen from stress. I take table 24
their reheated main courses, which they
immediately reject as either too cold or fossilized by the microwave. When I return to
the kitchen with their trays (three trays in
Fourth Quarter 2001
87
three trips) Joy confronts me with arms akimbo, “What is this?” She means the food – the
plates of rejected pancakes, hash browns in
assorted flavors, toasts, burgers, sausages,
eggs. “Uh, scrambled with cheddar,” I try,
“and that’s…”
“No,” she screams in my face, “is it a Traditional, a Super-Scramble, an Eye-Opener?” I
pretend to study my check for a clue, but
entropy has been up to its tricks, not only on
the plates but also in my head, and I have to
admit that the original order is beyond reconstruction.
“You don’t know an Eye-Opener from a
Traditional?” she demands in outrage. All I
know, in fact, is that my legs have lost interest
in the current venture and have announced
their intention to fold. I am saved by a yuppie
(mercifully not one of mine) who chooses
this moment to charge into the kitchen to bellow that his food is 25 minutes late. Joy
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The Milken Institute Review
screams at him to get the hell out of her kitchen, please, and then turns on Jesus in a fury,
hurling an empty tray across the room for
emphasis.
I leave. I don’t walk out, I just leave. I don’t
finish my side work or pick up my credit card
tips, if any, at the cash register or, of course,
ask Joy’s permission to go. And the surprising
thing is that you can walk out without permission, that the door opens, that the thick
tropical night air parts to let me pass, that my
car is still parked where I left it. There is no
vindication in this exit, no surge of relief, just
an overwhelming dank sense of failure pressing down on me and on the entire parking
lot. I had gone into this venture in the spirit of
science, to test a mathematical proposition,
but somewhere along the line, in the tunnel
vision imposed by long shifts and relentless
concentration, it became a test of myself, and
M
clearly I have failed.
SundayReview
|
OPINION
The Limping Middle Class
ROBERT B. REICH
SEPT. 3, 2011
Robert B. Reich is the former secretary of labor, a professor at the University of
California, Berkeley, and the author of “Aftershock: The Next Economy and
America’s Future.”
THE 5 percent of Americans with the highest incomes now account for 37
percent of all consumer purchases, according to the latest research from Moody’s
Analytics. That should come as no surprise. Our society has become more and more
unequal.
When so much income goes to the top, the middle class doesn’t have enough
purchasing power to keep the economy going without sinking ever more deeply into
debt — which, as we’ve seen, ends badly. An economy so dependent on the spending
of a few is also prone to great booms and busts. The rich splurge and speculate when
their savings are doing well. But when the values of their assets tumble, they pull
back. That can lead to wild gyrations. Sound familiar?
The economy won’t really bounce back until America’s surge toward inequality
is reversed. Even if by some miracle President Obama gets support for a second big
stimulus while Ben S. Bernanke’s Fed keeps interest rates near zero, neither will do
the trick without a middle class capable of spending. Pump-priming works only
when a well contains enough water.
Look back over the last hundred years and you’ll see the pattern. During periods
when the very rich took home a much smaller proportion of total income — as in the
9Great Prosperity
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median wages surged. We created a virtuous cycle in which an ever growing middle
class had the ability to consume more goods and services, which created more and
better jobs, thereby stoking demand. The rising tide did in fact lift all boats.
During periods when the very rich took home a larger proportion — as between 1918
and 1933, and in the Great Regression from 1981 to the present day — growth
slowed, median wages stagnated and we suffered giant downturns. It’s no mere
coincidence that over the last century the top earners’ share of the nation’s total
income peaked in 1928 and 2007 — the two years just preceding the biggest
downturns.
Starting in the late 1970s, the middle class began to weaken. Although
productivity continued to grow and the economy continued to expand, wages began
flattening in the 1970s because new technologies — container ships, satellite
communications, eventually computers and the Internet — started to undermine any
American job that could be automated or done more cheaply abroad. The same
technologies bestowed ever larger rewards on people who could use them to
innovate and solve problems. Some were product entrepreneurs; a growing number
were financial entrepreneurs. The pay of graduates of prestigious colleges and
M.B.A. programs — the “talent” who reached the pinnacles of power in executive
suites and on Wall Street — soared.
The middle class nonetheless continued to spend, at first enabled by the flow of
women into the work force. (In the 1960s only 12 percent of married women with
young children were working for pay; by the late 1990s, 55 percent were.) When that
way of life stopped generating enough income, Americans went deeper into debt.
From the late 1990s to 2007, the typical household debt grew by a third. As long as
housing values continued to rise it seemed a painless way to get additional money.
Eventually, of course, the bubble burst. That ended the middle class’s
remarkable ability to keep spending in the face of near stagnant wages. The puzzle is
why so little has been done in the last 40 years to help deal with the subversion of
the economic power of the middle class. With the continued gains from economic
growth, the nation could have enabled more people to become problem solvers and
innovators — through early childhood education, better public schools, expanded
access to higher education and more efficient public transportation.
We might have enlarged safety nets — by having unemployment insurance cover
part-time work, by giving transition assistance to move to new jobs in new locations,
by creating insurance for communities that lost a major employer. And we could
have made Medicare available to anyone.
Big companies could have been required to pay severance to American workers
they let go and train them for new jobs. The minimum wage could have been pegged
at half the median wage, and we could have insisted that the foreign nations we trade
with do the same, so that all citizens could share in gains from trade.
We could have raised taxes on the rich and cut them for poorer Americans.
But starting in the late 1970s, and with increasing fervor over the next three
decades, government did just the opposite. It deregulated and privatized. It cut
spending on infrastructure as a percentage of the national economy and shifted more
of the costs of public higher education to families. It shredded safety nets. (Only 27
percent of the unemployed are covered by unemployment insurance.) And it allowed
companies to bust unions and threaten employees who tried to organize. Fewer than
8 percent of private-sector workers are unionized.
More generally, it stood by as big American companies became global
companies with no more loyalty to the United States than a GPS satellite.
Meanwhile, the top income tax rate was halved to 35 percent and many of the
nation’s richest were allowed to treat their income as capital gains subject to no more
than 15 percent tax. Inheritance taxes that affected only the topmost 1.5 percent of
earners were sliced. Yet at the same time sales and payroll taxes — both taking a
bigger chunk out of modest paychecks — were increased.
Most telling of all, Washington deregulated Wall Street while insuring it against
major losses. In so doing, it allowed finance — which until then had been the servant
of American industry — to become its master, demanding short-term profits over
long-term growth and raking in an ever larger portion of the nation’s profits. By
2007, financial companies accounted for over 40 percent of American corporate
profits and almost as great a percentage of pay, up from 10 percent during the Great
Prosperity.
Some say the regressive lurch occurred because Americans lost confidence in
government. But this argument has cause and effect backward. The tax revolts that
thundered across America starting in the late 1970s were not so much ideological
revolts against government — Americans still wanted all the government services
they had before, and then some — as against paying more taxes on incomes that had
stagnated. Inevitably, government services deteriorated and government deficits
exploded, confirming the public’s growing cynicism about government’s doing
anything right.
Some say we couldn’t have reversed the consequences of globalization and
technological change. Yet the experiences of other nations, like Germany, suggest
otherwise. Germany has grown faster than the United States for the last 15 years,
and the gains have been more widely spread. While Americans’ average hourly pay
has risen only 6 percent since 1985, adjusted for inflation, German workers’ pay has
risen almost 30 percent. At the same time, the top 1 percent of German households
now take home about 11 percent of all income — about the same as in 1970. And
although in the last months Germany has been hit by the debt crisis of its neighbors,
its unemployment is still below where it was when the financial crisis started in
2007.
How has Germany done it? Mainly by focusing like a laser on education
(German math scores continue to extend their lead over American), and by
maintaining strong labor unions.
THE real reason for America’s Great Regression was political. As income and
wealth became more concentrated in fewer hands, American politics reverted to
what Marriner S. Eccles, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, described in the
1920s, when people “with great economic power had an undue influence in making
the rules of the economic game.” With hefty campaign contributions and platoons of
lobbyists and public relations spinners, America’s executive class has gained lower
tax rates while resisting reforms that would spread the gains from growth.
Yet the rich are now being bitten by their own success. Those at the top would
be better off with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than a large share of
one that’s almost dead in the water.
The economy cannot possibly get out of its current doldrums without a strategy
to revive the purchasing power of America’s vast middle class. The spending of the
richest 5 percent alone will not lead to a virtuous cycle of more jobs and higher living
standards. Nor can we rely on exports to fill the gap. It is impossible for every large
economy, including the United States, to become a net exporter.
Reviving the middle class requires that we reverse the nation’s decades-long
trend toward widening inequality. This is possible notwithstanding the political
power of the executive class. So many people are now being hit by job losses, sagging
incomes and declining home values that Americans could be mobilized.
Moreover, an economy is not a zero-sum game. Even the executive class has an
enlightened self-interest in reversing the trend; just as a rising tide lifts all boats, the
ebbing tide is now threatening to beach many of the yachts. The question is whether,
and when, we will summon the political will. We have summoned it before in even
bleaker times.
As the historian James Truslow Adams defined the American Dream when he
coined the term at the depths of the Great Depression, what we seek is “a land in
which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.”
That dream is still within our grasp.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 4, 2011, on Page SR6 of the New York edition with
the headline: The Limping Middle Class.
© 2017 The New York Times Company
Opinions
The fallacy of post-industrial
prosperity
By Harold Meyerson
September 4, 2011
Of all the lies that the American people have been told the past four decades, the biggest one may be this: We’ll all come out
ahead in the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial society. Yes, we were counseled, there will be major dislocations, as
there were during the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy, but the America that will emerge from this
transformation, like the America that emerged 100 years ago, will be one whose citizens are ultimately more prosperous and
secure than their industrial-era forebears.
What a crock.
On Labor Day 2011, the America that’s replaced the vibrant industrial giant of the mid-20th century is a basket case. We’ve
lost the jobs that created the broadly shared prosperity that made us the envy of the world. In their place, when we’ve created
jobs at all, they’ve generated neither prosperity nor security.
The most prescient writer on post-industrial America offered a sobering perspective. In his 1972 book “The Coming of PostIndustrial Society,” sociologist Daniel Bell predicted a future of service jobs, rising consumption, compensatory entitlements
and wars over taxes.
Even as Bell’s prophecies began to be borne out, though, the champions of the new economic order — from General Electric’s
Jack Welch to every New Democrat and any old Republican — assured us that America would flourish as a post-industrial
innovator in the new global economy, crafting the cutting-edge technologies whose actual assembly we could relegate to lessskilled workforces on distant shores. Thirty years ago, when defenders of American manufacturing first suggested that the
nation commit to a “domestic content” standard in the goods we bought, they were howled down by nearly every economist
and editorial writer in the land. (A friend counted 98 newspapers that editorialized against it, and none that wrote in favor.)
Today, the economy that arose on manufacturing’s ashes has turned to ashes itself. The Wall Street-Wal-Mart economy of the
past several decades off-shored millions of factory jobs, which it offset by creating low-paying jobs in the service and retail
sectors; extending credit to consumers so they could keep consuming despite their stagnating incomes; and fueling, until it
collapsed, a boom in construction.
We are only now beginning to understand the toll this economy has taken on America’s workers — and on our working men in
particular. A stunning study from Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project, published in the Milken
Institute Review, reveals that the median earnings of men ages 25 to 64 declined 28 percent between 1969 and 2009. Within
this age group, the median earnings of men who completed high school but didn’t go on to college fell 47 percent, while the
median earnings of male college graduates also declined, if only 12 percent.
Part of this decline stems from the shrinking share of working-age men with full-time jobs, which fell from 83 to 66 percent
between 1960 and 2009. The other part stems from the fall in inflation-adjusted median yearly earnings of working-age men
who have full-time jobs, which have shrunk by about $5,000 since the mid-’70s. Combined, write Greenstone and Looney,
these two declines explain why the earnings of American men “haven’t been this low since Ike was president and Marshal
Dillon was keeping the peace in Dodge City.”
Anyone seeking to understand the pessimism, frustration and rage of working-class men needs to begin here, with Greenstone
and Looney’s two-by-four-to-the-head tale of decline. White working-class men in particular have become a
disproportionately receptive audience for those who scapegoat immigrants and minorities for the damage that has actually
been caused by economic and political elites blissfully blind to the devastation ushered in by their vaunted new economy.
Since that new economy blew up three years ago, many of those elites have been disabused of the financial fantasies that
ordinary Americans long ago ceased to entertain. The fact that Greenstone and Looney’s study emerged from the Hamilton
Project — a pillar of new-economy thinking, founded by Clinton Treasury secretary Robert Rubin — is evidence of a paradigm
shift in economic vision. From centrist Democratic groups such as the Progressive Policy Institute and Third Way, to
economists such as Hoover Institution Nobel laureate Michael Spence, to chief executives and former chief executives such as
Dow Chemical’s Andrew Liveris and Intel’s Andy Grove, the new watchword for America’s future — however challenging it
may be to get there — is manufacturing.
Post-industrial America turned out to be a bust. The time for neo-industrial America has arrived.
meyersonh@washpost.com
Harold Meyerson is executive editor of The American Prospect and was a Washington Post op-ed columnist from
2003 through 2015. Follow @HaroldMeyerson
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