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THE PURPOSELESS TOURIST 

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America, reviewed by Mark Webster

A couple of years ago I worked for a food vendor at the Kentucky State Fair.  Over two weekends I worked a total of eighty hours (in addition to my usual weekly job) at approximately a dollar more than minimum wage.  When I received my paycheck,  I wondered how anyone could live on a weekly gross  of $240 to $280.  In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich, a professional writer, attempts to answer that question. 

Unfortunately, the book is unintentionally funny.  Ehrenreich writes about six low paying jobs in three different parts of the country.  And what locations!  Her first tour of low wage life takes place in Key West, not Wheeling or Detroit, but Key West!  Key West served as a set of training wheels for Ehrenreich, since she lives in Key West.  She finds work as a restaurant server and a housekeeper and, predictably for an educated yuppie, hates her work.  She talks endlessly about herself and not enough about her more interesting coworkers.  

Her next stop is Portland, Maine, not during the winter but during the beautiful fall season.  I believe she attended school in Portland decades ago and was familiar with the area.  She applies for jobs at Wal-Mart, Goodwill, and some housekeeping firms before finding work as a dietary aid at a nursing home.  Again, she hates her work.  She stops by a “Deliverance” church downtown and wonders why the preacher talks about Jesus instead of about increasing the minimum wage. 

She finds a second job at a cleaning service.  She doesn’t like this, because she has to move quickly and satisfy customers.  One day, she hears a couple of Peruvian street musicians on Old Orchard Beach and thinks the music strikes a chord with her own “peasant ancestors centuries ago.”  She believes the musicians are “emissaries of a worldwide lower-class conspiracy to snatch joy out of degradation and filth.” She throws them a dollar. 

Near the end of her tour of Portland, she leaks to a coworker that she is a writer.  The coworker asks if she is an investigator.  As a Ph.D. in biology, Ehrenreich thinks of herself as an investigator. In truth she is only a tourist who loathes the local specimens she observes. She is correct in objecting to drug tests and phony psychological tests which employers require.   She is wrong in trying to foment resentment by asking the workers how they feel about having so little when the owners have so much. She resents their apparent lack of envy and their belief that they can improve their lives through hard work. 

Next, she thinks about going to California but worries that Latinos “might be hogging all the crap jobs and substandard housing for themselves, as they so often do.”   I take this as a slur on hardworking Latinos.  Instead, she decided to tour Minneapolis but, of course, not during the winter.  She had friends and acquaintances in the area.  She finds work at a Wal-Mart and likens her light duty work of returning merchandise to shelves as something out of the myth of Sisyphus or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  She has all the makings of a bureaucrat, because customers are just a nuisance to her. 

She also hates the working class, which she professes to love as an abstraction. She is not a shopper and doesn’t like shoppers.  She hates the native, fat, female Caucasians        (her word, of course) who buy merchandise she thinks was designed to mock them.  At the end, she grows whimsical about organizing the workers into a union but decides she can no longer afford to work at Wal-Mart.  The workers will have to wait for another savior.  Thus ends her tour of the unskilled work world, and she rushes back to her world of writing, making book deals, buying books, eating at restaurants, and defending the poor at parties.

The book is actually two books in one.  Like a law journal article, the boring text is sprinkled with more interesting footnotes.

Ehrenreich set out to tour a world she had already made up her mind was bad.  She attempts to create a false sense of solidarity with her coworkers by pointing to her father’s blue collar origins, her Kentucky roots, and her husband’s job as an organizer for the Teamsters, but ultimately she is estranged from her less fortunate coworkers.   They wolf down Doritos; she eats healthier foods.  They are too thin or too fat; she works out.  They are not bright; she holds advanced degrees.  Some are Christians; she is not.  They believe in hard work; she sees them as suckers working for chump change.  She longs for the day they will rise from their dreamy slumbers, lose their chains, and take their fair share. It’s obvious she believes government should promote Robin Hood policies. 

The book may have been more interesting had she followed the real life of a real worker or had she started in Wheeling or Detroit flat broke in the winter. She lacked the courage and industry to do this.   She believes the way to find a job is to fill out an application and wait for a call.  When this doesn’t happen, she is convinced there are no jobs.  Persistence and personal persuasion, not just an application, get the job.

A better, more sympathetic writer would have done a better job portraying the “special cost” of being poor.  A worker with no car has trouble working and shopping.  Someone who can’t afford an apartment has to rent more expensive hotel rooms, usually located in rough areas.  A worker with no phone can’t take phone calls from prospective employers.  Workers with small children have no place to park the children while they work.  A sudden illness or accident can end a job.  Ehrenreich lightly touches some of these points, but not effectively. For Ehrenreich, the poor exist only as an abstraction to be used to win a cocktail party debate. 

This last point brings to mind the story of Lazarus and the rich man(Luke 16:19-31).  The rich man did no harm to Lazarus.  His sin was that he never even saw Lazarus in all his suffering.  Likewise, Ehrenreich does not “see” her coworkers as humans, just so much grist for her religious belief in the government as their savior and management as their exploiter, although she is careful never to state this directly.  She refuses to see that government causes more suffering than it alleviates.  The poor lose much of their income to taxes and FICA, yet Ehrenreich never once discusses the breakdown of any of her paychecks.  The poor may be entitled to a tax refund next spring, but they need all their resources immediately.  As Dr. Eric Schansberg demonstrates in his book How Government Policy Harms the Poor, special interest groups advocate policies that help themselves but hurt the poor. In a sense, these interests serve as a reverse Robin Hood who takes from the poor in the name of the poor and redistributes the plunder to those who feed at the public trough. 

Likewise, Ehrenreich paints a picture of people hopelessly trapped forever in their social class.  Her own father, Ben Alexander, worked as a copper miner in Montana before working himself up to a white-collar job.  She fails to mention him or anyone who succeeds.    

What then is to be done?  When I was in grade school, the state sent a stringy-haired social worker to “help” my family apply for public assistance.  My mother told her to leave us alone. My advice to those who would champion the poor as mascots for liberal posturing is the same: Leave them alone.