Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich

CONCEPT

I read Nickel and Dimed (the book has its own website) about a month ago as an economic perspective for my novel Urbàntasm. Here are my impressions of the book.

Nickel and Times is Barbara's attempt to integrate herself into life among low-income wage-slaves, or as she puts it with a bit more dignity, the "working poor." She includes a forward outlining her own background and personal biases (her family grew out of West Virginia mining roots; Barbara teaches at Universities, however), and what allowances and restrictions she imposes on herself (use of a car, starting budget, etc.). The body of the book follows three attemps at sustenance: as a waitress in Florida, a maid in Maine, and at a Wal-Mart in Minnesota.

First, it's a quick read, being written in a style not too heavy on details, but in which included details are delicious. For all of its antropologic tenderness, it was really the unscientific commentary that gave the writing its juice. Barbara recounting her battles with a cockatiel, the smell of her various lodgings, and the very personal anxieties about taking a drug test. Many details (wage statistics, workplace and training protocols, and communication or lack thereof between workers and employers) are clearly relevant, and this reopens a larger question for me.

From my perspective as a flagrant fiction writer, anthropology has always seemed a little weird, problematic, and maybe even a little unscientific to me. As a writer who makes no pretension to the truth, my medium of experimentation is stress and rhythm and prosody and theme, character, plot, and so on. Whether or not my stories have factual veracity has little impact on the import or rigor of my writing. It seems, however, that much of compelling anthropology is playing both sides of the court; utilizing the tools and devices of a novellist, but with a (sometimes haphazard) application of the scientific method.

Is this a weakness?

Clearly, I think it is. Also, I think everyone else who reads such writing and stops to consider these issues, is likely to recognize and agree with these points. If your writing is composed and detailed in such a way so as to clearly appeal to a reader's emotions, and to an extent that such composition and details are more memorable than the straight up facts you analyze, you're dealing with problems more of cross-pollination than of murky objectivity. In other words, if we can accept the fact that "mainstream media" and objective scientific inquiry is in fact subject to any number of subjective observations, how much more do we assume that subjectivity is paramount to studies like Ehrenreich's.

What bothered me, among this very compelling account, was the feeling that I was being apologized to throughout, by someone who, while she's had a college education has also grown up in a mining family defined, at least in part, by alcoholism and union politics. This is not someone who should have to apologize for her biases in a study of low-income living.

Explain, yes. I appreciated, and needed, I think, her analysis of her own opportunities and limitations at the beginning. It was the tone there and thereafter that put me off. The same thing burns through the comments left by the (also college-graduated) posters on the official message board. And that, I think is a pervasive problem, not only with Nickel and Dimed but with the whole labor debate in America today. Fiscal conservatism has become so vogue, welfare reform is so lauded, and in many cases (some of which appear in this book), low-income workers support the institutions that impede their growth, that this allegedly "militant" labor writer has made her argument softer and more conciliatory to her subject than is perhaps necessary.

If she's comfortable writing an emotionally charged account of the working poor, she should not frame her comments in self-doubts. She owes herself, and us, more confidence.

That was the speck that bothered me among the swarms.

All that said, it was an exciting page turner, and among the evocative details there are many compelling arguments. Most poignantly, she explodes the myth of declines in poverty by contrasting the poverty rate (calculated by the cost of food alone) with the astronomical increase in housing expenses. Just as trenchant were her points regarding the indignities imposed on low-income workers, the self-effacement that permeates most of the service industry, the bureaucraic red-tape that short-circuits empowerment and aid programs, and the mathematical impossibility to make ends meet. She does not approach her situation with a defeatest attitude, nor takes many liberties with her ability to "pull out" whenver she wants. And perhaps most importantly, she treats her coworkers and subject with complexity, respect, and circumspection.

I'm happy to say that I read this story, and despite the self-effacement that persisted throughout, I feel that I learned a lot from it.

~ Connor