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Connections&
September 30 -- 26th Sunday of the Year
"Lying at the rich man's door was a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps that fell from the rich man's table." Luke 16:19-31
Nickel and Dimed
How do four million women, most with children, manage to survive in a labor market that pays them $6 or $7 an hour?
Author Barbara Ehrenreich wanted to find out. So, putting aside her own impressive resume. Ms. Ehrenreich went undercover for two years, working as a waitress in Key West, Florida, as a maid in Portland, Maine, and as a sales clerk in a Minneapolis department store. The idea of the experiment was not to "experience poverty" but to see if she could match income to expenses as the truly poor struggle to do everyday.
In all three experiences, she found that she couldn't afford even basic needs such as housing or food on her salary.
Ms. Ehrenreich chronicles her experiences in the bestselling book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Her book shatters many of the myths we have about the poor. Many poor Americans, in fact, work very hard - some working two or three low-paying jobs seven days a week to provide for themselves and their families. More than 30% have found themselves in this situation not because of some horrible mistake they made or that they are unskilled or stupid but because the companies where they worked for years closed or were gobbled up and their high-paying union jobs eliminated as a result.
The working poor, she writes, are subject to the vagaries and illegal labor practices of incompetent management. They can't go to school because their employers demand that they be ready to work any shift, day or night. They live in rundown apartments or trailers, often skip meals, and work through illness and pain because, quite simply, minimum wage is not a living wage. They are forced to sacrifice their dignity and their dreams out of sheer financial desperation.
"[It] is a world of pain," Ms. Ehrenreich writes. "Do the owners have any idea of the misery that goes into rendering their homes motel-perfect? Would they be bothered if they did know, or would they take a sadistic pride in what they have purchased - boasting to dinner guests, for example, that their floors are cleaned only with the purest of fresh human tears?"
"& the indignities imposed on many low-wage workers - the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being 'reamed out' by managers - are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you're worth."
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