Main   |   Metaforix Mail   |   Lois on the Web   |   Informaticons

For previous issues, please click here.

METAFORIX MAIL

Sites and insights for the Information Age

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the IBM personal computer and the 20th anniversary of MTV, along with a media milestone on a somewhat smaller scale: With this issue, Metaforix Mail begins its second year of publication.

We thank our readers, old and new. If this issue contains a piece that a friend or colleague would appreciate, we hope you will pass the issue along and invite that person to join us as a subscriber.

CONTENTS AT A GLANCE:

ON MY MIND: "On (Not) Getting By in America"
INFORMATICON: Privacy as Competitive Advantage
MEDIA: Death and Dying
METAFORIX MAIL ARCHIVES
SITE OF THE WEEK:BPubs.com
CYBERSPEAK: Distributed Computing

Reality Testing

Have you ever really considered what it's like to be one of America's "working poor"? Not just in an abstract, conceptual sense. Not even from the perspective of social status or the field of realistically available opportunities. I'm talking about the day-to-day logistics of making sure you have a paycheck, a place to sleep, and regular, reasonably nutritious meals.

Journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has not only thought about this subject -- she has researched and written a riveting and profoundly disturbing book about it. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America paints a vivid picture of a world that is all around us, yet strangely absent from our literal and virtual screens in this age of information overload. I've been haunted by the book since I finished it.

The book, which originated as a magazine article, was conceived one day in 1998 at a luncheon meeting between Ehrenreich and Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's. The conversation turned toward one of Ehrenreich's long-standing interests, poverty. Four million unskilled women were about to feel the impact of welfare reform. How, Ehrenreich and Lapham wondered, would these women get by on jobs paying $6 to $7 per hour?

Ehrenreich, a physically fit PhD biologist on the far side of 55, had climbed from a solid blue-collar background to a solid perch in the upper middle class. Almost before she knew it, she had agreed to test for herself what all her reading and personal calculations suggested about low-income life in 21st century America: Survival without government subsidies at an entry-level wage would be next to impossible.

Ehrenreich's plan was to work at an unskilled entry-level job for one month in each of several settings. Her goal was to have enough money at the end of the month to pay a second month's rent.

Hoping to discover some hidden economies or hitherto unreported upsides of life as a working poor American, Ehrenreich embarked on the project. She adopted several rules designed to simulate the decisions of people genuinely thrust into the circumstances she had artificially created. In seeking entry-level employment, she would present herself as a divorced homemaker re-entering the workforce after a long absence. She would not disclose her previous education or work experience. In each of the several locations, she would take the highest-paying job offered to her and do her best to keep it. And she would take the cheapest housing accommodations available, within "acceptable limits of safety and privacy."

In addition, Ehrenreich made choices to serve her journalistic purposes and to establish a personal safety net: She would always have a "Rent-a Wreck" car, paid for apart from her earnings, so as not to write "a story about waiting for buses." If she could not pay for shelter, she would terminate the project. If she could not pay for food, she would "dig out her ATM card and cheat."

Ehrenreich was well aware of the advantages she brought to this "experiment." She was white, a native speaker of English, had no young children, and enjoyed excellent health. She had no illusions about really "experiencing" poverty. She was just a "visitor" who could return to real life at the end of the project, or even sooner.

Over the duration of the project, Ehrenreich worked in a town outside Key West, FL, in Portland, ME, and in Minneapolis, MN. She lived in trailers, residential motels, and other unsavory quarters: expensive, dirty, poorly maintained, vermin-infested, lacking privacy, and/or physically unsafe. Most of these were too costly on her entry-level wages, even while she was working two jobs.

Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a nursing home aide, a house cleaner, and a ladies' wear "associate" at Wal-Mart. She and her co-workers suffered indignities on a daily basis: insultingly transparent pre-employment "personality" tests, drug tests that failed to detect cocaine or heroin but picked up marijuana used weeks before, work uniforms designed without pockets to discourage theft, and policies that failed to provided needed breaks for water or to use the bathroom. Some employers routinely withheld employees' meager initial paychecks until they left the job. For people who had recently paid security deposits and rent, this represented a major hardship.

Although a number of Ehrenreich's co-workers lived with other adults who shared expenses, many also had young children, exceedingly cramped spaces, and higher expenses to contend with. Some came to work obviously ill, worked through painful injuries rather than forfeit a day's pay, and refused health insurance even when it was available because the employee's share of the premium was simply unaffordable. Others indulged in daily "pornographic" food fantasies or became faint with hunger before the end of their shifts. Still others lived in their cars or vans.

Ehrenreich terminated her project in Minneapolis, after gingerly suggesting to some Wal-Mart co-workers that perhaps they needed a union to represent their interests. She had calculated that her current exhorbitantly priced housing in the "worst motel in the United States," combined with her inadequate wages at Wal-Mart, would leave her penniless within a week.

Worse, she had realized that her job -- endlessly returning carts full of clothes to their proper places -- was, like many other low-wage jobs, numbingly repetitive. After several weeks at Wal-Mart, she felt "several years older than when [she] started." Even the knowledge that she would soon be returning to the "variety and drama" of her real life failed to sustain her from "moment to moment."

What did Ehrenreich -- whose politics admittedly lean toward the left -- learn from her experience?

- Contrary to the expectations of some of her "real-life" acquaintances, her co-workers and supervisors "couldn't, uh ,tell" that she was different (i.e., superior) as a result of her education. Ehrenreich observed that "low-wage workers are no more homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less likely to be funny or bright. Anyone in the educated classes who thinks otherwise ought to broaden their circle of friends."

- "No job, no matter how lowly" -- or boring -- "is truly unskilled." Ehrenreich's PhD was useless when it came to learning the lingo, the tools, the skills, and the culture. And all of her jobs were physically demanding, to the bargain.

- It was much easier to do well in the job department than in the survival department. Despite Ehrenreich's best efforts, the only time she came close to making ends meet was when she was working seven days a week. It was crystal clear to her that "wages are too low and rents too high."

- A bit of research confirmed for Ehrenreich that the official poverty level does not in any way account for housing. "Poverty" is officially calculated as it was in the early 1960s: a "bare-bones" food budget for a given size family, multiplied by three, equals the poverty level. Even at that time, food represented 24% -- not 33% -- of the average family budget. By 1999, food accounted for just 16% of the budget, while housing had risen from 29% to 37%. In Ehrenreich's view, this makes using food as the basis for the poverty level as arbitrary as using "comic books or dental floss," and the official U.S. poverty rate of 13% a "soothing" fiction.

In the concluding chapter of her book, Ehrenreich discusses the political and workplace implications of these observations and the factors that make the working poor invisible to the middle class and the wealthy. When poor people were on welfare, it was easier to criticize their "dependency" and to view them with "disapproval and condescension." Now that the poor are working, she asks, how should we feel about them?

To readers who may be thinking "Guilty," Ehrenreich says,"Guilt doesn't go anywhere far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame -- shame at our own dependency . . . on the underpaid labor of others." Ehrenreich sees the working poor as the "major philanthropists" of our society. After reading her book, I can only agree.

Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail Lois C. Ambash, Editor editor@metaforix.com

INFORMATICON
[a provocative quote, statistic, or piece of data]

Why You Should Care About Privacy, Even If Your Customers Don't

MEDIA
[a recent news article, feature, or opinion piece]

Each Dysfunctional Family Is Dysfunctional In Its Own Way

"The Sopranos", HBO's critically acclaimed series about a mobster's dysfunctional family and his death-centered family business, has been followed in the current season by "Six Feet Under". In this case, the family business is a funeral parlor where the dysfunctional family not only makes its living, but also makes its home.

In a recent piece in the Washington Post, funeral director, essayist, and poet Thomas Lynch offers a unique perspective on the series. From Lynch's vantage point as a real-life second-generation funeral director, creator Alan Ball (writer of the Oscar-winning film "American Beauty") has done an excellent job of capturing the competing strands in the "business of death." The series succeeds in getting viewers to confront the tensions between "the tendency to prettify the dead, with cosmetics and euphemism" and the call "to dispose of them, by quickie cremation in the name of convenience and cost efficiency."

As a regular viewer, I'm struck by another contradiction: Ball's attempts to demystify the rituals of death stand in vivid contrast to the network of secrets within the family. The secrets are kept by tacit common agreement, until accidents, or the callous or casual remarks of outsiders, force the family to confront them.

These alternations between reality and unreality, secrecy and confrontation, came to mind when PBS recently rebroadcast "Dying to Be Thin," a documentary on eating disorders that originally aired last December. In addition to exploring scientific explanations and medical treatement options for anorexia and bulimia, this episode of the Nova series captures the media, social, and professional pressures that contribute to the spread of these life-threatening conditions -- not only among young white women, but also among minority women and among men. (To watch this program on line, follow the link above.)

The business of death, the business of thin, the business of illusion, the business of concealment, the business of striving after the ever-changing, unattainable ideal: Sometimes it seems that the media's function is to keep us connected in one big, dysfunctional family. Programs like these offer evidence that the connection can be much more positive and meaningful than that.

METAFORIX MAIL ARCHIVES

Access previous issues of Metaforix Mail by date by visiting our archives. Or use the search box on any page of the Metaforix site (www.metaforix.com) to search by keywords.

SITE OF THE WEEK

Free Subscriptions to Business Magazines

CYBERSPEAK
[The vocabulary of the information age]

Power Sharing

Please note that the links contained in Metaforix Mail are current as of the time of publication. Some of them may no longer be operative at the time you access past issues.

BACK TO TOP

To Volume 1, Issue 48 July 27, 2001
To Volume 2, Issue 2 August 27, 2001

 
Home  | Sitemap |  About Us  |  Metaforix Services  |  Partners and Friends  |  Our Favorite Sites
Bookworks, Wordsmiths, & Trendwatchers  |  Archives  |  Contact Us  |  Privacy Policy

© 2000 -2001 Metaforix Incorporated