I loved this book (picked up based on a recommendation on Howard Zinn's People's History of the USA. It looks like it should be awful but she's such a great writer, that she pulls it out, and it's actually very readable. She spent 3 months working minimum-wage jobs and trying to figure out how people manage to survive. Each month a different town and a different job.
I liked it so much, in fact, that if i were in a position of power, i would force all my minions to read it.
Quotes:
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.
Maybe, I reasoned, when you give white people a whole state to themselves, they treat one another real nice.
despite all the help-wanted ads and job fairs, Portland is just another $6–$7-an-hour town. This should be as startling to economists as a burst of exotic radiation is to astronomers. If the supply (of labor) is low relative to demand, the price should rise, right? That is the “law.”
The real function of these [personality] tests, I decide, is to convey information not to the employer but to the potential employee
In the new version of the law of supply and demand, jobs are so cheap—as measured by the pay—that a worker is encouraged to take on as many of them as she possibly can.
It would be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage. But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say.
Not to worry—I have an address, two jobs, and a Rent-A-Wreck. The anxiety that gripped me those first few days at the 6 is finally beginning to ebb.
The musicians wink and smile at each other as they play, and I see then that they are the secret emissaries of a worldwide lower-class conspiracy to snatch joy out of degradation and filth. When the song ends, I give them a dollar, the equivalent of about ten minutes of sweat.
Or we might talk about that other great nemesis of the bathroom cleaner—pubic hair. I don’t know what it is about the American upper class, but they seem to be shedding their pubic hair at an alarming rate.
If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive injury of the spirit set in?
the Latinos might be hogging all the crap jobs and substandard housing for themselves, as they so often do.
When presenting yourself as a potential employee, you can never be too much of a suck-up.
Roberta introduces me to “what Wal-Mart is all about.” She personally read Sam Walton’s book (his autobiography, Made in America) before starting to work here and found that the three pillars of Wal-Mart philosophy precisely fit her own, and these are service, excellence (or something like that), and she can’t remember the third.
In 1990, the federal government spent $11.7 million to test 29,000 federal employees. Since only 153 tested positive, the cost of detecting a single drug user was $77,000
there is a product called CleanP supposedly available at GNC
Wal-Mart, when you’re in it, is total—a closed system, a world unto itself.
What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re actually selling is your life.
You might think that unskilled jobs would be a snap for someone who holds a Ph.D. and whose normal line of work requires learning entirely new things every couple of weeks. Not so. The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly “unskilled.”
Whatever my accomplishments in the rest of my life, in the low-wage work world I was a person of average ability—capable of learning the job and also capable of screwing up.
Each job presents a self-contained social world, with its own personalities, hierarchy, customs, and standards.
a lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness
But the real question is not how well I did at work but how well I did at life in general, which includes eating and having a place to stay. The fact that these are two separate questions needs to be underscored right away.
The problem of rents is easy for a Noneconomist, even a sparsely educated low-wage worker, to grasp: it’s the market, stupid. When the rich and the poor compete for housing on the open market, the poor don’t stand a chance.
What surprised and offended me most about the low-wage workplace (and yes, here all my middle-class privilege is on full display) was the extent to which one is required to surrender one’s basic civil rights and—what boils down to the same thing—self-respect.
When you enter the low-wage workplace—and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well—you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world’s preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.
Among the reasons he and others have cited for the blindness of the affluent is the fact that they are less and less likely to share spaces and services with the poor.
94 percent of Americans agree that "people who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty".
The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, “you give and you give.”
Someday, of course—and I will make no predictions as to exactly when—they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth. There’ll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better off for it in the end.
Carol Oppenheimer of the Santa Fe Living Wage Network told the New York Times: “What really got the other side was when we said, ‘It’s just immoral to pay people $5.15, they can’t live on that.’ . . . It made the businesspeople furious. And we realized then that we had something there, so we said it over and over again. Forget the economic argument. This was a moral one. It made them crazy.”
