{On April 5, 2013, we will celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the First Friday Book Synopsis, and begin our 16th year. During March, I will post a blog post per day remembering key insights from some of the books I have presented over the 15 years of the First Friday Book Synopsis. We have met every first Friday of every month since April, 1998 (except for a couple of weather –related cancellations). These posts will focus only on books I have presented. My colleague, Karl Krayer, also presented his synopses of business books at each of these gatherings. I am going in chronological order, from April, 1998, forward. The fastest way to check on these posts will be at Randy’s blog entries — though there will be some additional blog posts interspersed among these 30.}
Post #8 of 30
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Synopsis presented August, 2001
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (Metropolitan Books: May, 2001)
(The book, after all these years, is still a very consistent best seller. There is nothing else quite like it. You can purchase the 10th anniversary edition from Amazon here).
Here’s a simple observation. Companies really do not pay much attention to their “lower level” workers. At least to their well being, their circumstances… Not much at all.
For fifteen full years, I have read a minimum of one business book a month carefully enough to prepare a full synopsis (plus, many, many more business books without preparing such a synopsis), and I’m ready to make some pretty reliable observations. Here’s one: companies and organizations want to hire the “best talent.” They then promote the very best. But for the people at the “bottom?” The goal is to hire as few as possible, for as little money as possible.
This book, a genuine “classic” by Barbara Ehrenreich, is a remarkable look at the “other side.” It is the only book like it that I have presented at the First Friday Book Synopsis. But, in another of my work arenas, I speak twice a month at the Urban Engagement Book Club, sponsored by CitySquare, a large nonprofit in Dallas. For this other gathering, I present synopses of books on social justice and poverty. This Barbara Ehrenreich book has many “cousins,” (e.g., The Working Poor by Pulitzer Prize winning author David Shipler), But these kinds of books are rarely read by business leaders. That’s a shame.
Barbara Ehrenreich is a woman with a Ph. D. in cellular immunology. She had this degree as she set out on their “experiment/research” project. She wanted to work among “lower-level workers,” and see what the experience was like. She took three jobs:
#1 — Waitress.
#2 — Cleaning woman.
#3 — Wal-Mart “Associate”
Here are quite a few excerpts from the book. I’ve added emphasis a time or three. They really are worth reading…
The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly “unskilled.”
How does anyone live on the wages available to the unskilled? How, in particular, were the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?
Several times since completing this project I have been asked by acquaintances whether the people I worked with couldn’t, uh, tell – the supposition being that an educated person is ineradicably different, and in a superior direction, from your workaday drones. I wish I could say that some supervisor or coworker told me even once that I was special in some enviable way – more intelligent, for example, or clearly better educated than most. But this never happened, I suspect because the only thing that really made me special was my inexperience. To state the proposition in reverse, 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.
Toward the end of my stay and after much anxious forethought, I “came out” to a few chosen coworkers. The result was always stunningly anticlimactic, my favorite response being, “Does this mean you’re not going to be back on the evening shift next week?”
I find that of all the things I have left behind, such as home and identity, what I miss most is competence.
So ours is a world of pain – managed by Excedrin and Advil, compensated for with cigarettes and, in one or two cases and then only on weekends, with booze. Do the owners have any idea of the misery that goes into rendering their homes motel-perfect.
Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.
Employers resist wage increases with every trick they can think of and every ounce of strength they can summon. Many employers will offer almost anything – free meals, subsidized transportation, store discounts – rather than raise wages.
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.
Here were her “rules for the experiment” —
Rule #1 — “No falling back on education or skills.”
Rule #2 – “I had to take the highest paying job that was offered to me and do the best I could to hold it.”
Rule #3 — “I had to take the cheapest accommodations I cold find.”
(with an acceptable level of safety and privacy – though the standards regarding these were “hazy.”)
• A key reality – there was no “pretending” in the behavior department. You can’t “pretend” to be a waitress. You either get the food to the table, or you don’t!
• she would have a car ( a “rent-a-wreck”).
• she would hold her ATM in reserve if she got hungry.
Here are some of her lessons learned…
• The want ads are not a reliable measure of the actual jobs available at any particular time.
• Competence in one area does not necessarily translate into competence into other areas! (Or – you try waitressing in a busy restaurant for a week!).
• SURPRISING LESSON– THE POOR ARE INDEED MORAL! – THE GENEROSITY OF A LOW WAGE WAITRESS!
• Management seems to want the server to treat/view the customers as the enemy!
• Physical pain is a constant reality for the low-waged worker.
• And – hunger exacerbates this problem.
And here are some thoughts with which I concluded my synopsis…
#1 — The loss of/lack of hope perpetuates all of the problems of the low-wage worker.
#2 — The turnover is so ever-present that managers who genuinely care for their people are basically non-existent.
#3 — The low-waged worker is frequently treated just as a machine of industry – not as a person.
I presented this book back in August of 2001, twelve years ago. In these days, profits are up, productivity is way up, but wages are flat, more and more people with college degrees are now working in low-wage jobs, and the middle class is shrinking. There is another new rumbling about raising the minimum wage. Might I suggest that every business-book-reader should read an occasional book reminding us of the very-high-skilled work done among the “lower-level” workers among us. You could start with this book.
I’m glad this book is part of my books-I’ve-presented list from the First Friday Book Synopsis.
First Friday Book Synopsis 