By Laura Brown

“Never use the word unskilled,” Barbara Ehrenreich told the Morning Forum audience on Sept. 16, describing her work as a waitress, maid, salesclerk and nursing home aide. “These jobs take intelligence and patience, and are often made much harder than they have to be by employer rules against such things as talking to each other, or drinking water on the job. Some assembly line workers and cashiers actually wear adult diapers to work because they are not allowed bathroom breaks.”

Ehrenreich, an acclaimed writer, wondered how women driven into the work force by welfare reform could make ends meet with jobs paying $6 to $7 an hour. She went undercover with the following ground rules: To take the highest paying job she could find that required no prior experience, find the cheapest place to live, and keep her expenses within the income she earned. The resulting book, “Nickel and Dimed, On (Not) Getting By in America,” chronicles her experiences on jobs in Key West, Fla., as a waitress; Portland, Maine, as a maid and nursing home aide; and Minneapolis, Minn., as a Wal-Mart “associate.”

A wage of $7 per hour translates into $1,200 per month before taxes. In Key West, a trailer cost $625 per month, plus utilities. In Minneapolis, one room with a microwave and refrigerator was $800. Without cash for a deposit and the first and last months’ rent, Ehrenreich found herself living in motels at $170 to $250 per week, leaving virtually nothing for food and other expenses.

“This illustrates how meaningless the official poverty level is,” Ehrenreich said, explaining that the government standard is calculated using a 40-year-old formula of three times the cost of food. “The cost of food has remained relatively stable over 40 years, while the cost of housing has skyrocketed,” she said. Most of her co-workers got by because they lived with others, or worked more than one job, Ehrenreich said. Others slept in their cars, or went without eating. While most employers offered health insurance, the premiums were too high for workers to enroll. “The Bush administration’s solution to end poverty among women is marriage,” Ehrenreich said, “but since blue-collar men’s wages are shrinking, each woman would have to marry 2.3 men to rise above the poverty level.”

All of the jobs Ehrenreich had were physically demanding, but the worst was working as a maid for a housecleaning service. “In addition to the deeply unflattering uniforms we had to wear, we worked under extreme time pressure, carried backpack vacuums that weighed 14 pounds, and scrubbed floors on our hands and knees,” she said.

The Wal-Mart job was frustrating. Ehrenreich was assigned to replace clothing on racks in the women’s department, often having many carts of discarded garments to sort.

In all of the jobs, Ehrenreich found management heavy-handed, relying on threats and punishment, with very little praise.

Saying she’d like to now go undercover among the rich, “going to spas and charity balls,” Ehrenreich noted that poverty is the other side of what has been wonderful prosperity for the few. “We are becoming a society divided between gated communities and tenements and trailer parks,” she said. “The economy is more and more dependent on low-wage labor. The real philanthropists are the people who work so hard for so little money.”