Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic reveals the high cost of low-wage work
- Written by Eve Vincent, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Macquarie University
Last month, the ABC reported “rental affordability has hit a new low in Australia”. Already, low-wage workers in major cities face the burden of commuting to jobs they can’t afford to live near.
A lovely relative on my partner’s side, who is in her 60s and has worked for many years in aged care, told me last Christmas that women are joining her low-wage workplace after leaving retail jobs, where they were frequently verbally abused by customers. Signs displayed at many Australian retailers suggest this has become a post-pandemic feature of these workplaces.
Verbal abuse was not an aspect of the late Barbara Ehrenreich’s time working at Wal-Mart – one of a series of low-wage jobs she worked “undercover” in the United States over three months in the late 1990s. This year, her internationally bestselling classic about her experience, Nickel and Dimed, turns 25. As low-wage workers face worsening precarity and indignities, its insights are more important than ever.
Ehrenreich, a journalist and activist, proposed her project over lunch with her editor. (Well, sort of.) It was 1998, and as she ordered the salmon and field greens, she pondered the consequences of the Clinton government’s 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which required welfare recipients to engage in compulsory work programs, or “workfare”.
The experience of receiving social security was transformed across the Anglosphere in this period, including in Australia – where John Howard’s government would soon embrace “targeted interventions” (or “mutual obligation”) for welfare recipients.
Ehrenreich asked: how would people kicked off welfare rolls and into the bottom of the labour market make it on US$6 or $7 an hour? A journalist ought to try it for themselves, she suggested. The mission somehow became hers.
Making rent on low wages
Ehrenreich’s classic book is divided into three parts, each written in the present tense.
First, she works as a waitress at two restaurants in Florida, anonymised as Hearthside and Jerry’s. At Hearthside, she works from 2pm to 10pm for US$2.43 per hour plus tips, which she stuffs into a kitchen drawer. She spends six to eight hours at a time on her feet at Jerry’s, usually from 8am until 2pm, rushing between tables, and sitting only “to pee”: there are no breaks. She manages to work at both establishments for a few days, before succumbing to exhaustion and back pain. (She was in her late 50s.)
In the early 2000s, Wynhausen entered what she described as the “new, deregulated workplace”. Casual work had increased rapidly in Australia between the mid-1980s and 2000; between 1991 and 1993 centralised wage-fixing was replaced with enterprise-level bargaining, as Elizabeth Humphreys explains in her influential book How Labour Built Neoliberalism.
In the United Kingdom, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee submitted herself to a similar experiment, living in a council estate and working minimum-wage jobs for a few weeks to write Hard Work: Life in Low-pay Britain.
Oral historian Mark Peel, author of The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty, concluded that Wynhausen’s book “matches and even betters Ehrenreich’s account”. Wynhausen doesn’t shout or show off, he noted, perhaps implying Ehrenreich does? Indeed, Ehrenreich loses her cool at moments — I loved being able to enter into the rage.
I regard Nickel and Dimed as a better book, though not a better piece of research. Partly, it’s the appeal of Ehrenreich’s distinctive narration — her carefully calibrated mix of wry, bolshie and compassionate observations. Relatedly, it’s a question of style.
The reader of Nickel and Dimed is taken deep inside the microcosm of each workplace Ehrenreich has momentarily entered. The broader political, legislative and sociological context is mostly relegated to footnotes. The storytelling leads and the appeal of those stories is enduring.
Dirt Cheap is also an insightful and humane book, but there is more cool authority and more journalism; facts and context are interwoven into the body of the text.
Not everything has aged well
Not everything about Nickel and Dimed has aged well. I cringed at Ehrenreich’s uncharitable comments about the bigger bodies she encountered working alongside America’s poor (who often go hungry): not just in the restaurants that serve people almost as poor, but in Wal-Mart, where they shop. She understands, with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, these are “class bodies” – but she can’t help but express her disgust at obesity.
Another comment of Peel’s strikes me as prescient. “I’ve always wanted to declare a moratorium on debates about welfare and work,” he declared. “Just for a short time, only some people would be able to speak.” He meant only those people who actually work in the “low-wage, casualised world” and receive social security.
The importance of “lived experience” as a basis for expertise has since grown. Ehrenreich used the proceeds from Nickel and Dimed to found the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which supports journalism about inequality, and aims to foster the voices of working-class and poor people. Both Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland and Stephanie Land’s Maid (which became a film and a Netflix series) were supported by it.
Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland and Stephanie Land’s Maid were supported by Ehreneich’s Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Netflix
In 2023, sociologist Matthew Desmond also used Clinton’s mid-1990s welfare reforms as a grim marker, in his book Poverty in America. “In the years following the end of guaranteed cash welfare, the United States has witnessed a shocking rise in extreme poverty,” he writes. “There is growing evidence that America harbors a hard bottom layer of deprivation, a kind of extreme poverty once thought to exist only in faraway places.”
Low-wage work is the next layer up from Desmond’s “hard bottom layer”: no wonder servility is induced in those exhausted souls who fear hitting the bottom. Servility is not the only story in town, of course: witness the strikes at Amazon late last year.
Low-wage labour in Australia today
The pandemic drew attention to the “essential” and undervalued work happening in aged care, childcare and warehouses. Wages have risen in aged care since 2023 and for some childcare workers since 2024. But the privatised, profit-making model of both sectors represents a chronic problem.
Race, migration and visas are essential to any discussion of low-wage labour, in Australia and the US. Platform work or gig work took off here in the late 2010s. The climate crisis, specifically heat stress, is already impacting vulnerable workers.
More stories, from the ground up, about all of that, please — told with the wit, warmth, immediacy and acumen of Ehrenreich.
Authors: Eve Vincent, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Macquarie University
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