This book was written by Barbara Ehrenreich, and published in 2000. Her inspiration to try to live off low-wage earnings - waitressing, housekeeping, nursing home help - was the so-called 'welfare reform' that was debated and approved in the 1990s. One of the talking points for the new 'Temporary Assistance to Needy Families' was the 'uplifting' value that paid labor can bring, even menial tasks for minimum wage. Ehrenreich put this assertion to the test, working for several months at various locations in the country.
At the end of chapter two, there was quite a rich soliloquy of sorts about the odd need for Ted's (the supervisor's) approbation felt by her coworkers at 'The Maids', a franchised national house cleaning service she worked at. I will copy it here verbatim, and recommend that you check out the whole book if you get the chance:
"The big question is why Ted's approval means so much. As far as I can figure, my coworkers' neediness - because that's what it is - stems from chronic deprivation. The home owners aren't going to thank us for a job ell done, and God knows, people on the street aren't going to hail us as heroines of proletarian labor. No one will know that the counter on which he slices the evening's baguette only recently supported a fainting woman [who was malnourished and pregnant, and abused by her husband we learn in the story] - and decide to reward her with a medal for bravery. No one is going to say, after I vacuum ten rooms and still have time to scrub a kitchen floor, 'Godddamn, Barb, you're good!' Work is supposed to save you from being an 'outcast,' as Pete [a colleague at the nursing home] puts it, but what we do is an outcast's work, invisible and even disgusting [at least the way the are told to do the work]. Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditch diggers, changers of adult diapers - these are the untouchables of a supposedly cast-free and democratic society. Hence the undeserved charisma of a man like Ted. He may be greedy and offhandedly cruel, but at The Maids he is the only living representative of that better world where people go to college and wear civilian clothes to work and shop on the weekends for fun. If for some reason there's a shortage of houses to clean, he'll keep a team busy by sending them out to clean his own home, which, I am told, is 'real nice.'
"Or maybe it's low-age work in general that has the effect of making you feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the [news] anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly - the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample [she'd stepped in on early in her stay in Maine]. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple.
"On my last afternoon, I try to explain who I am and why I've been working here to the women on my team for the day, a much more spirited group than Holly's usual crew. My announcement attracts so little attention that I have to repeat it: 'Will you listen to me? I'm a writer and I'm going to write a book about this place.' At last Lori leans around from the front seat and hushes the others with 'Hey, this is interesting,' and to me: 'are you like, investigating?'
"Well, not just this place and not exactly 'investigating,' but Lori has latched on to that concept. She hoots with laughter. 'This place could use some investigating!' Now everyone seems to get it - not who I am or what I do - but that whatever I'm up to, the joke is on Ted.
"At least now that I'm 'out' I get to ask the question I've wanted to ask all this time: How do they feel, not about Ted but about the owners, who have so much while others, like themselves, barely get by? This is the answer from Lori who at twenty-four has a serious [back] problem and an $8,000 credit card debt: "All I can think of is like, wow, I'd like to have this stuff someday. It motivates me and I don't feel the slightest resentment because, you know, it's my goal to get to where they are.'
And this is the answer from Colleen, a single mother of two who is usually direct and vivacious but now looks at some spot straight ahead of her, where perhaps the ancestor who escaped from the Great Potato Famine is staring back at her, as intent as I am on what she will say: 'I don't mind, really, because I guess I'm a simple person, and I don't want what they have. I mean, it's nothing to me. But what I would like is to be able to take a day off now and then . . . if I had to . . . and still be able to buy groceries the next day.'"
I want to assure the one or two of my legions of followers who might have read this far, that the author is very caring and compassionate in her relations with coworkers, to the extent that her harried and exhausting work schedules - sometimes working two or more jobs - afford her. The facts of the matter dictate that some jobs will be menial, and difficult. But they do not have to be compensated with hunger wages, which the author finds is what she is paid, barely to manage rent. Healthcare and episodic expenses can devastate. It is high time to raise the federal minimum wage! And empower unions whenever we can - at a minimum vote out of office charlatans like Wisconsin governor Scott Walker who actively (or should I say reactively?) attempts to undermine teachers' and other public employees' unions.
However, as I believe that labor, the sweat of one's brow, is indeed inherently sacred, I want to end this post with the wise words of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.”
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