by Barbara Ehrenreich, Metropolitan Books, 2001 (221 pgs)

Subtitled, On (Not) Getting By in America, this was an interesting sociological study of the "working poor" (which, by Ms. Ehrenreich’s statistics, encompasses roughly 60% of the US workforce). Ms. Ehrenreich, an affluent and respected writer, decided to spend several months pretending to be a displaced homemaker with a limited employment history, and briefly worked as a maid, a waitress, and a Wal-Mart employee in various parts of the country. She has shared her experiences in this book.

While the concept of a pampered member of the privileged class keeping a diary after deciding on a lark to pretend to be an untouchable poor person may be deeply offensive to those of us who’ve, through various circumstances beyond our control, been discarded in society’s "trash can" and have little hope of ever attaining a comfortable economic status, her motives were noble and her views are destined to be shared with a large and influential readership. Perhaps her words may precipitate a small amount of pressure on a few of the employers she specifically mentioned to alleviate a bit of the unnecessary stress they routinely subject their subordinates to in order to "keep them in their place."

This book was a quick read, and Ms. Ehrenreich is a smart lady with a good sense of humor. It ought to be required reading for those upper-class dolts who enjoy condescending to (and otherwise exerting power over) their "lessers" and never leave tips — but those shallow creatures seldom read books, and are hopelessly locked into their worldview of choice. Would I recommend it to you? If you are currently doomed to toil for substandard wages under poor working conditions, it might only depress you more (or fill you with the irrational urge to snipe at BMWs from a hilltop), but she makes a few keen observations which are worth sharing. A large chunk of text has been transcribed from the "Evaluation" chapter at the book’s end, along with three footnotes and a final quote which I felt was appropriate:

"The chance to identify with a powerful and wealthy entity — the company or boss — is only the carrot. There is also a stick. What surprised and offended me the 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. I learned this at the very beginning of my stint as a waitress, when I was warned that my purse could be searched by management at any time. I wasn’t carrying stolen salt shakers or anything else of a compromising nature, but still, there’s something about the prospect of a purse search that makes a woman feel a few buttons short of fully dressed. After work, I called around and found that this practice is completely legal: if the purse is on the boss’s property — which of course it was — the boss has the right to examine its contents.

Drug testing is another routine indignity. Civil libertarians see it as a violation of our Fourth Amendment freedom from "unreasonable search;" most jobholders and applicants find it simply embarrassing. In some testing protocols, the employee has to strip to her underwear and pee into a cup in the presence of an aide or technician. Mercifully, I got to keep my clothes on and shut the toilet stall door behind me, but even so, urination is a private act and it is degrading to have to perform it at the command of some powerful other. I would add pre-employment personality tests to the list of demeaning intrusions, or at least much of their usual content. Maybe the hypothetical types of questions can be justified — whether you would steal if an opportunity arose or turn in a thieving coworker and so on — but not questions about your "moods of self-pity," whether you are a loner or believe you are usually misunderstood. It is unsettling, at the very least, to give a stranger access to things, like your self-doubts and your urine, that are otherwise shared only in medical or therapeutic situations.

There are other, more direct ways of keeping low-wage employees in their place. Rules against "gossip," or even "talking," make it hard to air your grievances to your peers or — should you be so daring — to enlist other workers in a group effort to bring about change, through a union organizing drive, for example. Those who do step out of line often face little unexplained punishments, such as having their schedules or their work assignments unilaterally changed. Or you may be fired; those low-wage workers who work without union contracts, which is the great majority of them, work "at will," meaning at the will of the employer, and are subject to dismissal without explanation. The AFL-CIO estimates that ten thousand workers a year are fired for participating in union organizing drives, and since it is illegal to fire people for union activity, I suspect that these firings are usually justified in terms of unrelated minor infractions. Wal-Mart employees who have bucked the company — by getting involved in a unionization drive or by suing the company for failing to pay overtime — have been fired for breaking the company rule against using profanity.

So if low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. 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.

Any dictatorship takes a psychological tool on its subjects. If you are treated as an untrustworthy person — a potential slacker, drug addict, or thief — you may begin to feel less trustworthy yourself. If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules, you begin to accept that unfortunate status. To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals — rats and monkeys, for example — that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming "depressed" in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some anti-depressants) declines in their brains. And — what is especially relevant here — they avoid fighting even in self-defense.

. . . My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers — the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being "reamed out" by managers — are part of what keeps wages low. If you’re made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you’re paid is what you are actually worth. It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism." (pp. 208-211)

"81% of large employers now require pre-employment drug testing, up from 21% in 1987. The drug most likely to be detected — marijuana, which can be detected weeks after use — is also the most innocuous, while heroin and cocaine are generally undetectable 3 days after use. Alcohol, which clears the body within hours after ingestion, is not tested for." (footnote from pg. 14)

"Kim Moody cites studies finding an increase in stress-related workplace injuries and illnesses between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s. He argues that rising stress levels reflect a new system of "management by stress" in which workers in a variety of industries are being squeezed to extract maximum productivity, to the detriment of their health." (footnote from pg. 35)

"Until April 1998, there was no federally mandated right to bathroom breaks. According to Linder and Nygaard, "The right to rest and void at work is not high on the list of social or political causes supported by professional or executive employees, who enjoy personal workplace liberties that millions of factory workers can only dream about . . . While we were dismayed to discover that workers lacked an acknowledged right to void at work, (the workers) were amazed by outsiders’ naive belief that their employers would permit them to perform this basic bodily function when necessary."" (footnote from pg. 37)

"You might expect a bit of grumbling, some signs here and there of unrest — graffiti on the hortatory posters in the break room, muffled guffaws during our associate meetings — but I can detect none of that. Maybe this is what you get when you weed out all the rebels with drug tests and personality "surveys"— a uniformly servile and denatured workforce, content to dream of the distant day when they’ll be vested in the company’s profit-sharing plan." (pg. 178)