Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA (24 page)

There is another way that low-income workers differ from “economic man.” For the laws of economics to work, the “players” need to be well informed about their options. The ideal case—and I've read that the technology for this is just around the corner—would be the consumer whose Palm Pilot displays the menu and prices for every restaurant or store he or she passes. Even without such technological assistance, affluent job hunters expect to study the salary-benefit packages offered by their potential employers, watch the financial news to find out if these packages are in line with those being offered in other regions or fields, and probably do a little bargaining before taking a job.

But there are no Palm Pilots, cable channels, or Web sites to advise the low-wage
job seeker. She has only the help-wanted signs and the want ads to go on, and
most of these coyly refrain from mentioning numbers. So information about who
earns what and where has to travel by word of mouth, and for inexplicable cultural
reasons, this is a very slow and unreliable route. Twin Cities job market analyst
Kristine Jacobs pinpoints what she calls the “money taboo” as a major factor
preventing workers from optimizing their earnings. “There's a code of silence
surrounding issues related to individuals' earnings,” she told me. “We confess
everything else in our society—sex, crime, illness. But no one wants to reveal
what they earn or how they got it. The money taboo is the one thing that employers
can always count on.”
[42]
I suspect that this
“taboo” operates most effectively among the lowest-paid people, because, in
a society that endlessly celebrates its dot-com billionaires and centimillionaire
athletes, $7 or even $10 an hour can feel like a mark of innate inferiority.
So you may or may not find out that, say, the Target down the road is paying
better than Wal-Mart, even if you have a sister-in-law working there.

Employers, of course, do little to encourage the economic literacy of their
workers. They may exhort potential customers to “Compare Our Prices!” but they're
not eager to have workers do the same with wages. I have mentioned the way the
hiring process seems designed, in some cases, to prevent any discussion or even
disclosure of wages—whisking the applicant from interview to orientation before
the crass subject of money can be raised. Some employers go further; instead
of relying on the informal “money taboo” to keep workers from discussing and
comparing wages, they specifically enjoin workers from doing so. The New York
Times recently reported on several lawsuits brought by employees who had allegedly
been fired for breaking this rule—a woman, for example, who asked for higher
pay after learning from her male coworkers that she was being paid considerably
less than they were for the very same work. The National Labor Relations Act
of 1935 makes it illegal to punish people for revealing their wages to one another,
but the practice is likely to persist until rooted out by lawsuits, company
by company.
[43]

But if it's hard for workers to obey the laws of economics by examining their options and moving on to better jobs, why don't more of them take a stand where they are—demanding better wages and work conditions, either individually or as a group? This is a huge question, probably the subject of many a dissertation in the field of industrial psychology, and here I can only comment on the things I observed. One of these was the co-optative power of management, illustrated by such euphemisms as associate and team member. At The Maids, the boss—who, as the only male in our midst, exerted a creepy, paternalistic kind of power—had managed to convince some of my coworkers that he was struggling against difficult odds and deserving of their unstinting forbearance. Wal-Mart has a number of more impersonal and probably more effective ways of getting its workers to feel like “associates.” There was the profit-sharing plan, with Wal-Mart's stock price posted daily in a prominent spot near the break room. There was the company's much-heralded patriotism, evidenced in the banners over the shopping floor urging workers and customers to contribute to the construction of a World War II veterans' memorial (Sam Walton having been one of them). There were “associate” meetings that served as pep rallies, complete with the WalMart cheer: “Gimme a 'W ”' etc.

The chance to identify with a powerful and wealthy entity—the company or the boss—is only the carrot. There is also a stick. What surprised and offended me 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 entirely 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 preemployment 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 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.
[44]

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 toll on its subjects. If you are treated
as an untrustworthy person—a potential slacker, drug addict, or thief—you may
begin to feel less trust worthy 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 antidepressants) declines
in their brains. And—what is especially relevant here—they avoid fighting even
in self-defense.
[45]

Humans are, of course, vastly more complicated; even in situations of extreme
subordination, we can pump up our self-esteem with thoughts of our families,
our religion, our hopes for the future. But as much as any other social animal,
and more so than many, we depend for our self-image on the humans immediately
around us—to the point of altering our perceptions of the world so as to fit
in with theirs.
[46]
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. Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work would quickly grind to a halt. That is not my impression. While I encountered some cynics and plenty of people who had learned to budget their energy, I never met an actual slacker or, for that matter, a drug addict or thief. On the contrary, I was amazed and sometimes saddened by the pride people took in jobs that rewarded them so meagerly, either in wages or in recognition. Often, in fact, these people experienced management as an obstacle to getting the job done as it should be done. Waitresses chafed at managers' stinginess toward the customers; housecleaners resented the time constraints that sometimes made them cut corners; retail workers wanted the floor to be beautiful, not cluttered with excess stock as management required. Left to themselves, they devised systems of cooperation and work sharing; when there was a crisis, they rose to it. In fact, it was often hard to see what the function of management was, other than to exact obeisance.

There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class- and often racial-prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing. But these things cost money—$20,000 or more a year for a manager, $100 a pop for a drug test, and so on—and the high cost of repression results in ever more pressure to hold wages down. The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the “social wage,” while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops. And in the larger society, too, the cost of repression becomes another factor weighing against the expansion or restoration of needed services. It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever deeper inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves.

But whatever keeps wages low—and I'm sure my comments have barely scratched the surface—the result is that many people earn far less than they need to live on. How much is that? The Economic Policy Institute recently reviewed dozens of studies of what constitutes a “living wage” and came up with an average figure of $30,000 a year for a family of one adult and two children, which amounts to a wage of $14 an hour. This is not the very minimum such a family could live on; the budget includes health insurance, a telephone, and child care at a licensed center, for example, which are well beyond the reach of millions. But it does not include restaurant meals, video rentals, Internet access, wine and liquor, cigarettes and lottery tickets, or even very much meat. The shocking thing is that the majority of American workers, about 60 percent, earn less than $14 an hour. Many of them get by by teaming up with another wage earner, a spouse or grown child. Some draw on government help in the form of food stamps, housing vouchers, the earned income tax credit, or—for those coming off welfare in relatively generous states—subsidized child care. But others—single mothers for example—have nothing but their own wages to live on, no matter how many mouths there are to feed.

Employers will look at that $30,000 figure, which is over twice what they currently pay entry-level workers, and see nothing but bankruptcy ahead. Indeed, it is probably impossible for the private sector to provide everyone with an adequate standard of living through wages, or even wages plus benefits, alone: too much of what we need, such as reliable child care, is just too expensive, even for middle-class families. Most civilized nations compensate for the inadequacy of wages by providing relatively generous public services such as health insurance, free or subsidized child care, subsidized housing, and effective public transportation. But the United States, for all its wealth, leaves its citizens to fend for themselves—facing market-based rents, for example, on their wages alone. For millions of Americans, that $10—or even $8 or $6—hourly wage is all there is.