Tirado - Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America

By Barbara Ehrenreich

I ve been waiting for this book for a long time. Well, not this book, because I never imagined that the book I was waiting for would be so devastatingly smart and funny, so consistently entertaining and unflinchingly on target. In fact, I would like to have written it myselfif, that is, I had lived Linda Tirados life and extracted all the hard lessons she has learned. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed, which tells the story of my own brief attempt, as a semi-undercover journalist, to survive on low-wage retail and service jobs. Tirado is the real thing.

After my book came out in 2001, I spent over ten years on the road talking about it at union conferences, church gatherings, and mostly on college campuses. I did this partly for the money because I had lost my best-paying journalistic job in 1997, and then a few years later the media decided that writers no longer needed to be paid at all, as if writing involves no caloric expenditure whatsoever.

But I also did it because I was on a mission. People often asked how my work for Nickeland Dimed changed me, and I think they meant how did it make me, as a middle-class person, more aware of the poor. Well, I didnt need that much more awareness since I was born into the lower rung of the working class and managed to re-land in it by becoming a single mother and then marrying a warehouse worker when I was in my thirties. So my stint as a low-wage worker/journalist had only one major effect on me: It moved me from concern about the exploitation of low-wage workersto something more like rage.

I had expected to experience material deprivation in my life at $7 an hour (the equivalent of about $9 today), and I certainly did. The fact that I had some built-in privileges like a working car (I got a Rent-A-Wreck in each of the cities where I worked so I wouldnt end up writing a book about waiting for buses) only made the deprivation part more shocking. Here I wasin good health, with no small children in my careworking full-time, sometimes more than one job at time, sometimes to the point where my legs felt like rubber, and I was living in a dump and dining at convenience stores or Wendys.

What I had not expected was the daily humiliation, the insults and what seemed like mean-spirited tricks. To be poor is to be treated like a criminal, under constant suspicion of drug use and theft. It means having no privacy, since the boss has the legal right to search your belongings for stolen items. It involves being jerked around unaccountably, like the time Wal-Mart suddenly changed my schedule, obliterating the second job I had lined up. It means being ordered to work through injuries and illness, like the debilitating rash I once acquired from industrial-strength cleaning fluids.

And what was most amazing to me: Being a low-wage worker means being robbed by the very employer who is monitoring you so insistently for theft. You can be forced to work overtime without pay or made to start working forty-five minutes before the time clock starts ticking. If you do the math, you may find that a few more hours have been shaved off your paycheck each week by the corporations computers.

But when I made my way from campus to campus, telling my stories about work and urging students to take an interest in all the low-wage workers who were making their education possible every daythe food service workers, janitors, clerical workers, and adjunct facultyI was invariably asked the question that boils down to: Whats wrong with these people? Meaning the workers, not their bosses.

Typically, the questioner would be a frat boy who had taken Econ 101, a course which exists, as far as I can see, for the sole purpose of convincing young people that the existing class structure is just, fair, and unchangeable anyway. If theres nothing wrong with our economic arrangements, then the only remaining question is: Why do these people have children, lack savings, fail to go to college, eat junk food, smoke cigarettes, or whatever else is imagined to be holding them back?

So when I came across Linda Tirados blog about six months ago, I felt an enormous wave of vindication. Evenor, perhaps, especiallyher admission that she smokes cigarettes hit me like a gust of fresh air. She tells what its like to be a low-wage worker for the long term, with an erratically employed husband and two small children to raise and support. She makes all the points I have been trying to make in my years of campaigning for higher wages and workers rights: That poverty is not a culture or a character defect; it is a shortage of money. And that that shortage arises from grievously inadequate pay, aggravated by constant humiliation and stress, as well as outright predation by employers, credit companies, and even law enforcement agencies.

But let me get out of the way now. She can tell this so much better than I can.