So Hard When it Doesn't Come Easy

I've been thinking a lot lately about work and inequality in America. For my sociology class, we had to read Barbara Ehrenreich's ethnographic study called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001). The author spends time in various cities "undercover" as a low-wage worker; the goal of her study was to find out what it's like to make a living at minimum wage in the United States. She encounters issues with housing, eating, self-respect, and basic civil rights. This video--Nickel and Dimed--is an interesting mini-dramatic-documentary that does a nice (and maybe a little bit creepy) job illustrating the project that Ehrenreich undertook.


We must evaluate our dependency on the labor and actions of others. Think about the people who clean our bathrooms, scrub our floors, clean up our trash, serve us coffee, cook our food, ring up our groceries, put away the clothes we discard after leaving the fitting room....all of these people are underpaid and giving up their time and energy so that others can live more comfortably and cheaply.

I feel ashamed. Why do we allow our country to run this way? Why do we call a waitressing job "unskilled" when it requires constant running, smiling, talking, organizing, listening...for numerous hours every day? That takes skill. It's physically and emotionally draining; not to mention stressful, fast-paced, and high-risk. But if it were considered "skilled" labor, the wages offered to those in the waitressing profession would have to be higher--and when all that companies care about is the bottom line, terminology is key.

When a person must work multiple jobs to barely stay afloat. There's a problem. When "67% of adults requesting emergency food aid are people with jobs" (Ehrenreich 219). There is a problem. When employers are allowed to disregard safety regulations and labor laws because they rely on immigrant workers who are vulnerable to an oppressive and threatening system. We have a huge problem. When a full time job doesn't pay enough for even one person to live on..not even factoring in children, healthcare, or quality housing, food, clothes, transportation, etc. People, we have a problem! 

We have to take a stand or it's only going to get worse. Just today, California approved the usage of methyl iodide on strawberry farms. This pesticide is a known carcinogen and has numerous other negative effects on health--who is going to suffer most from its usage? The people applying it. The farm workers who will be exposed to it at close range for ten hours a day; these people have no job security, make low-wages, rarely have any form of health coverage or benefits...yet, their work gives the rest of us perfect strawberries. Talk about philanthropy. How can this even be legal?...is it because the workers are largely migrants so their health doesn't matter? Try telling that to a young pregnant woman who looses her baby from exposure to this fumigant that was proven to induce late-term miscarriages before even being considered by the Department of Pesticide Regulation. Sign the Petition to persuade California against using this harmful chemical.

As quoted in the video, the author closes her book with: "Someday...they [the working poor] are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they're worth. There'll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better off for it in the end."

That "someday" that Ehrenreich referred to, it better come soon.

*Also as a side, yet highly relevant, note--check out: Dream Act 2010 to help make a difference for students who are connected closely with some of the issues I talked about above.