Nickel and Dimed: Introduction

In my own family, the low-wage way of life had never been many degrees of separation away; it was close enough, in any case, to make me treasure the gloriously autonomous, if not always well-paid, writing life.

Adding to my misgivings, certain family members kept reminding me unhelpfully that I could do this project, after a fashion, without ever leaving my study.

But if the question was whether a single mother leaving welfare could survive without government assistance in the form of food stamps, Medicaid, and housing and child care subsidies, the answer was well known before I ever left the comforts of home.

I have a Ph.D. in biology, and I didn’t get it by sitting at a desk and fiddling with numbers. In that line of business, you can think all you want, but sooner or later you have to get to the bench and plunge into the everyday chaos of nature, where surprises lurk in the most mundane measurements.

In the spirit of science, I first decided on certain rules and parameters.

There was also the problem of how to present myself to potential employers and, in particular, how to explain my dismal lack of relevant job experience.

Finally, I set some reassuring limits to whatever tribulations I might have to endure.

Almost anyone could do what I did — look for jobs, work those jobs, try to make ends meet. In fact, millions of Americans do it every day, and with a lot less fanfare and dithering.

With all the real-life assets I’ve built up in middle age — bank account, IRA, health insurance, multiroom home — waiting indulgently in the background, there was no way I was going to “experience poverty” or find out how it “really feels” to be a long-term low-wage worker.

Ideally, at least if I were seeking to replicate the experience of a woman entering the workforce from welfare, I would have had a couple of children in tow, but mine are grown and no one was willing to lend me theirs for a month-long vacation in penury.

In addition to being mobile and unencumbered, I am probably in a lot better health than most members of the long-term low-wage workforce.

I did modify my vocabulary, however, in one respect: at least when I was new at a job and worried about seeming brash or disrespectful, I censored the profanities that are—thanks largely to the Teamster influence—part of my normal speech.

Several times since completing this project I have been asked by acquaintances whether the people I worked with couldn’t, uh, tell — the supposition being that an educated person is ineradicably different, and in a superior direction, from your workaday drones.

To state the proposition in reverse, low-wage workers are no more homogeneous in personality or ability than people who write for a living, and no less likely to be funny or bright.

In each setting, toward the end of my stay and after much anxious forethought, I “came out” to a few chosen coworkers. The result was always stunningly anticlimactic, my favorite response being, “Does this mean you’re not going to be back on the evening shift next week?”