 Barbara Ehrenreich worked in low-paying jobs to experiment for her book.
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For her book about the American workforce titled Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to step into the workers' shoes - literally.
Ehrenreich worked at a number of low-paying jobs including a maid, a waitress, and a Wal-Mart employee in an attempt to make ends meet on the level of wages earned by most Americans. She described her experiences in the workforce to Boston College students yesterday.
In the introduction, professor Juliet Schorr compared her experience to John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, in which he died his skin black to experience life like an African-American male in the south in the 1950s.
Ehrenreich described the hardships of the various jobs in which she worked, including intimidation, physical, and mental fatigue, and harassment. "I will never use the word 'unskilled' to describe anybody's job again," she said.
In discussing her experiences at Wal-Mart, Ehrenreich brought up the current case against them in New York and Washington states, which alleges that employees were not paid for overtime and they were locked in the store at night to keep them working.
"If I seem to be picking on Wal-Mart, I am," she said, adding that "Wal-Mart is asking for it" as the largest corporation in the world.
Ehrenreich mentioned two growing polarizations in the United States: economic and moral.
"We are becoming ever more divided as a nation," she said. Low-level employees are supposed to be straight as an arrow in conforming to company policies, she said, but executives were held to much looser, if any, moral standards.
She noted the incongruity in a Wal-Mart training video, in which an employee is shown stealing $400 and receiving four years in prison while those guilty of white-collar crimes are stealing millions of dollars and not punished at all.
Ehrenreich criticized President Bush's plan of cutting taxes for the rich and spending money on the military, which forces him to cut programs for everyone else and called for employers to allow unions, universal health care, and for a universal living wage.
