[Solved] 1. Discuss the high cost of being poor.聽 2. Is mobility a... |
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1. Discuss the high cost of being poor.聽 2. Is mobility a possibility for the "nickel-and-dimed?" What aspects of the class system explain their condition? 3. What systematic changes might help low-income people (the "nickel-and-dimed") improve their economic conditions and status?聽 聽 context:聽 Image transcription text Ehrenreich I Nickel and Dimed | 107 Mathematically, the answer is no, as can be shown something between fear and indignation rises in my by taking $6 to $7 an hour, perhaps subtracting a chest. 1 want to say, ;Thank you for your time, sir, dollar or two an hour for child care, multiplying by but this is just an experiment, you know, not my ac- The Everyday Life of the Poor 160 hours a month, and comparing the result to the tual life.; prevailing rents. According to the National Coali- So begins my career at the Hearthside, I shall call tion for the Homeless, for example, in 1998 it took, it, one small profit center within a global discount on average nationwide, an hourly wage of $8.89 to hotel chain, where for two weeks I work from 2:00 afford a one-bedroom apartment, and the Preamble . till 10:00 p.m. for $2.43 an hour plus tips. In some Center for Public Policy estimates that the odds futile bid for gentility, the management has barred against a typical welfare recipients landing a job at employees from using the front door, so my first day evading the landlords Doberman pinscher. The big such a ;living wage; arc about 97 to 1. If these num- I enter through the kitchen, where a red-faced man 17. Barbara Ehrenreich* problem with this place, though, is the rent, which ben are right, low-wage work is not a solution to with shoulder-length blond hair is throwing frozen at $675 a month is well beyond my reach. . .. poverty and possibly not even to homelessness. ... steaks against the wall and yelling, ;Fuck this shit!; Nickel and Dimed So 1 decide to make the common trade-off be- On the morning of my first foil day of job search- ;That's just Jack,; explains Gail, the wiry mid- tween affordability and conveniences and go for a ing, I take a red pen to the want ads, which arc aus- dle-aged waitress who is assigned to train me. ;He's At the beginning of June 1998 1 leave behind every- $500-a-month efficiency thirty miles up a two-lane piciously numerous. Everyone in Key Wests on the rag again;-a condition occasioned, in this thing that normally soothes the ego and sustains the highway/rom the employment opportunities of Key booming ;hospitality industry; seems to be looking instance, by the fact that the cook on the morning body-home, career, companion, reputation, ATM West, meaning forty-five minutes if there's no road for someone like me-trainable, flexible, and with shift had forgotten to thaw out the steaks. For the card-for a plunge into the low-wage workforce. construction and I don't get caught behind some suitably humble expectations as to pay. I know I pos- next eight hours, I run after the agile Gail, absorbing There, I become another, occupationally much di- sun-dazed Canadian tourists. ... sess certain traits that might be advantageous-I'm bits of instruction along with fragments of personal minished ;Barbara Ehrenreich;-depicted on job- I am not doing this for the anthropology. My aim white and, I like to think, well-spoken and poised- tragedy. All food must be trayed, and the reason she's application forms as a divorced homemaker whose is nothing so mistily subjective as to ;experience but I decide on two rules: One, I cannot use any so tired today is that she woke up in a cold sweat sole work experience consists of housekeeping in a poverty; or find out how it ;really feels; to be a long- skills derived from my education or usual work- thinking of her boyfriend, who killed himself re- few private homes. 1 am terrified, at the beginning, term low-wage worker. I've had enough unchosen not that there are a lot of want ads for satirical essay- cently in an upstate prison. No refills on lemonade. of being unmasked for what I am: a middle-class encounters with poverty and the world of low-wage ists anyway. Two, I have to take the best-paid job And the reason he was in prison is that a few DUIs journalist setting out to explore the world that wel- work to know it's not a place you want to visit for that is offered me and of course do my best to hold caught up with him, that's all, could have happened fare mothers are entering, at the rate of approxi- touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear. it; no Marxist rants or sneaking off to read novels in to anyone. Carry the creamers to the table in a mon- mately 50,000 a month, as welfare reform kicks in. And with all my real-life assets-bank account, IRA, the ladies' room.... key bowl, never in your hand. And after he was Happily, though, my fears turn out to be entirely health insurance, multiroom home-waiting indul- Most of the big hotels run ads almost continually, gone, she spent several months living in her truck, unwarranted: during a month of poverty and toil, gently in the background, I am, of course, thor- just to build a supply of applicants to replace the peeing in a plastic pee bottle and reading by candle- my name goes unnoticed and for the most part un- oughly insulated from the terrors that afflict the current workers as they drift away or arc fired, so light at night, but you can't live in a truck in the uttered. In this parallel universe where my father genuinely poor. finding a job is just a matter of being at the right No, this is a purely objective, scientific sort of summer, since you need to have the windows down, never got out of the mines and I never got through place at the right time and flexible enough to take which means anything can get in, from mosquitoes college, I am ;baby,; ;honey,; ;biondie,; and, most mission. The humanitarian rationale for welfare re- whatever is being offered that day. This finally hap- commonly, ;girl.; form-as opposed to the more punitive and stingy on up . pens to me at one of the big discount hotel chains, My first task is to find a place to live. I figure that impulses that may actually have motivated it-is At least Gail puts to rest any fears I had of appear- where I go for housekeeping and am sent, instead, to if I can earn $7 an hour-which, from the want ads, that work will lift poor women out of poverty while ing overqualified. From the first day on, I find that simultaneously inflating their self-esteem and hence try out as a waitress at the attached ;family restau- seems doable-1 can afford to spend $500 on rent, of all the things I have left behind, such as home and or maybe, with severe economics, $600. In the Key their future value in the labor market. Thus, what- rant,; a dismal spot with a counter and about thirty identity, what I miss the most is competence. Nor West area, where I live, this pretty much confines me ever the hassles involved in finding child care, trans- tables that looks out on a parking garage and features that I have ever felt utterly competent in the writing to flophouses and trailer homes-like the one, a portation, etc., the transition from welfare to work such tempting fare as ;Pollish [sic] sausage and BBQ business, in which one day's success augurs nothing pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no will end happily, in greater prosperity for all. Now sauce; on 95-dogrcc days. Phillip, the dapper young at all for the next. But in my writing life, 1 at least air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, there are many problems with this comforting pre- West Indian who introduces himself as the manager, have some notion of procedure: do the research, and, by way of diversion, only the challenge of diction, such as the feet that the economy will inevi interviews me with about as much enthusiasm as if make the outline, rough out a draft, etc. As a server, tably undergo a downturn, eliminating many jobs. he were a clerk processing me for Medicare, the prin- though. I am beset by requests like bees: more iced . Barbara Ehrenreich. ;Nickel-and-Dimed: On (Not) Getting Even without a downturn, the influx of a million cipal questions being what shifts can I work and tea here, ketchup over there, a to-go box for table by in America,; Harper's Magazine, January 1999, pp. 37-52. former welfare recipients into the low-wage labor when can I start. I mutter something about being fourteen, and where are the high chairs, anyway? Of Copyright @ 1999 by Barbara Ehrenreich. Used by Permis- sion. All rights reserved. As published in Social Stratification: market could depress wages by as much as 11.9 per- woefully out of practice as a waitress, but he's already on to the uniform: I'm to show up tomorrow wear- the twenty-seven tables, up to six arc usually mine at Class. Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective, 3rd edition, cent, according to the Economic Policy Institute by David Grusky, copyright 2009. Reprinted by permis- ing black slacks and black shoes; he'll provide the any time, though on slow afternoons or if Gail is off, (EPI) in Washington, D.C. I sometimes have the whole place to myself. There is sion of Westview Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC. a But is it really possible to make a living on the rust-colored polo shirt with Hearthside embroidered the touch-screen computer-ordering system to mas- subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. All rights reserved. kinds of jobs currently available to unskilled people? on it, though I might want to wear my own shirt to ter, which is, I suppose, meant to minimize server- get to work, ha ha. At the word ;tomorrow,; cook contact, but in practice requires constant verbal MacBook Air...Image transcription text Ehrenreich I Nickel ana Dimed | 111 112 I PART IV: POVERTY AND THE UNDERCLASS piling up, at the present rate of accumulation it will between jobs, I pick up a spicy chicken sandwich at that, and they announce they now need a side of forty-five-minute commute, I can picture myself be more than a hundred dollars short of my rent the Wendy's drive-through window, gobble it down fries; and so on into distraction. Finally she tells me working two jobs and having the time to shower when the end of the month comes around. Nor can in the car, and change from khaki slacks to black, not to take her wrong. She tries to say things in a between them. I see any expenses to cut. True, I haven't gone the from Hawaiian to rust polo. There is a problem, nice way, but you get into a mode, you know, be- So I take the $500 deposit I have coming from entil-stew route yet, but that's because I don't have a though. When during the 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. dead cause everything has to move so fast. ... my landlord, the $400 I have earned toward the large cooking pot, pot holders, or a ladle to stir with time I finally sit down to wrap silver, my flesh seems I make friends, over time, with the other ;girls; next month's rent, plus the $200 reserved for emer- (which cost about $30 at Kmart, less at thrift stores), to bond to the scat. I try to refuel with a purloined who work my shift: Nita, the tattooed twenty-some- gencies. and use the $1,100 to pay the rent and de- not to mention onions, carrots, and the indispens- cup of soup, as I've seen Gail and Joan do dozens of thing who taunts us by going around saying brightly, posit on trailer number 46 in the Overseas Trailer able bay leaf. 1 do make my lunch almost every times, but a manager catches me and hisses ;No eat- 'Have we started making money yet?; Ellen, whose Park, a mile from the duster of budget hotels that day-usually some slow-burning, high-protein ing!; though there's not a customer around to be of- teenage son cooks on the graveyard shift and who constitute Key West's version of an industrial park. combo like frozen chicken patties with melted cheese fended by the sight of food making contact with a once managed a restaurant in Massachusetts but Number 46 is about eight feet in width and shaped on top and canned pinto beans on the side. Dinner server's lips. So I tell Gail I'm going to quit, and she won't try out for management here because she pre- like a barbell inside, with a narrow region-because is at the Hearthside, which offers its employees a hugs me and says she might just follow me to Jerry's fers being a ;common worker; and not ;ordering of the sink and the stove-separating the bedroom choice of BLT, fish sandwich, or hamburger for only herself. people around.; Easy-going fifty-ish Lucy, with the from what might optimistically be called the ;liv- $2. The burger lasts longest, especially if it's heaped But the chances of this arc minuscule. She has left raucous laugh, who limps toward the end of the shift ing; area, with its two-person table and half-sized with gut-puckering jalapenos, but by midnight my the flophouse and her annoying roommate and is because of something that has gone wrong with her couch. The bathroom is so small my knees rub stomach is growling again. back toglivi ng in her beat-up old truck. But guess leg, the exact nature of which cannot be determined against the shower stall when I sit on the toilet, and So unless I want to start using my car as a resi- what? she reports to me excitedly later that evening: without health insurance. We talk about the usual you can't just leap out of the bed, you have to climb dence, I have to find a second, or alternative, job. I Phillip has given her permission to park overnight in girl things-men, children, and the sinister allure of down to the foot of it in order to find a patch of call all the hotels where 1 filled out housekeeping the hotel parking lot, as long as she keeps out of Jerry's chocolate peanut-butter cream pie-though floor space to stand on. Outside, I am within a few applications weeks ago-the Hyatt, Holiday Inn, sight, and the parking lot should be totally safe, since no one, I notice, ever brings up anything potentially yards of a liquor store, a bar that advertises ;free Econo Lodge, HoJo's, Best Western, plus a half it's patrolled by a hotel security guard! With the expensive, like shopping or movies. As at the beer tomorrow,; a convenience store, and a Burger dozen or so locally run guesthouses. Nothing. Then Hearthside offering benefits like that, how could Hearthside, the only recreation ever referred to is King-but no supermarket or, alas, laundromat. By I start making the rounds again, wasting whole anyone think of leaving? . . parrying, which requires little more than some beer, reputation, the Overseas park is a nest of crime and mornings waiting for some assistant manager to Management at Jerry's is generally calmer and a joint, and a few close friends. Still, no one here is crack, and I am hoping at least for some vibrant, show up, even dipping into places so creepy that the more ;professional; than at the Hearthside, with two homeless, or cops to it anyway, thanks usually to a multicultural street life. But desolation rules night front-desk clerk greets you from behind bulletproof exceptions. One is Joy, a plump, blowsy woman in working husband or boyfriend. All in all, we form a and day, except for a thin stream of pedestrian traf- glass and sells pints of liquor over the counter. But her early thirties, who once kindly devoted several reliable mutual-support group: If one of us is feeling fic heading for their jobs at the Sheraton or either someone has exposed my real-life housekeep- minutes to instructing me in the correct one-handed sick or overwhelmed, another one will ;bev; a table 7-Eleven. There are not exactly people here but ing habits-which are, shall we say, mellow-or I method of carrying trays but whose moods change or even carry trays for her. If one of us is off sneaking what amounts to canned labor, being preserved am at the wrong end of some infallible ethnic equa- disconcertingly from shift to shift and even within a cigarette or a pee, the others will do their best to from the heat between shifts. . .. tion: most, but by no means all, of the working one. Then there's B. J., a.k.a. B.J.-thc-bitch, whose conceal her absence from the enforcers of corporate When my month-long plunge into poverty is al- housekeepers I sec on my job searches are African contribution is to stand by the kitchen counter and rationality. . most over, 1 finally land my dream job-housekeep- Americans, Spanish-speaking, or immigrants from yell, ;Nita, your orders up, move it!; or, ;Barbara, I make the decision to move closer to Key West. the Central European post-Communist world, didn't you sec you've got another table out there? ing. I do this by walking into the personnel office of First, because of the drive. Second and third, also whereas servers are almost invariably white and Come on, girl!; Among other things, she is hated for the only place I figure I might have some credibility, because of the drive: gas is eating up $4 to $5 a day, monolingually English-speaking. When I finally get having replaced the whipped-cream squirt cans with the hotel attached to Jerry's, and confiding urgently and although Jerry's is as high-volume as you can that I have to have a second job if I am to pay my positive response, I have been identified once big plastic whipped-cream-filled baggies that have to get, the tips average only 10 percent, and not just rent and, no, it couldn't be front-desk clerk, ;All again as server material. Jerry's, which is part of a be squeezed with both hands-because, reportedly, for a newbie like me. Between the base pay of $2.15 well-known national family restaurant chain and she saw or thought she saw employees trying to in- right,; the personnel lady fairly spits, ;So it's house- an hour and the obligation to share tips with the physically attached here to another budget hotel hale the propellant gas from the squirt cans, in the keeping,; and she marches me back to meet Maria, chain, is ready to use me at once. The prospect is hope that it might be nitrous oxide. On my third busboys and dishwashers, we're averaging only the housekeeping manager, a tiny, frenetic Hispanic both exciting and terrifying, because, with about the night, she pulls me aside abruptly and brings her about $7.50 an hour. Then there is the $30 I had to woman who greets me as ;babe; and hands me a same number of tables and counter scats, Jerry's at- face so close that it looks as if she's planning to butt spend on the regulation tan slacks worn by Jerry's pamphlet emphasizing the need for a positive atti- servers-a setback that could take weeks to absorb. traas three or four times the volume of customers as me with her forehead. But instead of saying, ;You're tude. The hours arc nine in the morning till when- the gloomy old Hearthsidc. ... fired,; she says, ;You're doing fine.; The only trouble (I had combed the towns two downscale depart- ever, the pay is $6.10 an hour, and there's one week I start out with the beautiful, heroic idea of han- is I'm spending time chatting with customers: ;That's ment stores hoping for something cheaper but de- of vacation a year. I don't have to ask about health dling the two jobs at once, and for two days I almost how they're getting you.; Furthermore I am letting cided in the end that these marked-down Dockers, insurance once 1 meet Carlotta, the middle-aged do it: the breakfast/lunch shift at Jerry's, which goes them ;run me,; which means harassment by sequent originally $49; were more likely to survive a daily African-American woman who will be training me. till 2:00, arriving at the Hearthside at 2:10, and at- tial demands: you bring the ketchup, and they de- washing.) Of my fellow, servers, everyone who lacks Carla, as she tells me to call her, is missing all of her tempting to hold out until 10:00, In the ten minutes cide they want extra Thousand Island; you bring a working husband or boyfriend seems to have a top front teeth. second job: Nita does something at a computer On that first day of housekeeping and last day of right hours a day; another welds. Without the my entire project-although I don't yet know it's the MacBook Air...Image transcription text Ehrenreich ! Nickel and Dimed | 109 UO I PART IV: POVERTY AND THE UNDERCLASS fine-tuning: ;That's gravy on the mashed, okay? offer. To bed by 1:30 or 2:00, up at 9:00 or 10:00, discovered some survival stratagems unknown to the I am astounded: How can she even think of paying None on the meatloaf,; and so forth-while the read for an hour while my uniform whirls around in middle class. But no. Its not hard to get my co-work- between $40 and $60 a day? But if I was afraid of cook scowls as if I were inventing these refinements the landlord's washing machine, and then its an- ers to talk about their living situations, because sounding like a social worker, I come out just sound- just to torment him. Plus, something I had forgotten other eight hours spent following Maos central in- housing, in almost every case, is the principal source ing like a fool. She squints at me in disbelief, ;And in the years since I was eighteen: about a third of a struction, as laid out in the Little Red Book, which of disruption in their lives, the first thing they fill where am I supposed to get a months rent and a servers job is ;side work; that's invisible to custom- was: Serve the people. you in on when they arrive for their shifts. After a months deposit for an apartment?; I'd been feeling ers-sweeping, scrubbing, slicing, refilling, and re- I could drift along like this, in some dreamy pro- week, I have compiled the following survey: pretty smug about my $500 efficiency, but of course stocking. If it isn't all done, every little bit of it, letarian idyll, except for two things. One is manage Gail is sharing a room in a well-known down- - it was made possible only by the $ 1,300 I had allot- you're going to face the 6:00 p.m. dinner rush de- ment. If I have kept this subject on the margins thus town flophouse for which she and a roommate pay ted myself for start-up costs when I began my low- fenseless and probably go down in flames. I screw up far, it is because I still flinch to think that 1 spent all about $250 a week. Her roommate, a male friend, wage life: $1,000 for the first month's rent and dozens of times at the beginning, sustained in my those weeks under the surveillance of men (and later has begun hitting on her, driving her nuts, but the deposit, $100 for initial groceries and cash in my shame entirely by Gail's support-;It's okay, baby, women) whose job it was to monitor my behavior rent would be impossible alone. pocket, $200 stuffed away for emergencies. In pov- everyone docs that sometime;-because, to my total for signs of sloth, theft, drug abuse, or worse. Not Claude, the Haitian cook, is desperate to get erty, as in certain propositions in physics, starting surprise and despite the scientific detachment I am that managers and especially ;assistant managers; in out of the two-room apartment he shares with his conditions arc everything. doing my best to maintain, I care. ... low-wage settings like this arc exactly the class girlfriend and two other, unrelated, people. As far as There are no secret economics that nourish the Sometimes I play with the fantasy that I am a enemy. In the restaurant business, they are mostly I can determine, the other Haitian men (most of poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special princess who, in penance for some tiny transgression, former cooks or servers, still capable of pinch-hitting whom only speak Creole) live in similarly crowded costs. If you can't put up the two months' rent you has undertaken to feed each of her subjects by hand. in the kitchen or on the floor, just as in hotels they situations. need to secure an apartment, you end up paying But the non-princesses working with me arc just as arc likely to be former clerks, and paid a salary of Annette, a twenty-year-old server who is six through the nose for a room by the week. If you have indulgent, even when this means flouting manage- only about $400 a week. But everyone knows they months pregnant and has been abandoned by her only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can't save ment rules-concerning, for example, the number of have crossed over to the other side, which is. crudely boyfriend, lives with her mother, a postal clerk. by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen croutons that can go on a salad (six). ;Put on all you put, corporate as opposed to human. Cooks want to Marianne and her boyfriend are paying $170 a for the week ahead. You cat fast food, or the hot dogs want,; Gail whispers, ;as long as Stu isn't looking.; prepare tasty meals; servers want to serve them gra- week for a one-person trailer. and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved She dips into her own tip money to buy biscuits and ciously; but managers arc there for only one rea Jack, who is, at $10 an hour, the wealthiest of in a convenience store. If you have no money for gravy for an out-of-work mechanic who's used up all son-to make sure that money is made for some us, lives in the trailer he owns, paying only the health insurance-and the Hearthside's niggardly his money on dental surgery, inspiring me to pick up theoretical entity that exists far away in Chicago or $400-a-month lot fee. plan kicks in only after three months-you go with- the tab for his milk and pic.... New York, if a corporation can be said to have a . The other white cook, Andy, lives on his dry- out routine care or prescription drugs and end up Ten days into it, this is beginning to look like a physical existence at all.. .. docked boat, which, as far as I can tell from his lov- paying the price. Gail, for example, was fine until livable lifestyle. I like Gail, who is ;looking at fifty; Managers can sit-for hours at a time if they ing descriptions, can't be more than twenty feet long. she ran out of money for estrogen pills. She is sup- but moves so fast she can alight in one place and want-but it's their job to sec that no one else ever He offers to take me out on it, once its repaired, but posed to be on the company plan by now, but they hen another without apparently being anywhere be- docs, even when there's nothing to do, and this is the offer comes with inquiries as to my marital sta- claim to have lost her application form and need to tween them. I clown around with Lionel, the teen- why, for servers, slow times can be as exhausting as tus, so I do not follow up on it. begin the paperwork all over again. So she spends $9 age Haitian busboy, and catch a few fragments of rushes. You start dragging out each little chore, be- Tina and her husband are paying $60 a night conversation with Joan, the svelte fortyish hostess cause if the manager on duty catches you in an idle per migraine pill to control the headaches she for a double room in a Days Inn. This is because and militant feminist who is the only one of us who moment, he will give you something far nastier to wouldn't have, she insists, if her estrogen supple- they have no car and the Days Inn is within walking dares to tell Jack to shut the fuck up. I even warm up do. So 1 wipe, I clean, I consolidate ketchup bottles ments were covered. Similarly, Marianne's boyfriend to Jack when, on a slow night and to make up for a and recheck the cheesecake supply, even tour the ta- listance of the Hearthside. When Marianne, one of lost his job as a roofer because he missed so much particularly unwarranted attack on my abilities, or so bles to make sure the customer evaluation forms arc he breakfast servers, is tossed out of her trailer for time after gening a cut on his foot for which he I imagine, he tells me about his glory days as a young all standing perkily in their places-wondering all subletting (which is against the trailer-park rules), couldn't afford the prescribed antibiotic. she leaves her boyfriend and moves in with Tina and man at ;coronary school;-or do you say ;culi- the time how many calorics I burn in these strictly My own situation, when I sit down to assess it her husband. nary;?-in Brooklyn, where he dated a knock-out theatrical exercises. When, on a particularly dead af- after two weeks of work, would not be much better Puerto Rican chick and learned everything there is to ternoon, Stu finds me glancing at a USA Today a cus- . Joan, who had fooled me with her numerous if this were my actual life. 'The seductive thing about know about food. I finish up at 10:00 or 10:30, de- tomer has left behind, he assigns me to vacuum the and tasteful outfits (hostesses wear their own waitressing is that you don't have to wait for payday pending on how much side work I've been able to entire floor with the broken vacuum cleaner that has clothes), lives in a van she parks behind a shopping . to feel a few bills in your pocket, and my tips usually get done during the shift, and cruise home to the a handle only two feet long, and the only way to do center at night and showers in Tinas motel room. cover meals and gas, plus something left over to stuff apes 1 snatched up at random when I left my real that without incurring orthopedic damage is to pro- The clothes arc from thrift shops. into the kitchen drawer I use as a bank. But as the home-Marianne Faithfull, Tracy Chapman. ceed from spot to spot on your knees. ... It strikes me, in my middle-class solipsist, that tourist business slows in the summer heat, I some- Enigma, King Sunny Ade, the Violent Femmes- The other problem, in addition to the less-than- there is gross improvidence in some of these arrange- times leave work with only $20 in tips (the gross is just drained enough for the music to set my cranium nurturing management style, is that this job shows ments. When Gail and I are wrapping silverware in higher, but servers share about 15 percent of their resonating but hardly dead. Midnight snack is no sign of being financially viable. You might imag- napkins-the only task for which we are permitted tips with the busboys and bartenders). With wages Wheat Thins and Monterey Jack, accompanied by ine, from a comfortable distance, that people who to sit-she tells me she is thinking of escaping from included, this amounts to about the minimum wage cheap white wine on ice and whatever AMC has to live, year in and year out, on $6 to $ 10 an hour have her roommate by moving into the Days Inn herself. of $5.15 an hour. Although the sum in the drawer is...Image transcription text 1 14 1 PART IV: POVERTY AND THE UNDERCLASS my car is still parked where I left it. There is no vin- dication in this exit, no fuck-you surge of relief, just 18. Kathryn Edin, Timothy Nelson, an overwhelming, dank sense of failure pressing and Joanna Miranda Reed* down on me and the entire parking lot. I had gone into this venture in the spirit of science, to test a Low-Income Urban Fathers and the mathematical proposition, but somewhere along the ;Package Deal; of Family Life line, in the tunnel vision imposed by long shifts and relentless concentration, it became a test of myself, Economically disadvantaged fathers arc far less likely and dearly I have failed. ... to marry before having children than middle-class When I moved out of the trailer park, I gave the fathers arc, and they have them far earlier (Nock key to number 46 to Gail and arranged for my de- 2007). When they do marry, they are more likely to posit to be transferred to her. She told me that Joan divorce (Martin 2004). In the absence of a marital is still living in her van and that Stu had been fired tic. the government assigns them financial obliga- from the Hearthsidc. . .. tions, which most do not satisfy fully (U.S. Census In one month, I had earned approximately Bureau 2007). Thus, such mens fathering behavior $1,040 and spent $517 on food, gas, toiletries, laun- attracts a good deal of attention from both scholars dry, phone, and utilities. If I had remained in my and poi icy makers. $500 efficiency, I would have been able to pay the Little attention is paid, however, to these men's rent and have $22 left over (which is $78 less than roles as romantic partners. Qualitative studies have the cash 1 had in my pocket at the start of the been an exception to this trend (i.c., Drake and Cay- month). During this time 1 bought no clothing ex- ton 1945; Liebow 1967; Nelson, Clampet-Lund- cept for the required slacks and no prescription quist, and Edin 2002; Furstenberg 2001). As these drugs or medical care (1 did finally buy some vitamin studies have repeatedly shown, economically disad- B to compensate for the lack of vegetables in my vantaged men do engage in romantic relationships; diet). Perhaps I could have saved a little on food if I this is the context into which most of their children had gotten to a supermarket more often, instead of are born (though some children arc the product of convenience stores, but it should be noted that 1 lost non-relationships, i.c., one-night stands) (Augustine, almost four pounds in four weeks, on a diet weighted Nelson, and Edin 2009). New survey research re- heavily toward burgers and fries. veals that fully eight in ten nonmarital children now How former welfare recipients and single moth- enter the world with a mother and father who de- ers will (and do) survive in the low-wage workforce, scribe themselves as ;romantically involved;; up to I cannot imagine. Maybe they will figure out how to half of those parents live together, and at least 70 condense their lives-including child-raising, laun- percent of both mothers and fathers say there is at dry, romance, and meals-into the couple of hours least a 50-50 chance they'll marry each other. Yet it between full-time jobs. Maybe they will takeup res- is also true that fewer than a third of such couples are idence in their vehicles, if they have one. All I know still together by the time the child turns five (Center is that I couldn't hold two jobs and I couldn't make for Research on Child Wellbeing 2007). Low-in- enough money to live on with one. And I had ad- come couples who marry before having children arc vantages unthinkable to many of the long-term fragile as well- much more so than middle-class poor-health, stamina, a working car, and no chil- married couples are but they still function as part- dren to care for and support.. .. ners for a considerable period of time (Martin 2004; The thinking behind welfare reform was that McLanahan 2004). even the humblest jobs are morally uplifting and Wc offer the reader a portrait of the romantic psychologically buoying. In reality they are likely to be fraught with insult and stress. But I did discover partnerships of such men. [Our sample) is of a rela- one redeeming feature of the most abject low-wage tively large group of very economically disadvan work-the camaraderie of people who are, in al- taged white and black men (with earnings below the most all cases, far too smart and funny and caring poverty line for a family of four in the formal for the work they do and the wages they're paid. From Social Class and Changing Families in an Unequal Amer- The hope, of course, is that someday these people ica by Marcia Carlson and Paula England, eds. Copyright will come to know what they're worth, and take ap- 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. Uni- propriate action. versity. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the pub- lisher. Stanford University Press, sup. org....聽 |
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