Complaints and Disorders by Barbara Ehrenreich

(In fact, on the Walmart survey she takes, the prospective employee is asked to agree/disagree with the statement “There is room in every corporation for a nonconformist.” The correct answer is “totally disagree.”) When Ehrenreich only “strongly” rather than “very strongly” or “totally” agrees with the statement “rules have to be followed to the letter at all times,” an explanation is demanded of her. This began with tests at the application phase designed to weed out nonconformists and troublemakers. But she also came to understand how workers were kept obedient by a repressive internal hierarchy of power. When Ehrenreich entered the low-wage labor force, she discovered that it was hard to make ends meet. It also contained a (much less discussed) radical critique of how workplaces operate. Having been a 1980s-era founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Ehrenreich said she deserved to be in a club for those who were “democratic socialists before it was fashionable”), and her book was not merely a liberal reformist call to bump up the minimum wage and respect the dignity of labor. Ehrenreich was a staunch socialist (a fact unmentioned in the Guardian and Times obituaries.

But there’s more to the book than the simple observation that wages are too low and rent is too high. As Ehrenreich worked restaurant, retail, and house cleaning jobs across the United States she found coworkers sleeping in cars, depending on relatives, forgoing medical care, and not getting enough to eat, and she herself could barely subsist. It’s true that a central finding of Nickel and Dimed was that it’s really difficult to survive on the minimum wage.

The Times obit says Ehrenreich “found it nearly impossible to subsist on an average of $7 an hour” and says she concluded that “every job takes skill and intelligence… and should be paid accordingly.” The Guardian says the book “helped spread awareness of an economy in which it was necessary to work two or three jobs to survive, and acted as a catalyst of the minimum wage movement.” The New York Times review of the book, which deemed Ehrenreich “our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism,” said the takeaway of the book was that for “a worker holding two jobs, wages are too low, housing costs too high for minimally decent survival.” Indeed, in obituaries for Ehrenreich, the point of the book is summarized as: working class jobs do not pay enough to cover a minimally decent standard of living. Barbara Ehrenreich will probably always be best known for Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a bestseller that recounted her time spent working low-wage jobs across America.

Complaints and Disorders by Barbara Ehrenreich