The Economic Policy Institute recently reviewed dozens of studies of what constitutes a living wage and came up with $14 an hour. According to Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Blood Rites: The Worst Years of Our Lives, about 60 percent of American workers earn less than $14 an hour. In addition, for the first quarter of 2000, the poorest 10 percent of the workers were earning only 91 percent of what they made in the distant era of Watergate and disco music. This group of unskilled workers has made the least progress back to their 1973 wage levels.
In 1998, the intrepid Ehrenreich, a journalist with a mission to help us see and respect the invisible poor, left her comfortable home in Key West and took a series of low-paying jobs in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota. "I was only visiting a world that others inhabit full-time, often for most of their lives." Her goal was to simply try to match income to expenses. Ehrenreich worked as a waitress, a nursing home aid, a cleaning woman, and a Wal-Mart salesclerk.
What did the author learn? Even living in trailer parks and decrepit residential motels, she could not pay the rent and put food on the table without having another job. So much for the American work ethic: "No one ever said that you could work hard — harder even than you ever thought possible — and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt."
Ehrenrich vividly conveys the humiliating and degrading aspects of working for $6 and $7 an hour wages where there is little privacy, no wasting time, not enough money for lunch, and constant fear of being fired or incapacitated by illness and an inability to pay for medical care. The author, who is a zealous prophet exposing the shadow side of American capitalism, notes: "Most civilized nations compensate for the inadequacy of wages by providing relatively generous public services such as health insurance, free or subsidized child care, subsidized housing, and effective public transportation. But the United States, for all its wealth, leaves its citizens to fend for themselves — facing market-based rents, for example, on their wages alone. For millions of Americans, that $10 — or even $8 or $6 — hourly wage is all there is."
Ehrenreich ends this scathing portrait by designating "the working poor" as "the major philanthropists of our society" providing all the rest of us with the benefits accruing from their unpaid labor. Thomas Aquinas once wrote: "Saints have a heart full of justice." On these terms alone, Barbara Ehrenreich is a modern day saint crying in the wilderness that the poor and the vulnerable be treated fairly.
