Me llama la atención que haya tantas reseñas de personas profundamente indignadas y enfadadas con Barbara Ehrenreich: ¿como se atreve una escritora con un doctorado y de clase media alta a pasar unos meses intentando vivir de trabajos mal pagados? No solo tengo una opinión bastante diferente sobre ese «experimento» en sí, es que me parece haber estado leyendo un libro completamente distinto del que han leído esas personas. No soy capaz, por ejemplo, de ver a Ehrenreich como alguien inconsciente de sus privilegios, porque precisamente su posición privilegiada es algo que va recalcando a lo largo de todo el libro. Tampoco se me antoja pomposa ni arrogante su actitud. Al contrario, me parece una persona empática y compasiva, que si inicialmente se pregunta si la van a desenmascarar ya de entrada, no es, creo, porque piense que una persona de su clase social y educación ha de ser detectada de inmediato, sino por la extrañeza que cualquiera sentiríamos en una situación en la que estuviésemos de tapadillo. Está también el desclasamiento, supongo, el volver al trato con una clase social que desde hace tiempo no es en la que te mueves habitualmente. Hay que decir que Barbara Ehrenreich provenía de una familia de clase trabajadora, con un padre minero y una madre ama de casa, que solo durante su adolescencia pudo llegar a considerarse clase media debido a que su padre logró un trabajo mejor pagado. Sea como sea, supongo que lo hecho por Ehrenreich con este libro es algo que no podía sino despertar reacciones muy viscerales, que son tan interesantes, si nos pusiéramos a analizarlas, como el propio Nickel and Dimed.

Pero, en fin, yo lo que venía a decir es que Nickel and Dimed me ha gustado, así, de forma igualmente visceral. Creo que si alguien tenía que tener esa experiencia y escribir un libro sobre ella, Barbara Ehrenreich era una de las personas más adecuadas. (Por cierto, a una de esas reseñas furibundas, alguien respondía algo así como «¿Por qué los pobres no escribís vuestro propio libro sobre el tema si tanto os disgusta este?». Ya sabemos lo que pasa cuando alguien pobre se queja, ¿verdad? De hecho creo que eso es parte del intríngulis de este libro, que está escrito por alguien de la misma clase social de aquellas personas que serían sus principales lectores.) Podría parecer que debido al contexto en que fue publicado (los EE. UU. de Bill Clinton) y la época (de 1998 al 2000) Nickel and Dimed habrá perdido algo de su vigencia, pero desafortunadamente es difícil que envejezca. Por ejemplo, buena parte del libro trata sobre lo difícil que es encontrar alojamiento con un sueldo mínimo (e incluso no tan mínimo). Vaya, ¿de qué me suena esto?

This was not an eye opener for me, having worked minimum wage jobs in the past and knowing people who are still doing that.

Her core message was a good one, but I got irritated with her sometimes smug attitude about this was not her real life and also how highly educated she was.

I passed on buying this book for years because I figured I already knew what Ehrenreich would say. I was mostly right, but it was still a decent read.

Ehrenreich, a highly educated and well-to-do professional writer, here undertakes a social experiment of sorts spending a several months working various unskilled jobs and tries to get by living on the income she earns. She works as a waitress, as a maid, in a retirement home, and at Wal-mart, and reports on her experiences.

Perhaps I had already read too much about this book, or maybe I’ve just had more experience with the working poor than Ehrenreich, but I don’t feel that I learned very much. However, the story is still engaging and well told—she is a “professional writer” after all. Part of the entertainment value of the book is seeing how surprised she seems to be about how the working class lives, and what entry-level work actually involves. She apparently hadn’t spent much time outside her upper middle-class circles and clearly learned a lot more from her experiment than most people would have. I doubt there are very many other Americans who would regard her revelations as terribly eye-opening.

Having said that, I think many of the one-star reviews are unfair. She clearly recognizes—and reports—her own deficiencies. She’s mostly just trying to make people who live in relative luxury understand that for many other people life is just hard.

In the closing analysis, she predictably laments low minimum wages, lack of workers unions, and housing shortages for the poor. She’s not wrong, but she does make a few common mistakes. One is equating the mortgage interest deduction with a tax credit. Another is assuming that if wages for the a particular decile have only increased by X% over the last 10 years that it means those people are only earning X% more now. As Sowell points out, this is only a statistical category. Most workers in this category will move up into higher deciles over time, so after ten years the category contains a different batch of people. Which is really the point with entry-level jobs—the expectation is that with experience and the learning of new skills each worker will gradually earn better wages over time.

Of course this doesn’t always happen, as Ehrenreich clearly describes. And she’s definitely right that this kind of work is hard, often depressing, and sometimes outright degrading. All people deserve better than this. Work shouldn’t be toil. And sure, we hope that there is enough economic mobility that over time workers will gradually move upward from the lower deciles, but there is still much we should do to ensure that those currently in such positions can live decently and with dignity.

For what it’s worth, an interesting counterpoint to Ehrenreich’s experiment is  Scratch Beginnings.  Here the author starts out with much less than Ehrenreich did, doesn’t cheat like she did, yet succeeds impressively at improving his situation. But again, just like Ehrenreich’s book, the top GR reviews are absurdly critical and I would regard these 1-star reviews as similarly unfair. Let the record show I gave both books 3 stars.

This book was vastly disappointing. I thought that it was going to be a big expose of how the lower classes are being kept down or something. But really it's just Ehrenreich working at a copule of crappy jobs and whining about them. She never digs into the history of any of these companies, she never delves very deeply into the backstories of her co-workers to find out why they are where they are. She doesn't care. She's very much a snob, she firmly believes that she's too good for any of these jobs, and doesn't think that her co-workers could ever do anything else. It was depressing in so many ways. . . .