Nickle and Diming To Death

BARBARA EHRENREICH died last week, a great loss to America's working class, although America's working class will never know it. She was the author of several seminal seminal monographic studies of American culture, focusing mainly on the ordeals of the workng class. Her best known work, "Nicled and Dimed", is a detailed examination of minimum wage labor in America, from her first hand experience. IN her researdh, she obtained employoment variously at Wal mart in the ladies apparel department, at a fast food restaurant, as a server in a "mom and pop" restaurant, and in severl factories, and wrote about her experiences. Her basic conclusion is that there is virtually no way to make a decent living working at minimun wage in America. This was of course somewhat before the recent rise in pay for low wage workers, a phenomenon born of the pandemic and the resulting labor shortage. Since her book was published two decades ago, the situation has improved somewhat, but not significantly. She found it amazing and daunting the amount of knowledge and memorization required to work at Wal Mart, wokers being required to keep track of a vast inventory, to spend enormous amounts of time on their feet, and the physical labor required in moving stock from shelf to shelf, rack to rack, as teh store tends to constantly relocate its merchandise within the building. The sameappies to beinga server in a diner. A hectic routine, constant whilrwind motion, low wages, low tips, much mental calisthenics. She ended up swearing that never again would she use the term "unskilled" to describe minimum wage employment; there truly are no low skill jobs. After the Civle War in the United States the industrial revolution began, and the factory system replaced cottages industries. The hourlly wage system came into being. It was immediately seen by most workers and social critics as wage slavery, and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were an era of labor organizing and violent labor disputes and strikes. The past one hundred years has been a slow but steady struggle for worker's rights, and continues to this day. The greatest service rendered by Barbara Ehrenreich was in her articulate elucidation of the unfinshed business with which the blue collar community must and hopefully will contend and complete.