Wage against the machine

No Logo did it for corporate branding. Fast Food Nation did it for the gastro-trash industry. Now Barbara Ehrenreich’s New York Times bestseller Nickel & Dimed – Undercover In Low-wage USA makes up the third part of must-read non-fiction trilogy of exposes on the evils of capitalist America, decimating myths about the nobility of menial work.

In 1998, Ehrenreich, a veteran contributor to Harper’s, Time and the New York Times magazine, took it upon herself to go undercover and conduct an old-fashioned Orwell-esque experiment in first person journalism, attempting to eke out a living at a series of drudge jobs: waitressing in Florida, house-cleaning in Maine, working at Wal-Mart in Minnesota.

The results are pretty horrifying, portraying a blue-collar America in a state of perpetual panic, never more than two steps from homelessness. With imminent welfare crackdowns – families ejected from the roll under new rules allowing a lifetime maximum of five years state support – millions of Americans are forced to exist on slave-wages, unable to better themselves while caught in the poverty trap. Factor children into the equation and you have many single parents making do with shaky child care arrangements, in a constant state of anxiety while they work, raising yet another generation of latchkey kids.

This is hardcore. After reading Nickel & Dimed I went out and bought the first four Clash albums – the book burns with the same inflamed anger.

“That’s a good response,” Ehrenreich says, sitting in the lounge of the Morrison Hotel. “Anger certainly was part of it. I would come out of each city pretty angry, not in a personal way but in a cosmic way about what I had seen and experienced.”

Much of Ehrenreich’s anger stems from witnessing the dehumanising systems of control and manipulation exerted by corporations upon workers, who are for the most part unprotected by any effective union movement. One major bugbear is drug testing via urine samples. In the book, the author bristles at being made to provide such samples for analysis, not just because of the degradation, but also because the tests are effectively useless as they can be faked by use of on-line brand names like Detox, NuKlear Urine Additive and Zydot Ultimate Blend. Nevertheless, the tests remain in place as a means of letting the worker know Big Brother is watching.

“This is a particular crusade of mine, the drug testing stuff,” says Ehrenreich. “The American Civil Liberties Union released a big report two years ago saying that all the studies of employment related drug testing say they don’t accomplish any of the things that they’re supposed to. It doesn’t reduce accidents or increase productivity yet they keep doing it, there’s a whole industry devoted to this now. It’s a little ritual humiliation, telling you where you stand in the hierarchy.

“Of course all of this will get much harder once they start doing hair or blood. My son is a freelancer, he works for a publication in Los Angeles quite similar to the one you work for, and he did a big investigative piece on drug testing a few months back. They’ve really cut it back among higher level white collar people and it’s more concentrated among the low wage workers now, although a lot of major newspapers have subjected journalists and editors to it. I think that might be one way of testing who’s a good journalist – anybody who would submit to a drug test should not be hired as a journalist.”

Start talking about corporate mind control and you run the risk of being marginalized as a paranoid crank, yet in Nickel & Dimed the author notes with some disquiet some of the questions asked of prospective employees in interview situations, questions about whether the applicant is subject to depression, or is willing to snitch on workmates.

“You can fake out those tests pretty easily,” says Ehrenreich, “anybody with a normal amount of hypocrisy can get it pretty much right.”

So why do they ask?

“I think they’re there to send you a message as the new employee about what’s expected of you. Like the one on the Wal-Mart test – ‘Agree or disagree: All rules must be followed to the letter at all times’. Which I got wrong because I only agreed ‘strongly’ not ‘totally’.

“Wal-Mart is even worse than I said in the book. There was an expose in the New York Times recently about Wal-Mart’s habit of forcing people to work without pay. I heard rumours to this effect from co-workers, but nothing I could pin down, but now in six different states workers have been complaining of being locked in the store at closing time and forced to work two more hours putting things away until they’re let out, which is like a third world sweatshop. I mean they’re absolutely lawless. And that’s what we’ve been finding out about corporate America in general is that the people at the bottom have to obey all rules to the letter, give complete deference and obedience.”

Much as James Kelman’s novels outline how social welfare bureaucracy is angled towards keeping people ignorant of their entitlements, Nickel & Dimed depicts a similar lack of disclosure. For example, job applicants at Wal-Mart go straight from application status to “orientation”, with no line of demarcation between interview and training where the applicant might get to ask a few questions about work conditions and wages.

“I think that was a very important economic discovery,” says Ehrenreich. “Economists who are very far from the scene tend to think of every worker as a free agent. In fact every effort is made to prevent you from having a moment in which you might think of yourself as a free agent.”