First of all, I just want to start by saying to all my readers that I am not, nor have I ever knowingly been, a Russian spy. I just wanted to make that known.
In other news…it was pretty much just your average Tuesday around these parts. No televisions on the lawn this morning, and nothing much more exciting than a quick birthday celebration for a co-worker — seriously, just a card and some cookies at his cubicle — at the office.
I did finish reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America this evening, the first full book I’ve actually read on my iPad. I liked it, although I think it works best as the story of one woman’s individual experience, with some interesting economic facts, than as an in-depth examination of what it means to be working poor in this country. There’s plenty of food for thought in the book — even if it does hover on the edge of feeling dated, now that it’s almost a decade old — but I found it interesting more as a narrative of a social experiment than anything else.
I did like her closing thoughts:
But now that government has largely withdrawn its “handouts,” now that the overwhelming majority of the poor are out there toiling in Wal-Mart or Wendy’s — well, what are we to think of them? Disapproval and condescension no longer apply, so what outlook makes sense?
Guilt, you may be thinking warily. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to feel? But guilt doesn’t go anywhere near far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame — shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, “you give and you give.”
Someday, of course — and I will make no predictions as to exactly when — they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they’re worth. There’ll be a lot of anger when that day comes, and strikes and disruption. But the sky will not fall, and we will all be better for it in the end.