Getting By—Sort Of

Week of Monday, February 10, 2003

Last month my son emailed us from college to say that he had a job. He had applied to his school cafeteria, been hired, received a company uniform, and was even paid for his two-hour training session. He was proud and so were we. At last, I thought, with the federal minimum wage at $5.15 per hour and his starting wage at $7.15 per hour, my son is gainfully employed. Right?

About this same time I happened to read a book recommended to me as a NY Times bestseller, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed; On (not) Getting By in America (2001). Ehrenreich earned a PhD in biology but has made her way as a writer, authoring a dozen books and writing for the likes of Time, Harper's Magazine, and The New Republic. Over lunch one day she and her editor were waxing eloquent about American poverty, welfare reform and the like, when she wondered aloud how an unskilled but fully employed worker could survive on low wages: “Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism—you know, go out there and try it for themselves.”

Her editor called her bluff and thus began her fascinating economic experiment that resulted in her book. For the next six months she lived the life of an unskilled, fully employed wage earner. In Florida she worked as a waitress on the 2:00 until 10PM shift and as a house cleaner for the likes of Molly Maid. In Maine she worked as a “dietary aide” at a nursing home and as a hotel maid. In Minnesota she clerked at Wal-Mart, the largest private employer in the nation with 825,000 people on the payroll. Although she admits that her experiment was artificial for a number of reasons, Ehrenreich lived in budget motels and dangerous trailer parks, she ate only what she could afford (which tended to be fast food), she discovered that she really needed two such unskilled jobs just to squeak by, and overall found her lot physically and emotionally draining. And God help her if she ever got sick or needed health care.

Mind you, these unskilled wage earners are the fully employed, not the lazy, the unemployed or those abusing welfare. No doubt you will cross their paths today, for they constitute about 30% of the American work force who earn less than $10 per hour ( cf. the Economic Policy Institute). No wonder Ehrenreich struggled to make ends meet: according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, “in the median state a minimum wage worker would have to work 89 hours each week to afford a two-bedroom apartment at 30% of his or her income, which is the federal definition of affordable housing.” Her colleagues routinely worked more than one job, slept in cars, and crowded multiple people into small living quarters.

Like many, I used to think that an industrious person who “really” wanted to get off welfare could easily do so by getting a job. How many of us baby boomers heard the mantras, “hard work is the key to success” and “work hard and you will succeed?” But if you earn about $8 an hour to support a family of four, then you straddle what the federal government defines as the poverty level. Grinding poverty and getting left in the economic dust are not only consequences of unemployment. Millions of people who want to work and who work hard earn far less than they need to afford basic food and shelter; for them getting a job is a far cry from getting by.

Ehrenreich's findings coincide with similar reflections by Ray Boshara and Ted Halstead in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly.¹ Boshara claims that by the end of the 1990s our country had become “the most unequal society in the advanced democratic world.” Consider these statistics: ”The top 20 percent of households earn 56 percent of the nation's income and command an astonishing 83 percent of the nation's wealth. Even more striking, the top one percent earned about 17 percent of national income and owned 38 percent of national wealth...In contrast, the bottom 40 percent of Americans earned just 10 percent of the nation's income and owned less than one percent of the nation's wealth. The bottom 60 percent did only marginally better, accounting for about 23 percent of income and less than five percent of wealth.” As you can easily imagine, there are also striking racial aspects to these inequities, with blacks and Hispanics earning considerably less than white households. The inequities of wealth also spill over into other areas. Owning a house provides stability and the chance to plan for the future in ways that Ehrenreich's colleagues who live in cars and trailer parks cannot. Wealth can be passed on to children; a wage job cannot. Economic clout carries political and social influence, too.

Our country does many things well; we are easily the best in the world in many areas—creating wealth, building a military, producing entertainment, discovering new technologies, and so on, so much so that we have no rival, for good or ill, as the premier cultural force in the world. But we are also a country of startling paradoxes. We have more Nobel laureates and millionaires than any country, but also far higher levels of poverty, homicide, infant mortality, HIV infection, and environmental pollution than most other advanced countries. We spend more on education than anyone but routinely score far worse on standardized tests than our global peers. Rates of teen pregnancy and single parent homes are some of the highest in the world. We have the best health care in the world and people flock here from all over the world to obtain it, but we have over 40 million citizens with no health insurance. We have created more wealth than any civilization in human history but have extraordinarily low levels of personal savings.²

All these statistics can be mind-numbing, and we all know that you can twist numbers to prove a point. Fine economists from the left and the right will have honest disagreements about what causes these socioeconomic inequalities and how they might be ameliorated.

The point I would like to make is that Christians should care deeply about these inequities and do their part to make a difference. To be truly “pro-life” extends far beyond the single issue of abortion. Pro-life Christians should care as much about helping poor children to read as they do about preventing premarital sex. Uncontrolled gun violence should disturb us as much as pornography. Making war on Iraq (we killed 100,000 Iraqis in the last Gulf War) should keep us awake at night as much as making war on drugs here at home. It's one thing to consider what a “fair wage” is for your own self; but what, exactly, would a “fair wage” look like for the 30% of our work force that Ehrenreich got to know?³

Many Christians are in the forefront of creative responses to these socioeconomic inequities. I think of Charles Colson's prison reform, of Village Enterprise Fund's micro-enterprising grants, of Gary Haugen and the International Justice Mission, of Bayshore Christian Ministry teaching children academic skills, of Millard Fuller's Habitat for Humanity, and on and on. May their tribe increase. May they inspire us all to our own small but authentic expressions of Christian love for our neighbor on the journey with Jesus.

1. See Ray Boshara, “The $6,000 Solution,” and Ted Halstead, “The American Paradox,” in The Atlantic Monthly (January-February 2003), pp. 91–95, 123–125.
2. See Halstead's article.
3. Type in “living wage movement” into Google for that entire issue. For a critique of the living wage movement see www.epionline.org/livingwage.

The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself Copyright ©2003 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.