Low Wage Jobs example essay topic

The division of labor in today's America can be described in a simple pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are the corporate presidents who depend on individual owners to keep the profits up. The middle section of the pyramid includes the managers of each store, responsible for maintaining employee productivity. The bottom of the pyramid contains the most abundant and expendable block, the low-wage workers. If one level does not function properly, the overall workforce cannot prosper. The problem is that the lowest level of workers cannot function to their full ability because they are not earning enough income to survive until the next paycheck.

Something must be done to help these poor families. A recent living wage has been proposed by numerous individuals, including author Ehrenreich. In her book, Nickel and Dimed: on Not Getting by in America, she offers a personal viewpoint regarding the reasons for a living wage. However, better solutions are available. Although the Ehrenreich documentary Nickel and Dimed gives an emotional argument for a living wage law, the facts were somewhat flawed. New research has found better solutions through the Earned Income Tax Credit.

The story of Nickel and Dimed shows one woman's struggle to survive in three major cities on minimum wage jobs. The story begins in Key West, Florida where Ehrenreich packs up a few belongings and some money to get started, leaves her family and home to work low-wage jobs. She rents a trailer and finds a job at a small restaurant attached to a hotel. As she begins working there, she uncovers many different personal stories of the tragic lifestyle of her co-workers. Ehrenreich soon learns just how physically demanding and hard it is to survive on $2.43 an hour plus tips. "There are no breaks... for eight hours in a row; you never sit except to pee" (Ehrenreich 30).

Countless long, hard nights are spent trying to keep up with the bills, to no avail. Ehrenreich is forced to take on a second low-wage job as a housekeeper just to meet daily expenses. Working two full-time jobs turns out to be too much for Ehrenreich to handle "I start tossing back drugstore-brand ibuprofen's as if they were vitamin C, four before each shift, because an old mouse-related repressive stress injury in my upper back has come back to full-spasm strength, thanks to the tray carrying" (Ehrenreich 33). Ehrenreich is forced to quit, admitting that Key West was too much sweat and pain for one person to try to make a living. She moves on to her second stop, Portland, Maine. When Ehrenreich arrived in Portland, she was unable to find an apartment for a few weeks.

She was forced to live in a cheap motel room. Finding a job was not too difficult, and on her fourth day in Portland, she began work as a dietary aide in a retirement home. Ehrenreich decides she must find another job if she wants to move into an apartment. She secures her place among the employees at "The Maids" cleaning service. Ehrenreich then finds a cramped, one-bedroom apartment where, "the toilet is less then four feet from the tiny kitchen table", and she is forced to close the bathroom door or feel like she is eating in a latrine (Ehrenreich 69). Having her own place, as small as it is, is already a step-up from everyone else in her complex.

A majority of the other residents live in a similar one-bedroom establishment with up to three or four other people (Ehrenreich 70). Ehrenreich begins her new job, assuming it will be a cakewalk; she's been doing housework for years now without pay! Professional housecleaning, she finds, is much different. Ehrenreich works 9-10 hours a day Monday through Friday. She lugs around heavy equipment, crouching, bending, and moving more than any person outside of an aerobics instructor should.

Despite the constant movement, this arrangement works out for the duration of Ehrenreich's stay in Portland. She cleans homes during the week and cleans up after senior citizens on the weekends. Through the maid service, Ehrenreich learns just what kinds of pains and experiences low-wage workers contend with every day. Every employee had their own sob story, but the one that she recollects the most was the experience of a woman who had sprained her ankle on the job.

It was sprained so severely on the job, that any movement brought extreme pain to her entire body. She refused to stop working, injuring her ankle more, because she was afraid to lose her job. She was afraid to tell her boyfriend that she was unable to work. The injured employee, after some coaxing from Ehrenreich, finally agreed to call her boss and tell him what had happened. She ends up getting reduced to tears; partly by him and partly by the pain. She even begins apologizing to him for getting hurt!

Ehrenreich, obviously seeing something wrong with this conversation, got on the phone and blew up at him for "putting money above his employee's health" (Ehrenreich 110). His only response was to tell Ehrenreich to "calm down", and that the maid can, "work through the pain" (Ehrenreich 110). He had no concern for his employee while she was in tears "hopping around on one foot, wiping up pubic hairs" (Ehrenreich 110). Low-wage employees are constantly faced with situations like this because their positions are very expendable, giving them little to no job security. Having no real reason to quit, Ehrenreich leaves Portland and moves on to her final destination, Minneapolis, MN. As did the other two cities, Minneapolis brings an entirely new experience and new set of jobs.

Ehrenreich starts out living in an apartment owned by a friend of a friend who is out of town for a while. She sets out job searching, this time in retail or factory work instead of physical labor. Ehrenreich lands a job at the world's largest retail chain, Wal-Mart. She then moves into a pay-by-the-week motel room, which is an extremely common lifestyle among low-wage families. The motel room is nothing like the rooms most tourists are used to seeing. .".. the single small window has no screen... the door has no bolt" (Ehrenreich 151). Ehrenreich is basically at the mercy of "anything the drifts in from the highway", and she wouldn't "depend on her hosts or neighbors for help", if anything does happen (Ehrenreich 152).

The situation at Wal-Mart is just like the one at "The Maids" in Maine; minimum wage women working under the constant supervision of a white, male manager just looking for something about which to reprimand the ladies. During her employment there, Ehrenreich meets a young lady who is in much the same situation as Ehrenreich. The scene that she recalls vividly is one in which this girl finds a stained, clearance shirt to wear to work for sale. She tries to negotiate an additional discount on the shirt, one above and beyond the employee discount.

The manager refuses to give her any discount at all stating that, .".. there are no reductions and no employee discounts on clearance items" (Ehrenreich 181). The girl is crushed, and now unable to purchase a new shirt to satisfy the employee dress code. Ehrenreich is quick to point out, "there's something wrong when you " re not paid enough to buy a Wal-Mart shirt, a clearance Wal-Mart shirt with a stain on it", especially when it's a shirt to wear for work at Wal-Mart (Ehrenreich 181). Finally, after months of back-breaking labor in three different cities, things begin to take a turn for the worst, in an experimental sense.

The new seasonal rates at her motel room force Ehrenreich out. She has no other choice than to dip into her own emergency money from her old life and live in a nice hotel. As if that wasn't bad enough, after assessing her wages and expenses, Ehrenreich is actually losing money by continuing to work at Wal-Mart and live in the nice hotel. She decides to cut her losses, and return home. Ehrenreich's experience although eye opening proves to have many major flaws that raises questions and the validity of her argument.

The first major flaw noticed was within her first experience as a low-wage worker. In Key West, Ehrenreich maintained a substantial connection to her old life. While working in Key West, Ehrenreich would "take occasional breaks from this life, going home now and then to catch up on e-mail and for conjugal visits" (Ehrenreich 34). Her "home" in Key West was not a typical low-wage life. In order for that to happen, she would have needed to share her "home" will at least two more people. Instead Ehrenreich would return from work to her own place, and her laptop, which "provided a link to my past and future" (Ehrenreich 8).

This connection did not allow her to become fully submerged in her new life. Therefore she didn't possess the same worries and stresses a low-wage worker would have. Ehrenreich's mistakes continue into Minneapolis as well. Her basic set-up of her stay there caused for many questions. First, Ehrenreich did not take on a second job to try to survive Minneapolis, unlike every other Wal-Mart employee she encountered. Second, during her job hunt, Ehrenreich was offered a much higher paying job at Menard's which she did not take because she would have to work longer hours.

Any unemployed laborer trying to meet the basic needs of life would have jumped at that occasion, regardless of the hours. Finally, Ehrenreich had the option of sleeping in a dormitory bed for $19 a night, which she declined, and instead opted to pay $245 a week to live in a hotel. If you were a low-wage worker in this situation for real, which would be more affordable for you, $245 a week, or $133? Obviously Ehrenreich took the luxury of a real hotel over completely engulfing herself in her research. This definitely took away from her argument because she wasn't living the "true life" of a low-wage worker in a large city.

I feel the biggest aspect of Ehrenreich's research that arose questions in my head was, in fact the argument itself. The stance Ehrenreich takes is very emotional, but has little to do with the actual facts. It is true that one hears various stories of people's hardships, and how they could use more money. But what about exploring other options?

Could there be another way to get the families out of the cheap motels and off the streets? The answer is yes. New research on this topic has found just that. A solution is present amidst all of this debate.

It is the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the local EITC. The federal EITC is a credit that reduces the amount of federal tax owed and can result in a refund check. When the EITC exceeds the amount of taxes owed, it results in a tax refund to those who claim and qualify for the credit. A local EITC is additional money given to those who qualify by the local governments. This solution will target low income families rather than just low-wage laborers. Studies conducted by Dr. Mark Turner (Georgetown University) and Dr. Burt Bar now (Johns Hopkins University) show that living wage laws are vastly inefficient when compared to localized EITC programs.

The main difference is that a local EITC focuses the same amount of money, which would be spent on a wage increase, on families with children. In 2002, in the District of Columbia, families with children and earnings below $33,000 could get up to $4,140 from the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and an additional $1,035 from the District's EITC (DC Fiscal Policy Institute 2). That's an additional $5,175 per year for doing nothing more than being a US citizen. Another benefit of this localized EITC is that the allocated money would be spent on a target group rather than the whole population. When comparing a living wage increase and the EITC, the wage increase would benefit just 39 percent of the poorest working families, defined as those with incomes below 60 percent of the poverty level. However, 92 percent of the poorest working families meet the EITC eligibility requirements, suggesting that the EITC is a far better targeted program (Hoar 2).

When grouping all 58 million working families of the sample, regardless of income status, only 0.013 percent of this group benefits from a narrow living wage ordinance, while 16 percent are eligible for the EITC (Hoar 2). Viewed another way, only 26 percent of those affected by a narrow living wage are officially in poverty; however 44 percent of EITC eligible families are below the poverty level. If we are most concerned with helping poor families, EITC programs are shown to be far more efficient in reaching this group (Hoar 2). Any type of living wage increase affects a large number of families that are not near the poverty level. Over seven in ten working families benefiting from living wages have incomes over one and a half times the poverty level, while only 13 percent of EITC eligible families fall into this category (Hoar 2). In fact, studies have shown that most working families that would be affected by a living wage law are not even classified as low income.

Between 42 and 64 percent of living wage eligible families have incomes above the 20th percentile. Also, between 13 and 25 percent of living wage eligible families have incomes above the 40th percentile, a very large proportion for a program that is supposed to be directed at the poorest working families. By contrast, 99 percent of families who are eligible for the EITC have incomes below the 20th percentile, and 100 percent have incomes below the 40th percentile. Ehrenreich's book, Nickel and Dimed gives the public an insight into low-wage work that is sure to be an awakening for most. Unfortunately her argument has little factual backing which lives it open to much criticism. Through her experience Ehrenreich gives the reader many accounts of personal events.

All this really does though is raise public awareness about the need for something to be done. The Earned Income Tax Credit is the solution, and statistically shows its superiority when under debate. Through its specific targeting of poverty stricken families, the Earned Income Tax Credit is what will lead the 21st century's low-wage workers to financial freedom, making America a better place to live for everyone. Ehrenreich, Barbra. Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America. New York: Henry...

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