At the beginning of June 1998 I leave behind everything that normally soothes the ego and sustains the body – home, career, companion, reputation, ATM card – for a plunge into the low-wage workforce.
There, I become another, occupationally much diminished “Barbara Ehrenreich” – depicted on job-application forms as a divorced homemaker whose sole work experience consists of housekeeping in a few private homes. I am terrified, at the beginning, of being unmasked for what I am: a middle-class journalist setting out to explore the world that welfare mothers are entering, at the rate of approximately 50,000 a month, as welfare reform kicks in. Happily, though, my fears turn out to be entirely unwarranted: during a month of poverty and toil, my name goes unnoticed and for the most part unuttered. In this parallel universe where my father never got out of the mines and I never got through college, I am “baby,” “honey,” “blondie,” and, most commonly, “girl.”
We Write Essays for Students
Tell us about your assignment and we will find the best writer for your paper
Get Help Now!My first task is to find a place to live. I figure that if I can earn $7 an hour – which, from the want ads, seems doable – I can afford to spend $500 on rent, or maybe, with severe economies, $600. In the Key West area, where I live, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes – like the one, a pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, and, by way of diversion, only the challenge of evading the landlord’s Doberman pinscher. The big problem with this place, though, is the rent, which at $675 a month is well beyond my reach. All right, Key West is expensive. But so is New York City, or the Bay Area, or Jackson Hole, or Telluride, or Boston, or any other place where tourists and the wealthy compete for living space with the people who clean their toilets and fry their hash browns.(1) Still, it is a shock to realize that “trailer trash” has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to.
So I decide to make the common trade-off between affordability and convenience, and go for a $500-a-month efficiency thirty miles up a two-lane highway from the employment opportunities of Key West, meaning forty-five minutes if there’s no road construction and I don’t get caught behind some sun-dazed Canadian tourists. I hate the drive, along a roadside studded with white crosses commemorating the more effective head-on collisions, but it’s a sweet little place – a cabin, more or less, set in the swampy back yard of the converted mobile home where my landlord, an affable TV repairman, lives with his bartender girlfriend. Anthropologically speaking, a bustling trailer park would be preferable, but here I have a gleaming white floor and a firm mattress, and the few resident bugs are easily vanquished.
Besides, I am not doing this for the anthropology. My aim is nothing so mistily subjective as to “experience poverty” or find out how it “really feels” to be a long-term low-wage worker. I’ve had enough unchosen encounters with poverty and the world of low-wage work to know it’s not a place you want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear. And with all my real-life assets – bank account, IRA, health insurance, multiroom home – waiting indulgently in the background, I am, of course, thoroughly insulated from the terrors that afflict the genuinely poor.
No, this is a purely objective, scientific sort of mission. The humanitarian rationale for welfare reform – as opposed to the more punitive and stingy impulses that may actually have motivated it – is that work will lift poor women out of poverty while simultaneously inflating their self-esteem and hence their future value in the labor market. Thus, whatever the hassles involved in finding child care, transportation, etc., the transition from welfare to work will end happily, in greater prosperity for all. Now there are many problems with this comforting prediction, such as the fact that the economy will inevitably undergo a downturn, eliminating many jobs. Even without a downturn, the influx of a million former welfare recipients into the low-wage labor market could depress wages by as much as 11.9 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington, D.C.
PLACE THIS ORDER OR A SIMILAR ORDER WITH TODAY AND GET AN AMAZING DISCOUNT
The post At the beginning of June 1998 I leave behind everything that normally soothes the ego and sustains the body – home, career, companion, reputation, ATM card – for a plunge into the low-wage workforce. appeared first on Nursing Nursing.
Welcome to originalessaywriters.com, our friendly and experienced essay writers are available 24/7 to complete all your assignments. We offer high-quality academic essays written from scratch to guarantee top grades to all students. All our papers are 100% plagiarism-free and come with a plagiarism report, upon request
Tell Us “Write My Essay for Me” and Relax! You will get an original essay well before your submission deadline.
