Author Barbara Ehrenreich died yesterday, Thursday September 1st, 2022. She worked minimum wage jobs in order to write her book “Nickel and Dimed : on (not) getting by in America“, about what it was like to work minimum wage jobs in ~2000.

Author Emily Guendelsberger wrote what was effectively the 20 year later version, “On the Clock : what low-wage work did to me and how it drives America insane“, about what working minimum wage jobs looked like just before the pandemic. Emily’s book has many similarities, and some differences (spoiler alert – not in a good way), vs what Barbara wrote about.

Why should I care about these books?

These are both good books about what low wage work is like, and how destroying it is. It’s not just the low wages, it’s everything else that goes with it. What all goes with it? There’s the hours in flux from day to day and week to week, with late-breaking changes. That makes it impossible to have a normal biological schedule, children and child care, or scheduling that second low-wage job you need in order to pay the bills. Then there’s the corporate time theft and unreasonableness, not paying you for the time you’re actually there, because you’re doing the necessary intermediate steps that aren’t “what the company hired you to do”. There’s the mental/physical/emotional mistreatment by management and corporate policies as well as by customers. There’s that the housing you can get on these wages may not be safe (especially for women and children), plus it likely won’t come with a kitchen so you have to eat less healthy and more expensive take-out food. And when you can’t pay the bills with the realities of the low-wage work, there’s the functional inaccessibility of public support systems. Really, these companies seem to be in search of human-shaped robots.

Who should read these books?

I think a number of groups should read these books, along with “Can’t Even : How millennials became the burnout generation“, another book I wrote a more full book review of. Those people include:

• Teens who are not showing enough motivation in school or trades to launch into a self-supporting career. If you need to bribe them to get them to read these books, do it, it may be the best money (ROI) you’ve ever spent on your child besides for their health.
• Parents with children who have not yet launched.
• Those who are curious about the topic based on my description.
• Anyone tempted to tell low wage earners, especially those who are also parents of young children, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, work 2-3 jobs, etc. These books show how once you enter this trap, it’s so very hard to get out of from the inside by yourself.
• Anyone who feels called to advocacy for better treatment of humans.
• Those on the FIRE path who know how unhappy they are in their jobs today, and think that they will be happy working low-wage jobs to supplement their investment income during retirement. Even without needing a large amount of income, you aren’t gaining back your time freedom, your physical or emotional health, by working one of these types of jobs in your retirement.

Thank you Barbara, and others like you, who have gone where many of us have never gone, to tell an unforgettable story about how we never want to be there.