Peso and Dimed

America's greatest 20th-century accomplishment may have been the creation of a society in which relative poverty no longer seemed fearful. Someone willing to work steadily at a humble job would be decently housed and fed; public libraries and television put potentially spectacular entertainment there for the taking. Children complicated the picture, so if you had them, best to be married. So did violent crime-which destroyed the livable texture of countless poor urban neighborhoods.

But factor out the bad decisions people make with their money and a careful person stuck for some reason in the lower levels of the American wage-earning could still do okay. No holidays to Disney World perhaps, and probably some difficulties with unforeseen expenses. Nevertheless a kind of comfort zone could be assumed. After all, it was not so long ago that an American guy could get a factory job out of high school, get married, buy a house, eventually a boat, and raise three kids all on his own salary, however utopian that seems today.

Nickel and Dimed, the important new book by Barbara Ehrenreich, drives a stake through the notion that such a comfort zone still exists, and does it with a verve and wit that make it the year's most important political book. The plot is simple. Ehrenreich, an accomplished author (physically fit, middle-aged, rather left-wing) goes incognito for about two years and tries to make ends meet with entry-level jobs. She waitresses, cleans hotel rooms and later private homes with a maid service, serves meals in a nursing facility and keeps the shelves neat as a Wal-Mart "associate." She lives in Key West, Portland, ME, and Minneapolis, records her expenses carefully, keeps her personal life out of it. (I wondered whether she was allowed occasional visits home to a real-life lover, or made other arrangements. Then again, as sheer physical exhaustion is so much a part of the world she inhabits, it may not have been an issue at all.)

Her well-documented conclusion is that it is not possible to make ends meet with one seven-dollar-an-hour job; that rent and carfare and food take up nearly all one's paycheck. Along the way we learn that corporate America, deploying a battery of drug tests and psychological screening, has put a good deal of effort into securing a docile work force; that most of her coworkers were competent, honorable and barely coping-sharing small apartments with relatives, sleeping on couches, with no time or energy left for any type of personal life.

Lacking the capital for a security deposit on a low-rent apartment, Ehrenreich discovered her housing options were limited to frightening cheap motels or rent-a-bed dormitories. Two jobs were needed to really keep comfortably above water, but waitressing was too exhausting after a seven-hour shift somewhere else. The tv waitress, comfortable in her station and her life-"Rosie" touting "Bounty, the quicker picker-upper"-is as much a fiction as Mr. Clean.

This is not a policy book, and no one in the American establishment is losing sleep because working-class life is meaner than it used to be. Welfare creates its own set of difficulties that are probably worse. Socialism is no longer a viable dream. Ehrenreich does make a semi-ironic reference to "Latinos hogging all the crap jobs and substandard housing" in some parts of the country-regions that she then avoids, and it is certainly no accident that the closest she came to achieving financial stability was in relatively immigrant-free Maine, a state with a tight labor market.

She certainly doesn't argue that the problems of the working poor might be alleviated by reducing the flow of unskilled immigrant labor into the workforce. But of course they would be. It was symptomatic of the state of mind of the American political establishment that when President Bush last month raised the prospect of an amnesty for Mexican illegal immigrants or perhaps all illegal immigrants-a measure that would pretty much tell the world that the Border Patrol is no longer relevant-there was virtually no mention (sole exception: Molly Ivins) of the impact such a measure would have on the wages of the American working poor. Indeed, in all the back and forth about immigration policy-are new immigrants assimilating? should they assimilate? should they be educated in Spanish or English, sing the national anthem, vote in Mexican elections?-there is no disagreement over the salient economic fact that the importation of unskilled foreign workers lowers the wages of unskilled American workers.

As Christopher Lasch pointed out in The Revolt of the Elites, America now has a ruling establishment that has essentially seceded from the country, no longer feeling any particular ties or responsibility to native citizens who might need them for protection or guidance. The establishment's members are all globalists now. This is the underlying cause of the hardship Ehrenreich describes. Artistically speaking she may be right to avoid political speculation in her own book, but her account does raise questions that will find political answers, one way or another.