From Wikipedia:
Wage slavery is a term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. It is usually used to refer to a situation where a person’s livelihood depends on wages or a salary, especially when the dependence is total and immediate.
Land has written a book which is very well structured, and therein lies her true forté; where other authors may simply opt for straightforward chronology, Land jumps in time to firmly display where she, and her small child, ended up becoming dependant on welfare and monies from friends.
One of the best things about this book, is Land’s no-nonsense way of describing hardship and how truly horrific it is to live on the edge of abject poverty, while constantly trying to fend not only for herself, but for her infant, especially as the child’s father is trying to combat them.
The foreword to this book is written by erudite Barbara Ehrenreich, famous for her book “Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America“. From the foreword:
These workers unclog our drains of pubic hairs, they witness our dirty laundry literally and metaphorically. Yet, they remain invisible—overlooked in our nation’s politics and policies, looked down upon at our front doors. I know because I briefly inhabited this life as a reporter working in low-wage jobs for my book Nickel and Dimed. Unlike Stephanie, I could always go back to my far-more-comfortable life as a writer.
Perhaps the most hurtful feature of Stephanie’s world is the antagonism beamed out toward her by the more fortunate. This is class prejudice, and it is inflicted especially on manual laborers, who are often judged to be morally and intellectually inferior to those who wear suits or sit at desks. At the supermarket, other customers eye Stephanie’s shopping cart judgmentally while she pays with food stamps. One older man says, loudly, “You’re welcome!” as if he had personally paid for her groceries. This mentality reaches far beyond this one encounter Stephanie had and represents the views of much of our society.
This book introduces the reader not only into the hard world of trite, non-stop physical labour, but also into the forays of trying to make a better world for oneself and one’s infant, in spite of a government which is currently (and has been for a long time) designed to keep workers both insecure and without the faint possibilities of class mobility, i.e. to work hard, and that way be able to raise above their class level.
Sometimes I cleaned the floors and toilets of homes whose owners I knew, friends who had heard I was desperate for money. They weren’t rich, but these friends had financial cushions beneath them, something I didn’t. A lost paycheck would be a hardship, not a start of events that would end with living in a homeless shelter. They had parents or other family members who could swoop in with money and save them from all of that. No one was swooping in for us. It was just Mia and me.
There’s even sadness in how Land describes the psychography left in the apartments, houses, and trailers that she cleans.
Here’s a memory of a time when Land meets her mother, which particularly goes to show how “poor people” are not the mentally poor ones:
Mom ordered another beer when the bill came for our lunch at Sirens. I checked the time. I needed to give myself two hours to clean the preschool before I picked up Mia. After watching Mom and William amuse themselves with outlandish anecdotes about their neighbors in France for fifteen more minutes, I admitted that I had to leave.
“Oh,” William said, his eyebrows rising. “Do you want me to get the waitress’s attention so you can pay for lunch?” I stared at him.
“I don’t,” I said. We looked at each other, in some kind of standoff.
“I don’t have money to pay.” It would have been appropriate for me to buy them lunch, since they were visiting and had helped me move, but they were supposed to be my parents. I wanted to remind him that he just moved me out of a homeless shelter, but I didn’t and turned to my mom with pleading eyes.
“I can put the beer on my credit card,” she offered.
“I only have ten bucks in my account,” I said. The knots in my throat were growing in size.
“That barely pays for your burger,” William blurted out.
He was right. My burger was $10.59. I had ordered an item exactly twenty-eight cents less than what I had in my bank account. Shame pounded inside my chest. Any triumph I felt that day about my move out of the shelter was shattered. I could not afford a damn burger. I looked from my mom to William and then excused myself to use the bathroom. I didn’t have to pee. I needed to cry.
My reflection in the mirror showed a rail-thin figure, wearing a kid-sized t-shirt and tight-fitting jeans that I’d rolled up at the bottom to hide that they were too short. In the mirror, there was that woman—overworked but without any money to show for it, someone who couldn’t afford a fucking burger. I was often too stressed to eat, and many mealtimes with Mia were just me watching her spoon food into her mouth, thankful for each bite she took. My body looked sinewy and sunken, and all I had left in me was to cry it out in that bathroom.
When I returned, William still sat with his nostrils flared, like some kind of miniature dragon. Mom leaned toward him, whispering something, and he shook his head in disapproval.
“I can pay ten dollars,” I said, sitting down.
“Okay,” Mom said. I hadn’t expected her to accept my offer. It’d be days before I’d get a paycheck. I fumbled in my bag for my wallet and then handed my card to include with hers. After signing the check, I stood and stuffed my card into my back pocket and barely gave her a hug goodbye as I walked out.
I was only a few steps from the table when William said, “Well, I’ve never seen someone act more entitled!”
It’s also very interesting to see how the state system works (against) poor persons:
If we went out and got groceries, I’d spend the morning scrolling my bank account balance and my EBT (electronic benefit transfer) card, a debit card for food paid by the government, to see how much money we had left. EBT cards were still relatively new and had been used only since 2002.
I’d applied for food stamps when I was pregnant, and Jamie still remembered his mom paying for groceries with paper stamps and always sneered at the memory. I was grateful for programs that fed my family, but I’d also carry back home a bag of shame, each time mentally wrestling with what the cashier thought of me, a woman with an infant in a sling, purchasing food on public assistance.
All they saw were the food stamps, the large WIC paper coupons that bought us eggs, cheese, milk, and peanut butter. What they didn’t see was the balance, which hovered around $200 depending on my income, and that it was all the money I had for food. I had to stretch it to the end of each month until the balance was re-upped after the beginning of the month. They didn’t see me eating peanut butter sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, rationing my morning cup of coffee to make it stretch.
Though I didn’t know it then, the government had worked that year to change the stigma surrounding the twenty-nine million people who used food stamps by giving it a new name: the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But whether you called it SNAP or food stamps, the assumption that the poor stole hardworking Americans’ tax money to buy junk food was unchanged.
Land’s way of describing her hardships is great, there are no two ways about it. The one qualm that I have in her writing, is how her infant is used as a kind of literary bat, a simple way of swaying a reader’s mind, and as a literary device, it quickly turns clichéd and used; while I am sure that the infant was in her mind all of the time (and why should she not be?) during her life as this book unraveled, it could (to me) have been written in more interesting ways.
Still, this is a fairly strong book. It does repeat, but how could it not? To paraphrase Alan Greenspan, worker insecurity is required for the rabble to keep in line.
To see how much money plays into every single second of Land’s life, and the lives of the hundreds of millions of Americans who live in poverty or teeter very closely to the poverty line, is astounding, as there exists eight men who own the same wealth as half the world; possibly fewer than that, as that report was published more than two years ago.
She paused before getting out.
“Can you lend me money for a pack of smokes?”
“That’s an hour’s pay,” I said, wincing a little, knowing she’d try to pressure me to give it to her anyway.
She nodded instead, possibly understanding how upset I was. Maybe even understanding I didn’t really have all that much money, either.
I hope this book brings forth a revolution, much like Shane Bauer’s “American Prison“. But, as economic power lies in the hands of the people (and ultimately not in the hands of politicians, regardless of what you might believe), this may require a revolution; reading this book readies our understanding of why.
