Low-wage workers put the rest of us to shame, author says

America's low-wage workers — the people who serve our fries, clean our hotel toilets, ring us up at Wal-Mart — are this country's real philanthropists, says Barbara Ehrenreich. And if you feel guilty about that, she says, that's not enough.

The appropriate emotion, she said in her 2001 best-seller "Nickel and Dimed," should be shame — "shame at our own dependence ... on the underpaid labor of others."

Ehrenreich's sentiments are at the heart of this year's Women's Week at the University of Utah, whose subtitle is "Will Work for Change: Being Nickeled and Dimed in America." Ehrenreich gave the keynote address Wednesday to a full house at the Olpin Union ballroom.

She is a longtime political activist and essayist, but it was when she went undercover — becoming a waitress, house cleaner and retail clerk — that Ehrenreich learned the harder lessons about what it means to be ignored, distrusted, humiliated and underpaid in America. She also learned that the jobs were a lot more taxing, physically and mentally, than she ever imagined.

"I never use 'unskilled' to describe any job anymore," she told her audience.

Ehrenreich owns a car, speaks English and didn't have any small children in tow when she embarked on her experiment, so in these ways she had advantages many blue-collar workers do not. Still, she could barely live on her wages, and like many low-wage workers she at one point had to take on a second job so she could afford a sleazy pay-by-the-week motel. Renting an apartment, of course, was out of the question, since she didn't have enough for a deposit plus first and last month's rent.

Some of the women she worked alongside lived in their cars and went without food. Operating at first on her middle-class bias, she says, she thought the women whose lunch consisted of a small bag of chips were trying to diet.

The "very bleak choice" facing so many American women, she says, is one of two options: working two jobs and therefore seeing their kids so little that it borders on neglect; or "staying home and watching them starve."

The official U.S. poverty level is meaningless, she says, because it is based solely on the cost of food — when housing, health-care and child-care costs have risen more dramatically. In introductory remarks prior to Ehrenreich's talk, University of Utah President Michael K. Young noted that in Utah a single parent with two small children needs to earn $17.60 an hour "to be even minimally self-sufficient," and that 43 percent of renters in Salt Lake City can't afford fair-market rent on a two-bedroom apartment.