In the book Getting Me Cheap: How Low-Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty, Amanda Freeman and Lisa Dodson examine the various journeys of women trying to get by and get ahead by doing low-wage work. People tend to thin of low-wage work as unskilled and therefore, people performing these jobs don’t deserve decent life supporting pay. But these women doing low-wage work are performing labor that makes our lives much easier. They clean our homes and offices. They prepare and serve the food we eat. They ring up our purchases. They take care of our children, and work other jobs we deem lowly.
Over the past several years, Freeman and Dodson interviewed several American women caught up in low-wage work. These women were also juggling family duties, other employment, and sometimes school. While working these low-wage jobs, these women dealt with unreliable hours, less than understanding bosses, and often had no decent benefits like health insurance.
Many of these women relied on public assistance. The hoops they had to jump through to get aid and the horrible way many of them were treated by people employed to help them was quite infuriating. It’s disgusting how people who are already struggling get pushed down ever further. And finding affordable and reliable childcare was also a roadblock.
The authors spoke to these women both one on one and in group sessions. They also connected their stories to various statistics to illustrate the frustration and discouragement of working low-wage jobs for these women.
Some of the women tried to improve their circumstances by going to college to gain more skills and possibly find a better paying job. However, college isn’t cheap and many of them had employers who weren’t willing to work with their school schedules. Still, I couldn’t believe how clueless some these women going to college were when it came to things like office hours and class credits. This is something most students acclimate to once the go to college.
And yes, there is talk of Covid-19 and how the pandemic upended so many of their lives. A high level executive could easily work from home. But some of the women worked with the public and faced getting infected with Covid-19, not to mention some women lost their jobs and had difficulty finding new employment.
Though most of these stories were heartbreaking, I did find myself questioning some of the women’s choices. A majority of these women were single moms, many with more than one child. And the fathers of these children were mostly absent. To be honest, I couldn’t help but be a little judgmental of these women. Babies happen by design; they just don’t appear on your doorstep. I was often left wondering why women without children working low-wage jobs weren’t profiled. Is it because there is this idea that those of us with kids are hyper careerists and swimming in money? Heck, even jobs requiring education and advanced skills often pay pitiful wages. A few years ago, I saw a copywriting job that wanted applicants to have a Master’s degree and it paid only 10 bucks an hour.
I really wanted to love Getting Me Cheap, but something about it left me wanting more, perhaps a wider scope of women (like women without kids). Even with the personal stories, Getting Me Cheap didn’t grab me the way the late Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed did.
And if you really want to read a tale about a woman working a low-wage job while raising a child, you’re probably better off reading Stephanie Land’s brilliant memoir Maid.
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