Poverty Takes Center Stage at FCCF Benefit

from the Greenwich Citizen

Ehrenreich: 'Working Poor' are Society's 'Major Philanthropists'
By PATRICIA McCORMACK

Poverty was the "food for thought" at a $250-a-head benefit luncheon Thursday in the swanky ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Greenwich.

Attending were 700 well-heeled women and a handful of well-off men from Greenwich, Darien, New Canaan, Fairfield, Norwalk, Westport and other towns along the county's gold coast. Among prominent women were Greenwich philanthropist Joan Warburg, and Mary Sullivan, widely admired for her workhorse campaigning during Ned Lamont's run for the U.S. Senate.

Prominent among men was Jim Himes, former Goldman-Sachs hand now engaged in affordable housing pursuits. Himes is also racing to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Chris Shays in the Fourth Congressional District.

The luncheon centerpiece was an announcement about a record $400,000 in awards to nonprofit entities helping under-served women and girls across Fairfield County. The money will be distributed by the Fairfield County Community Foundation's unique Fund for Women and Girls. Himes is on the Foundation's board.

The main course on the "food for thought" menu was served up by Barbara Ehrenreich, peppery social critic and author from Key West, Fla. She revealed that she cut her eye-teeth in print journalism by using her scientific smarts to knock down a report that feminism causes heart disease in women. When Ehrenreich spoke of that wildly incorrect hypothesis, waves of laughter rose up and rocked the ballroom.

Her rebuttal was printed decades ago in a pioneer of Ms. Magazine, edited by super-feminist Gloria Steinem. The edition was so widely received that Ehrenreich, who holds a doctorate in biology from Rockefeller University, decided to make her living by writing.

After she tickled ribs with that anecdote, Ehrenreich got into the meat and potatoes of her conscience-pricking talk. It could have been titled Poverty 101.

Some of her revelations about poverty and minimum wage work by the working poor -especially single moms - caused some folks in the audience to squirm in their cushioned seats. Consider hearing that:

1. Single moms on the minimum wage job track can't afford decent housing, childcare, auto repairs or schooling to qualify for a career that will lift them out of poverty. (Single mom head of households in Fairfield County number 20,281, the Census Bureau reports.)

2. A big box store entry interview for a minimum wage job includes a mandatory urine sample to test for evidence of illegal drug use. Ehrenreich said the routine indignity is seen by Civil Libertarians as a violation of the Fourth Amendment right of freedom from unreasonable search - though most jobholders and applicants find it simply "embarrassing" when they are instructed to void in a plastic receptacle in front of a management representative.

3. In toiling at minimum wage jobs in Florida, Maine and Minnesota, Enrenreich found most stomach-churning was work as a waitress. She reported that grossly unsanitary conditions in a restaurant kitchen were routinely tolerated by management.

The bottom line in Ehrenreich's little instruction about the working poor: Though toiling long hours under demeaning and deplorable conditions, the "working poor" are the unsung "major philanthropists of our society."

"If they were paid a living wage, we all would have to spend more for their services - in hotels, restaurants and big-box stores," Ehrenreich contends.

She bases her premise on first-hand information gained by toiling in minimum wage - and less - jobs in Florida, Maine and Minnesota in the past.

In Maine, she cleaned houses - sometimes with an electric sweeper strapped on her back. The "maid service" employing her had the backpack appliance designed so crews could perform their menial work with a minimum of wasted time. The hose to the appliance was coiled around the waist. Maids were not allowed to use cuss words, smoke or chew gum. And it was taken for granted that hidden cameras were in motion when owners were absent.

In Florida, she toiled as a waitress with workers who were so poor they put partially-smoked cigarettes back in the package for later use. A "break" room had lockers where workers could store their street togs and other personal belongings. But a sign reminded that management has the right to search lockers at any time.

In Minnesota, Ehrenreich worked in a big-box store where she did all kinds of stuff when told. Making order out of chaos on tables and racks of clothes was a constant and vexing challenge. It was work, work, work. Never an idle minute. Rules about restroom breaks were so strictly enforced that one woman regularly wore adult diapers at her work station. During the entry interview at the big-box store Ehrenreich was promised $10 per-hour. That was a myth. Actual starting pay on her first paycheck was $7 per-hour. Overtime? Forget it.

Details of what Ehrenreich learned by becoming one of the "working poor" are between the covers of her landmark book - Nickle and Dimed: On (NOT) Getting By in America (Henry Hold and Co.). It made The New York Times Best-seller list and sold over a million copies. The paperback version, put out by Metropolitan/Owl, is $13.

The tome that chronicles Ehrenreich's attempt to live on minimum wage is now required reading at more than 600 colleges and universities - from the University of the Ozarks to Yale University.

Ehrenreich ends the book with a recommendation that people should feel shame at "our dependence. . . on the underpaid labor of others."

She declares in the book, as she did at the talk on Thursday, "When someone works for less pay than she can live on - when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently - then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.

"The working poor - as they are approvingly-termed - are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.

"They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for.

"They live in substandard housing so that our homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high.

"Someday they are bound to tire of getting so little in return and to demand to be paid what they're worth.

"There will be a lot of anger when that day comes - and strikes and disruption.

"But the sky will not fall...and we will all be better off for it in the end."

Ehrenreich, a frequent contributor to Harper's and The Nation, has been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine. She was given the 2004 Nation Institute/Puffin prize for Creative Citizenship. The annual award goes to "an American who challenges the status quo through distinctive, courageous, imaginative, socially-responsible work of significance."

Now a grandmother of a certain age, Ehrenreich said she has great appreciation and much admiration for the never-seen housekeepers who made her room at the Hyatt perfect during her stay in Greenwich.