Last month, the ABC reported “rental affordability has hit a new low in Australia”. Already, low-wage workers in major cities face the burden of commuting to jobs they can’t afford to live near.

A lovely relative on my partner’s side, who is in her 60s and has worked for many years in aged care, told me last Christmas that women are joining her low-wage workplace after leaving retail jobs, where they were frequently verbally abused by customers. Signs displayed at many Australian retailers suggest this has become a post-pandemic feature of these workplaces.

Verbal abuse was not an aspect of the late Barbara Ehrenreich’s time working at Wal-Mart – one of a series of low-wage jobs she worked “undercover” in the United States over three months in the late 1990s. This year, her internationally bestselling classic about her experience, Nickel and Dimed, turns 25. As low-wage workers face worsening precarity and indignities, its insights are more important than ever.

Ehrenreich, a journalist and activist, proposed her project over lunch with her editor. (Well, sort of.) It was 1998, and as she ordered the salmon and field greens, she pondered the consequences of the Clinton government’s 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which required welfare recipients to engage in compulsory work programs, or “workfare”.

The experience of receiving social security was transformed across the Anglosphere in this period, including in Australia – where John Howard’s government would soon embrace “targeted interventions” (or “mutual obligation”) for welfare recipients.

Ehrenreich asked: how would people kicked off welfare rolls and into the bottom of the labour market make it on US$6 or $7 an hour? A journalist ought to try it for themselves, she suggested. The mission somehow became hers.

Making rent on low wages

Ehrenreich’s classic book is divided into three parts, each written in the present tense.

First, she works as a waitress at two restaurants in Florida, anonymised as Hearthside and Jerry’s. At Hearthside, she works from 2pm to 10pm for US$2.43 per hour plus tips, which she stuffs into a kitchen drawer. She spends six to eight hours at a time on her feet at Jerry’s, usually from 8am until 2pm, rushing between tables, and sitting only “to pee”: there are no breaks. She manages to work at both establishments for a few days, before succumbing to exhaustion and back pain.........

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