Nickel and Dimed Two, Scrubbing in Maine Summary & Analysis

Two, Scrubbing in Maine

Summary

Ehrenreich decides to look for employment in Portland, Maine. On a previous visit, she noted that it was predominantly Caucasian, and so she will not seem suspect when applying for minimum-wage jobs. She also notes the difficulty in traveling to a town where she has no friends or resources, and the challenges that those who are regularly displaced (the working poor) must face. She stays at a Motel 6 and looks for a permanent place to live. After much searching, she finds a small apartment attached to a motel, for $120 a week. She then starts applying for jobs. She has learned that many of the “now hiring” businesses might not have openings but are expecting turnover.

Many of the jobs have surveys and personality tests. Ehrenreich decides that the tests are easy to navigate, provided that one knows the answers expected of a model employee. Ehrenreich accepts employment offers from a maid service (The Maids) and a nursing home (the Woodcrest Residential Facility).

On her first day at the nursing home, Ehrenreich helps serve food to the patients on the locked Alzheimer’s ward. She enjoys the interactions with the patients overall, but she is overwhelmed with the cleanup. Since the other employees are allowed to eat as well, there are many plates to be hand-scraped and then loaded into an industrial washer. On her break, Ehrenreich joins one of the cooks, Pete, who shows romantic interest in her. He claims that he is actually wealthy, from gambling success, but works due to getting stir-crazy at home. Pete tells Ehrenreich not to trust most of the employees at the nursing home, since they all gossip.

On the weekend, Ehrenreich decides to attend a “tent revival” at the “Deliverance” church downtown. She states that she is an atheist, but the event sounds entertaining. She does not find much spiritual value in the service. She notes that it would “be nice if someone would read this sad-eyed crowd the Sermon on the Mount, accompanied by a rousing commentary on income inequality and the need for a hike in the minimum wage.”

Ehrenreich moves from her motel to a small apartment attached to the Blue Haven Motel. The bathroom is four feet from the kitchen table, and the stove is seven feet from her bed. Reporting for her first day at The Maids, she is given a uniform and meets the other cleaning staff. They are provided coffee, bagels and doughnuts. The veteran cleaning staff are sent in teams to different locations, while Ehrenreich is sent to watch several training videos. She learns that The Maids charges $25 per person-hour, while she will earn $6.65 an hour. She watches the training videos and is confused by the cleaning methods that focus on removing visible dirt and stains, instead of actual deep cleaning. In a footnote, Ehrenreich states that two different cleaning industry experts say that the methods that The Maids teach are “grossly inadequate.” The Maids clean “to create the appearance of having been cleaned.”

When Ehrenreich joins a cleaning team, she finds that the prescribed pace is much faster than in the training videos. She is only given five minutes for lunch, which involves a stop at a convenience store. She was told she would receive thirty minutes for lunch. Ehrenreich estimates that a full day of cleaning requires over 2000 calories. She talks to another employee, who only eats a bag of chips for lunch. The employee tells Ehrenreich that she cannot afford more food and gets dizzy during workdays.

Ehrenreich describes a day when her cleaning team is sent to a large mansion. After dusting the home, Ehrenreich is assigned the kitchen floor. She scrubs the kitchen floor on her hands and knees while the owner of the home stands in the kitchen and watches her work. The house is very warm, but The Maids’ employees are not allowed to eat or drink (even water) while in a client’s home.

After being told to find a way into a client’s home that her team is locked out of, Ehrenreich contracts an itchy skin rash. She believes that it is likely poison ivy, or something similar. Ehrenreich reports to work with a “speckled and inflamed appearance,” assuming that she will be sent home. The manager delivers a speech about “working through it.” She breaks down and calls her dermatologist in Florida for a prescription, unwilling to go through the channels that her peers on the cleaning team would have to go through for treatment. A majority of her fellow maids have ongoing injuries and ailments. She states that her success and efficiency as a cleaner is attributed to “decades of better-than-average medical care, a high-protein diet” and workouts at an expensive gym. She states that she has not “been working, in any hard physical sense, long enough to have ruined my body.” While cleaning, she notes the types of books that are in the homes of the various clients as well as the “unwanted intimacy” of cleaning stains from toilets. While traveling between jobs, she asks if the next house owners are wealthy. She is told “If we’re cleaning their house, they’re wealthy.”

One of Ehrenreich’s fellow maids, Holly, looks sick during work. Ehrenreich learns that Holly is likely pregnant and has had a fight with her husband. Ehrenreich wants to help her and tries to do extra work to alleviate the amount that Holly has to do. Ehrenreich questions her own motives, wondering if she is helping to feel significant. She also finds that after work, in her green and yellow uniform, she is treated poorly everywhere, even by grocery store and gas station employees, who are also paid minimum wage. While working, she spills dirty water on her shoes, from the bag the toilet brush is carried in. It soaks her sock, but it is her only pair of shoes, so she continues to work.

Ehrenreich learns that her first paycheck at The Maids is withheld until she quits or leaves. She will not have enough money for food. After an hour of phone calls to various charitable agencies, she acquires $7.02 worth of food with vouchers. While walking to the car, Holly trips and hurts her ankle. Ehrenreich tries to convince her to go to the hospital to have it examined, even threatening to quit working until Holly sees a doctor. This makes the rest of the cleaning team uncomfortable, and Holly insists on working. On the ride back to the office, Ehrenreich thinks of how she will tell the manager that she cannot stand by while surrounded by human suffering. She states that “The only thing I know for sure is that this is as low as I can get in my life as a maid, and probably in most other lives as well.”

Ehrenreich observes that “what we do is an outcast’s work, invisible and even disgusting.” She states that, “Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditchdiggers, changers of adult diapers—these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society.” Even working-class characters on sitcoms make $15 or more an hour. She reveals herself to her fellow cleaning team and asks them how they feel about the disparity between the houses that they clean and their own lives. They are not bitter. One even states, “I don’t want what they have… what I would like is to be able to take a day off now and then… if I had to… and still be able to buy groceries.”

Analysis

In the second chapter, Ehrenreich revisits the idea that people in poverty are often undervalued and even ignored by society. Ehrenreich supports this theory with an examination of the roads around her hotel. The roads are designed for cars, not pedestrians, so anyone without a car who wants to get from the motel to the Shop-n-Save must be both brave and fast enough to dodge traffic. Her experiences with the cleaning service The Maids also demonstrate this theme. The maids are essentially interchangeable because the homeowners don't interact with the same maids every time and the maids wear identical uniforms. In addition, the homeowners mostly communicate with the office manager and the owner of the franchise. In fact, Ehrenreich points out that many of the owners seem hostile toward the maids. Even other low-wage workers, such as convenience store workers, look down on the maids, suggesting that all of society looks down on low-wage workers, not just wealthy people.

Ehrenreich’s experience in Maine highlights once again that low-wage workers are not seen as individuals but as mechanisms for making money. The secretary who interviews Ehrenreich for a job at a tortilla factory doesn't even greet Ehrenreich. The interview questions at Wal-Mart mainly consist of questions about theft, drugs, and being late. In The Maids’ training video about how to use the backpack vacuum, the inventor says, " See, I am the vacuum cleaner,” unintentionally driving home the point that the maids are treated more like cleaning equipment than humans. Cleaning often requires Ehrenreich and the other maids to perform physically demanding tasks, but despite their hard work, they are not allowed to have a drink of water or wash their hands in the houses they clean. One homeowner is suspicious that that the maids will perform low-quality work, so he set “traps” by leaving little mounds of dirt under rugs to see if the maids cleaned them properly. In Ehrenreich’s experience, the maids are seen as labor, not people, and the general perception is that low-wage workers cannot be trusted.

Chapter 2 introduces the theme of the true value of "working through it.” After other maids warn Ehrenreich that the backpack vacuum is heavy and difficult to use, she feels proud of her ability to handle it efficiently. She is also proud of her cheerful, energetic, and helpful attitude while on the job, inadvertently emphasizing the fact that not only are low-wage workers expected to complete physically difficult work, they are expected to do it with a smile. During one of the morning meetings on the topic of "working through it,” Ted admonishes an unnamed employee for missing work due to a migraine. Later, Ehrenreich has a terrible skin rash, but Ted decides she only has a latex allergy and tells her to work through it. Holly, a team leader at The Maids, works despite being physically ill and possibly pregnant, and later insists on continuing to clean houses after she falls on the job and injures herself. Low-wage workers are encouraged, and sometimes guilted into, “working through it,” a system that clearly benefits management. The working poor are taught to wear (and bear) back-breaking work like a badge of honor, but their extra efforts are very rarely rewarded.

In Chapter 2, Ehrenreich contrasts the lives of the working poor with the lives of wealthy people to show the disparity. Ehrenreich primarily uses Mrs. W and Mrs. W’s house, which is so large that Ehrenreich compares it to a beached ocean liner, as her supporting example. Mrs. W stays home all day and watches her child like a hawk, even charting her child's bowel movements. By contrast, Maddy, who works for the cleaning service, must ask her boyfriend's sister (who she doesn't trust) to watch her eighteen-month-old child because she can’t afford daycare. By drawing this comparison, Ehrenreich demonstrates that wealth allows a parent to choose exactly what type of daily care their child will receive, while poverty forces parents to make compromises on their childcare. Even objects are viewed differently by the rich and the poor. For the wealthy, books are used as decorations or for leisure reading, but the maids view them in terms of how time-consuming they will be to clean. The monastery in northern California where people pay to meditate and do housework serves as another symbol of the stark divide between poor and rich. On one end of the spectrum, wealthy people are paying to do “chores” as a spiritual practice, and on the other end, poor people are spending their weekends working second jobs just so they can put food on the table.

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