nickel and dimed continued...

some excerpts from ehrenreich's nickel and dimed

Any emphasis is by me...

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Work is suppposed to save you from being an "outcast,"...but what we do is an outcast's work, invisible and even disgusting. Janitors, cleaning ladies, ditch diggers, changers of adult diapers - these are the untouchables of a supposedly caste-free and democratic society. (p 117)

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How do they feel...about the owners, who have so much while others, like themselves, barely get by? This is the answer from Lori..."All I can think of is like, wow, I'd like to have this stuff someday. It motivates me and I don't feel the slightest resentment because, you know, it's my goal to get to where they are." (p. 118)

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So if low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor in any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace - and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well - you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration fo the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.

Any dictatorship takes a psychological toll on its subjects. If you are treated as an untrustworthy person - a potential slacker, drug addict, or thief - you may being to feel less trustworthy yourself. If you are constantly reminded of your lowly position in the social hierarchy, whether by individual managers or by a plethora of impersonal rules, you begin to accept that unfortunate status. To draw for a moment from an entirely corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals - rats and monkeys for example - that are forces into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming "depressed" in humanlike ways. Their behaviour is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin...declines in their brains. And - what is especially relevant here - they avoid fighting even in self defense. (p. 210-211)

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Ehrenreich references two articles that relate to the animal depression and lack of self defense mentioned above

Shively CA, Laber-Laird K, Anton RF Behavior and physiology of social stress and depression in female cynomolgus monkeys. Biological Psychiatry 41(8): 871-882, 1997.

Blanchard DC, Spencer RL, Weiss SM, Blanchard RJ, McEwen B, Sakai RR. Visible burrow system as a model of chronic social stress: behavioral and neuroendocrine correlates. Psychoneuroendocrinology 20(2): 117-134, 1995.

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i've always found it strange that we (in the West) live in democratic societies but that the work environment is typically non-democratic; we fit into a hierarchy and fill our roles often without question even if it endangers our health and well being

and all for what?