According to the National Coalition for the Homeless, in 1998the year I started this projectit took, on average nationwide, an hourly wage of $8.89 to afford a one-bedroom apartment, and the Preamble Center for Public Policy was estimating that the odds against a typical welfare recipient's landing a job at such a 'living wage' were about 97 to 1.

But if the question was whether a single mother leaving welfare could survive without government assistance in the form of food stamps, Medicaid, and housing and child care subsidies, the answer was well known before I ever left the comforts of home. With the prevailing wages running at $6$7 an hour in my town and rents at $400 a month or more, the numbers might, it seemed to me, just barely work out all right.

I could just pay myself a typical entry-level wage for eight hours a day, charge myself for room and board plus some plausible expenses like gas, and total up the numbers after a month. So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who'd had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.Īdding to my misgivings, certain family members kept reminding me unhelpfully that I could do this project, after a fashion, without ever leaving my study. My father had been a copper miner uncles and grandfathers worked in the mines or for the Union Pacific. My sister has been through one low-paid job after anotherphone company business rep, factory worker, receptionistconstantly struggling against what she calls 'the hopelessness of being a wage slave.' My husband and companion of seventeen years was a $4.50-an-hour warehouse worker when I fell in with him, escaping eventually and with huge relief to become an organizer for the Teamsters. In my own family, the low-wage way of life had never been many degrees of separation away it was close enough, in any case, to make me treasure the gloriously autonomous, if not always well-paid, writing life. I felt sorry for the parents who had paid college tuition for these blue-collar wannabes and sorry, too, for the people they intended to uplift. The last time anyone had urged me to forsake my normal life for a run-of-the-mill low-paid job had been in the seventies, when dozens, perhaps hundreds, of sixties radicals started going into the factories to 'proletarianize' themselves and organize the working class in the process.

Nickel and dimed online book