Nickel and Dimed at Cosi

Nickel and Dimed at Cosi – It feels so good to write about corporations doing bad things. Especially ones that you used to work for. Here is a little paper I wrote for my labor class with thoughts on Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed as it relates to my illustrious tenure at Cosi a/k/a Xando (the bizarre neo-greasy-spoon gourmet fast-food coffeeshop/bars for squagel-eaters).

Nickel and Dimed:
Barbara Ehrenreich’s Experiment and My Life At Cosi.

BY ERIK MOE

In the debate over welfare programs that provide benefits to the poor, opponents often argue that the poor are lazy and unwilling to work hard. The Horatio Alger myth, that hard work will be rewarded, continues to color the debate over poverty. In the wake of welfare-to-work laws enacted during the Bush I and Clinton administrations Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich sought to better understand the issues facing the growing ranks of the working poor. Shunning the comfortable lifestyle she knew as a writer, she placed herself in the position of a divorced, middle-aged woman without significant job skills and inserted herself into the economies of three states: Florida, Maine, and Minnesota. Following (for the most part) a strict set of rules that required her to live only on what she earned, she gained an inside perspective on the conditions that keep the working poor working very hard just to meet their basic needs. Though some of the difficulties Ehrenreich faces are clearly caused by her experiment (most people in her assumed situation would move somewhere where they had friends or family to help them out instead of moving to a new town without a support network), the observations of her coworkers clearly indicate that there are a lot of people facing the same difficulties she did.

My own experience of the years 1996-2002 in Minneapolis and Philadelphia is not unlike the parallel lives Ehrenreich leads during 1998-2000 in Nickel and Dimed. My comparatively privileged background allowed me to pursue schooling part-time and pursue arts-related activities while paying my bills by working a variety of full and part-time jobs of the types Ehrenreich found. The most recent of these jobs, which ended in Summer, 2002 was at an upscale fast-food restaurant and coffeeshop chain called Cosi (formerly Xando). While reading Nickel and Dimed, I could not help but notice the parallels between the conditions Ehrenreich encountered and the situation at Cosi. These parallels began at the hiring process and continued through my stint with the company. Though they did not require a drug test, their hiring process was otherwise nearly identical to the process Ehrenreich encountered at Merry Maids in Maine and Wal-Mart in Minnesota. A slow transition from applicant to employee eliminated the possibility of a confrontational wage negotiation stage. Shortly after I was hired, Cosi began administering the sort of personality test Ehrenreich encountered; “Agree/disagree” questions such as “there is room in every corporation for a non-conformist (135)” seemed to be intended more to judge a worker’s ability to understand the expectations of a corporation than to judge personality. Nickel and Dimed called attention to several illegal practices that store managers at Cosi engaged in while I worked there: including pressuring workers to clock out before their work is completed, shifting hours from one pay period to the next to avoid paying overtime, deleting hours from the computer, and pressuring workers to accept non-monetary compensation (such as food) in order to keep the location’s labor costs low in the corporate books. Ehrenreich also highlights the “money taboo” that corporations cultivate. At Cosi, corporate training materials specifically stated that disclosing our hourly wage to other employees was grounds for immediate termination. According to Ehrenreich, “the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 makes it illegal to punish people for revealing their wages to one another, but the practice is likely to persist until rooted out by lawsuits, company by company (207).” At Cosi, workers accept these abuses and other injustices in part because they are not aware of their rights, but primarily because they are living paycheck to paycheck and they cannot afford the time it takes to search for a new job.

The housing issues Ehrenreich encountered were much bleaker than my experience. Most of my co-workers at Cosi and other low-wage jobs I’ve held have lived in shared apartments with private bedrooms, or have lived in one-bedroom apartments with significant others, or have lived with family – often they have shifted among all of these options in a year’s time. In each city she worked in, Ehrenreich and her coworkers had extreme difficulty with housing. In Florida, at least one of her fellow waitresses lived in a car. Many of the servers, cooks, and maids she met were forced to rent rooms at a weekly rate from motels because they did not have the security deposit and first month’s rent needed to rent an apartment – even in the rare instances when affordable housing was available (in Philadelphia it is legal and common for landlords to request a first and last month’s rent in addition to a third month’s rent as a security deposit at the time of a lease signing). The high cost of the motel makes it much more difficult to save money towards that security deposit. It was not uncommon for workers to improvise housing solutions together – a phenomenon I witnessed while working at Cosi. In Florida, when one waitress’ housing situation with a boyfriend became unworkable, she moved into a motel room shared by her coworkers. In Minnesota, Ehrenreich found a record-level shortage of affordable housing. The only housing she could find for a time was in a dilapidated urban motel with toilets that frequently overflowed. In each city she visited, upper class prosperity had driven the real estate market out of the reach of the poor.

The difficulties these workers face are perpetuated by the demands on their time and energy. In each city, Ehrenreich was forced to work long hours seven days a week at two jobs to make her budget work. This schedule left her with no time or energy to hunt for better-paying jobs or to seek job training. While working as a housecleaner and as a waitress, the physical demands on her body were so taxing that eating and sleeping were the only things she could squeeze in to her free time. Many of my coworkers at Cosi worked such schedules. Cooks and dishwashers there often worked at second restaurants or would work double shifts with days off only rarely. Some of these workers are supporting families; others are enduring these conditions to pay for the schooling that they barely have time to attend.

Health care is largely non-existent for these workers. In some instances, health insurance is touted as an employee benefit, but the workers generally must pay for the expensive and sub-standard “benefits” through a payroll deduction. Such is the case at Cosi, for workers who remain on the payroll for several months while continuing to work an average of at least 25 hours per week (the standard was 20 when I was first hired). Though their work is infinitely more likely to cause health problems than white-collar work, most of the workers Ehrenreich encountered were uninsured.

Nickel and Dimed is a provocative exploration of the issues facing the working poor. Her work provided an excellent lens for considering my own recent life with one foot in that realm. For those without a personal connection to the modern food, cleaning, and retail service economy, the stories of Ehrenreich’s coworkers help to humanize the statistics of economic and welfare policy debates.

Additional Notes:

I wrote this little essay to fulfill a small undergraduate assignment. It seemed wrong to let it age privately on my hard drive, when it could be searchable by Google. Don’t you agree?

There are a lot more things I could tell you about life behind the counter at Cosi if you are interested. For example, the company began forbidding tipping of counter staff like me after I had worked for them for about six months. This policy amounted to a 25% pay cut that was not compensated in any way by the company. After about two months of complaining I received a small raise that was not retroactive and certainly did not compensate for the 25% cut… Breaks were discouraged at Cosi… Minors sometimes served alcohol… I’m sure there was more…

This is one tiny story in the ocean of bad treatment of low-skill labor by corporations. I don’t have the time to do it, but I would love to see someone build a website that would collect labor stories from workers at various corporations and allow workers to evaluate and rate corporations. It would be beautiful if it worked as a parallel to sites like Yahoo Finance, giving workers (and investors) the ability to evaluate companies labor practices in the same way that investors can.