Nickel and Dimed
Chapter two: Scrubbing in Maine
Chapter two: Scrubbing in Maine
In this chapter Barbara gets a job as a maid and a job as a dietary counselor at a nursing home.
Throughout this chapter Barbara reveals the harsh treatments of the Maid’s corporation and the
dissatisfactory way the maids are supposed to clean. If you get sick on the job at for the Maids or if you get sick in general you are supposed to just work through it. If you take off because you are sick you do not receive pay for the day you missed. There is this personality test you have to take if you want to work for Maids. The test as Barbara explains is “Bullshit! Anyone can pass the test!” While cleaning houses the maids are expected to follow strict rules. There is hardly any water used to clean the kitchen, and the bathroom. Basically the maids job is to make the house appear clean, not actually clean the house. This process is unfair to the customers, but it saves time and money for the Maids. It seems that all of the Maids employees are treated unfairly and worked to the bone. The maids also have to wear green and yellow uniforms, they stick out like sore thumbs compared to everyone else. It is clear that if you are a maid you are looked down upon. One maid imparticularly Holly, who doesn’t appear to eat, and could be pregnant; is a team leader who works all the time and gets in trouble with her husband when she doesn’t go to work. It is clear that Holly does not have health insurance. Even when she sprains her ankle holly will not leave work or go to an emergency room. Ted the manager discourages missing work and tries and turn maids against each other by having other maids “snitch” on each other. Ted agrees to let Holly go home after she injures her ankle; but it is unclear if he will pay her for leaving; he should since she was injured on the job. Another maid who is very old and has worked a long time at Maids is paid less than every other maid because she can not vacuum. This is an unfair discrimination against physical ability made by Ted. Barbara questions why these maids stay and work for Ted when there are plenty of other jobs available, the maids just do not have time to find another job, they are stuck. Barbara comes out and tells several fellow co-workers at Maids that she is “really a writer and she is going to write about this place.”
Barbara also works at Woodcrest a nursing home. Here she practically waitresses, she takes orders, helps make food, and does the dishes. She also cleans up after the people when they are done eating. Usually there are a few people that are there to help her. One day Barbara is forced to work with one cook, a broken dishwasher, and just herself as waitress. Luckily it was not that bad because some of the nursing home employees helped Barbara get her job done. Something Barbara has to watch out for is to make sure that diabetic patients do not receive any sugar. Something peculiar about the day Barbara worked by herself was that, that night when she went home she actually began to think that her fellow co-workers were in a conspiracy against her. Pete because she was avoiding “smoke dates” with him, and the others she did not know why they would act against her. In reality Barbara’s job at the nursing home was better than her job at Maids. Barbara lives in a hotel called Blue Haven. Barbara has to get help because she can not afford to buy groceries. She calls around and eventually get help and get food vouchers to buy groceries. It is really hard for minimum wage workers to get the help they need because they do not have the time to find the help they need. Barbara’s living conditions are very cramped, but manageable; especially when compared to other peoples living conditions, or other hotels. Barbara is also injured from working at Maids, her back begins to ache, and her knees from scrubbing, or cleaning floors on her hands and knees. She is also injured from vacuuming. When Barbara quits the Maids she just stops by one of her fellow co-workers house (Lori), and lets her have the “satisfaction of returning her Maids uniform to Ted and explaining her departure however she wanted. When Barbara quits work at Woodcrest, she just calls in sick and never shows up for work again.
One thing that I found interesting was that there was a lack of reported domestic workers. It was like all the people hiring privat domestic workers and all the domestic workers did not want anyone to know about them. On page 99 of Nickel and Dimed Barbara states the following information: "This invisibility persits at the macroscopic level. The Census Bureau reports that there wer 550,000 domestic workers in 1998 up 10 percent since 1996,but this may be a considerable underestimate.
