From the trenches of minimum-wage existence

In the early 2000s, Stephanie Land found herself the single mother of a small child, out of a broken relationship with the child’s father, with a high school education, and no job skills. She needed to make a living for herself and her daughter, and so fell back on the only available opportunity: housecleaning at minimum wage or less. Maid is her report from the approximately two years of working as a house cleaner.

Land grew up in the middle class, and it’s not entirely clear from the book why she had so few options. She starts the book when she is 28, working as a bartender, and dating Jamie who has always said he doesn’t want children. Then she finds out she is pregnant. Jamie is still strongly opposed to having a baby, but Land eventually decides to go ahead anyway. She had the option of going to college, but she decides to stay in the area so she would be close to the child’s (unwilling) father.

Maybe Jamie would come around. Maybe it would just take some time. […] I had to at least give him the opportunity to be a dad. My child deserved that.

Make of that what you will, but her plan didn’t seem to offer Jamie many options. Over the next two years he provides a smattering of court-ordered child support. He does indeed develop a relationship with the child, but by the end of the book, Land moves with Mia to Missoula, leaving a bitter Jamie behind.

I’d read and admired Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, a classic of undercover journalism where she reported on her attempt to survive on minimum wage jobs. Ehrenreich’s book has tightly detailed reporting combined with a real feel for the lives of her fellow minimum wage workers. I was expecting something in the same vein from this book. Land is not a journalist on an assignment, but was actually surviving on her cleaning job, so one would expect an even deeper empathy with blue collar workers in her book. I wanted to sympathize with her, but found it difficult because of the continuous tone of victimhood running through her book.

I work 25 hours a week as a professional cleaner, but it’s not enough to pay the bills.

Indeed, few Americans can pay the bills on a 25-hour workweek.

As with Ehrenreich’s book, Land makes it clear that the support provided by the state is much less than needed for a single parent to survive. Yes, absolutely, the social safety net in America is ragged at best. Still, the reader has an uneasy feeling that Land doesn’t seem to do much to help herself. Could she take up a second job, as so many do? Could she work in a grocery store or retail nearer her house instead of having to drive miles around, using expensive gas, for cleaning jobs? There’s no evidence in the book that she even considered those possibilities.

She works hard at her cleaning, but is generously helped along by a series of kindly bosses and state agencies. Bosses who suggest she takes days off when she is upset (!), and state agencies who find her housing without delay (!!).

The logistics of her life are rather confusing. Whole pages are devoted to her lack of family support. She says that her grandfather has little to spare, her father is abusive, and her mother lives in Europe. Yet family and friends appear helpfully out of the woodwork at opportune moments. For her daughter Mia’s first birthday:

We celebrated at a picnic table overlooking the ocean […] in Port Townsend […]. My dad and my grandfather had travelled for almost two hours from opposite ends of the state to attend. My brother and a few friends came.

When it snows, her boss calls to tell her to stay home, so she won’t get stuck in the snow. A former teacher who lives in the neighbourhood offered

a great sled, with a rope and everything, that he’d leave on the porch.

At one point she has a car accident, and her panic over inadvertently endangering her child is something that every parent can understand. Without a car, she can’t work, but

A man I’d been on a few dates with, Todd […] insisted I borrow a car he didn’t drive anymore. […] ‘I was about to sell it, so you can use it as long as you need’, and then handed me a key.

Land seems to take such generosity for granted, and Todd vanishes from the book thereafter. She has offputting snarky comments about her mother and boyfriend who come to help her move.

Mom in a black-and-white striped dress that hugged her round hips too tight […] They looked ready for sipping espresso, not moving.

Throughout the book, there is a thread of yearning for a solid middle class life. She constantly compares her own life against her well-to-do clients.

We lived in the small room that was our living room and kitchen, and was about the size of most of the guest bedrooms or offices that I dusted.

Understandable, of course, but it’s combined with an envy of those who have such a life, and a sense of entitlement that is less appealing.

Much of the book analyzes the lives of her clients, based on their furniture, photographs and clothes. She eventually concludes that money does not bring happiness. Ah.

She survived via

the Pell Grant, SNAP, TBRA, LI-HEAP, WIC, Medicaid and childcare. I needed seven different kinds of government assistance to survive.

The messy patchwork of social services is a fact, but there is little appreciation for the fact that she is eligible for all of these, able to negotiate their complexity, and that she is awarded the grants.

There is a self-righteous right wing notion that anyone getting any sort of financial help from the state is ripping off taxpayers, and Land makes much of the comments she hears from friends and strangers about welfare recipients.

Taxpayers thought their money subsidized food for lazy poor people.

At the same time:

I tried to give Mia only organic whole milk. Non-organic 2% milk might as well have been white-colored water to me, packed as it was with sugar, salt, antibiotics and hormones.

A lot of working people can’t afford organic milk, and it’s understandable that they might resent seeing someone on food stamps buying this relative luxury. The reader too can sympathize with Land’s desire to give her child the best start in life, while also feeling some discomfort about the fact that people on welfare can afford what would be luxuries for taxpaying workers.

Yet Land’s examples of taxpayer bitterness towards welfare recipients are not very convincing. Someone in the grocery line says ‘You’re welcome’, which she takes to mean that they are pointedly saying that they paid for her groceries. That phrase is so commonly used, though, that it could apply to almost any situation. She sees people in line behind her getting annoyed when her food-stamp purchases take a while to ring up, but surely many of us have experienced such irritation regardless of food-stamps.

To be clear, I have no doubt there is resentment against those on any kind of welfare in America, but I was not convinced from this book that Land had faced much opprobrium personally.

Given her experiences, one would imagine that Land had developed a deep sympathy for those even worse off — people of color, immigrants with imperfect English navigating a complicated social-services system, or migrant workers. Yet the book indicates little thought for others, except for a brief section which feels like it was squeezed in later. She cleans houses with fellow workers, but displays no interest in their lives or problems. Not even a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’…. She complains often about having no friends, but never seems to talk to other mothers at a playground, or talk to her neighbours. Land is focused entirely on her own life and problems.

I was hoping for considerably more introspection and analysis, but this is not an author thoughtful enough to provide it.

Things, as they usually do, have a way of clicking into place.

Land’s book got made into a Netflix series, so for her things did click into place. I wish I’d liked the book, or its author, better.

~ Maid, by Stephanie Land ~ Hatchette, 2019