Linda Tirado is married with two children and lives in Utah, USA. Until 2014, she worked as a food service worker in a chain restaurant. She blogs, writes and campaigns on poverty and class issues. Since her online essay ‘Why I Make Terrible Decisions’ went viral around the world in autumn 2013, she has received speaking and commentary requests from numerous media outlets and institutions. Hand to Mouth is her first book.

COPYRIGHT

Published by Virago

978-0-3490-0549-2

Copyright © Linda Tirado 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Foreword copyright © Barbara Ehrenreich 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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Hand to Mouth

Table of Contents

About the Author

COPYRIGHT

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction

1:  It Takes Money to Make Money

2:  You Get What You Pay For

3:  You Can’t Pay a Doctor in Chickens Anymore

4:  I’m Not Angry So Much as I’m Really Tired

5:  I’ve Got Way Bigger Problems Than a Spinach Salad Can Solve

6:  This Part Is About Sex

7:  We Do Not Have Babies for Welfare Money

8:  Poverty Is Fucking Expensive

9:  Being Poor Isn’t a Crime – It Just Feels Like It

10:  An Open Letter to Rich People

Afterword

Acknowledgments

For Tom, who can’t say I didn’t warn him

Foreword

By Barbara Ehrenreich

I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time. Well, not this book, because I never imagined that the book I was waiting for would be so devastatingly smart and funny, so consistently entertaining and unflinchingly on target. In fact, I would like to have written it myself – if, that is, I had lived Linda Tirado’s life and extracted all the hard lessons she has learned. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed, which tells the story of my own brief attempt, as a semi-undercover journalist, to survive on low-wage retail and service jobs. Tirado is the real thing.

After my book came out in 2001, I spent over ten years on the road talking about it at union conferences, church gatherings, and mostly on college campuses. I did this partly for the money because I had lost my best-paying journalistic job in 1997, and then a few years later the media decided that writers no longer needed to be paid at all, as if writing involves no caloric expenditure whatsoever.

But I also did it because I was on a mission. People often asked how my work for Nickel and Dimed changed me, and I think they meant how did it make me, as a middle-class person, more aware of the poor. Well, I didn’t need that much more awareness since I was born into the lower rung of the working class and managed to re-land in it by becoming a single mother and then marrying a warehouse worker when I was in my thirties. So my stint as a low-wage worker/journalist had only one major effect on me: It moved me from concern about the exploitation of low-wage workers – to something more like rage.

I had expected to experience material deprivation in my life at $7 an hour (the equivalent of about $9 today), and I certainly did. The fact that I had some built-in privileges like a working car (I got a Rent-A-Wreck in each of the cities where I worked so I wouldn’t end up writing a book about waiting for buses) only made the deprivation part more shocking. Here I was – in good health, with no small children in my care – working full-time, sometimes more than one job at time, sometimes to the point where my legs felt like rubber, and I was living in a dump and dining at convenience stores or Wendy’s.

What I had not expected was the daily humiliation, the insults and what seemed like mean-spirited tricks. To be poor is to be treated like a criminal, under constant suspicion of drug use and theft. It means having no privacy, since the boss has the legal right to search your belongings for stolen items. It involves being jerked around unaccountably, like the time Wal-Mart suddenly changed my schedule, obliterating the second job I had lined up. It means being ordered to “work through” injuries and illness, like the debilitating rash I once acquired from industrial-strength cleaning fluids.

And what was most amazing to me: Being a low-wage worker means being robbed by the very employer who is monitoring you so insistently for theft. You can be forced to work overtime without pay or made to start working forty-five minutes before the time clock starts ticking. If you do the math, you may find that a few more hours have been shaved off your paycheck each week by the corporation’s computers.

But when I made my way from campus to campus, telling my stories about work and urging students to take an interest in all the low-wage workers who were making their education possible every day – the food service workers, janitors, clerical workers, and adjunct faculty – I was invariably asked the question that boils down to: What’s wrong with these people? Meaning the workers, not their bosses.

Typically, the questioner would be a frat boy who had taken Econ 101, a course which exists, as far as I can see, for the sole purpose of convincing young people that the existing class structure is just, fair, and unchangeable anyway. If there’s nothing wrong with our economic arrangements, then the only remaining question is: Why do “these people” have children, lack savings, fail to go to college, eat junk food, smoke cigarettes, or whatever else is imagined to be holding them back?

So when I came across Linda Tirado’s blog about six months ago, I felt an enormous wave of vindication. Even – or, perhaps, especially – her admission that she smokes cigarettes hit me like a gust of fresh air. She tells what it’s like to be a low-wage worker for the long term, with an erratically employed husband and two small children to raise and support. She makes all the points I have been trying to make in my years of campaigning for higher wages and workers’ rights: That poverty is not a “culture” or a character defect; it is a shortage of money. And that that shortage arises from grievously inadequate pay, aggravated by constant humiliation and stress, as well as outright predation by employers, credit companies, and even law enforcement agencies.

But let me get out of the way now. She can tell this so much better than I can.