36 pages • 1 hour read
Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Perilous Work”
Jennifer Hernandez and her two children spent 10 months in homeless shelters in Chicago before she finally landed a job cleaning houses and offices. She earned $8.75 per hour and was able to get by with the help of SNAP and a generous rent subsidy. Everything seemed to be looking up, but it didn’t last long. Once winter came, she had to start cleaning foreclosed homes with no heat, power, or water. She wore multiple coats while she worked, and the skin on her hands blistered and peeled. Her asthma made it difficult to breathe, and she became sick again and again. Jennifer’s employer drastically cut her hours due to her illnesses, so she decided to quit her job and begin the arduous process of finding work all over again.
There used to be far more working-class jobs that paid a decent wage, but low-wage employment has grown in recent years and is projected to grow further still. Not only are workers often paid too little to pull themselves out of poverty, but many of them are also given inconsistent hours. They are nevertheless expected to be available whenever the employer may need them, and a worker tends to be quickly disposed of if they find that difficult to do. They may face unsafe working conditions, as was the case for Jennifer, and they are very rarely offered any benefits like health insurance or paid vacation time.
Maintaining a job requires a lot of sacrifice for little in return, but finding a job in the first place is also an uphill battle. Susan fills out online job applications from the tiny screen on her phone. Jennifer had to put the phone number of the homeless shelter on her resume, something that would be an immediate red flag to employers if they were to call her. After all, if an employer has a plethora of job applicants to choose from, why would they hire the homeless woman who is struggling to pull her life together? The authors note that Susan and Jennifer are at a further disadvantage not just because they are poor but due to their skin color as well. They cite multiple studies that have shown that black and Latino job applicants receive significantly fewer callbacks than white applicants, even when they have the same qualifications.
Getting a job may be difficult, but losing one is easy. Rae McCormick lives in Cleveland with her young daughter, and for a while she held a job at Walmart while living with some family friends. Her life outside of work was chaotic, and she struggled to control her emotions due to being abandoned as a child. But at work she felt in control. She worked hard and was twice awarded the distinction of being “cashier of the month.” One day, Rae was preparing to drive to work only to find that the friends she was staying with had used up all the gas. When she called her manager to explain the situation, she was told to not bother showing up again. Despite all her dedication, Rae was fired from her job in an instant.
Chapter 3 Summary: “A Room of One’s Own”
Before they made their way to Chicago’s homeless shelters, Jennifer and her children stayed with her cousin Andrea. They lived in a safe area, her children attended a decent school, and Jennifer got a stable job thanks to her cousin. The first problem that arose were the intense fights that Andrea and her boyfriend would get into in the middle of the night. Then Jennifer’s employer started demanding that she work 70 hours a week, and her children acted out because they rarely saw her. Jennifer decided they would be better off staying with some other family members in Texas, but things turned out to be even worse there. She walked in one day to see her uncle molesting her nine-year-old daughter.
The $2-a-day poor tend to experience housing instability, and that often means having to stay with relatives. The foreclosures brought about by the Great Recession exacerbated the competition for rental units, but there has been a shortage of affordable housing since long before the economy crashed in 2008. Rents have been rising in virtually every area of the country—urban, suburban, and rural—while the real income of renters has declined. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provides a significant helping hand to the poor through public housing and a voucher program often referred to as Section 8. While these programs have been shown to greatly reduce housing instability, they have been underfunded since the 1980s. In the early 2010s there were 85,000 families on the Section 8 waiting list in Chicago, and 268,000 in New York City.
Staying with family or friends can be a positive experience in some cases, but in other cases it leads to trauma. The authors cite a study that found poor children are far more likely to suffer from adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, such as abuse and neglect. The list of ACEs that Rae has experienced is tragically long and includes rape, assault, and abandonment. When she was 11 years old, her father died and her mother left her. She spent one year living alone and putting herself through the fifth grade. She has spent rest of her life bouncing around from one home to the next, including several spells with an abusive boyfriend, with whom she had her daughter. Currently, she lives in a house with two friends of her late father—the closest thing she has to family—and three other tenants. The house looks OK from the outside, but inside it reeks of urine, cigarette smoke, and mold. Rae is only 25 years old, but she has already lost all her teeth, is going blind in one eye, and has high blood pressure. She suffers from toxic stress, meaning that she is always on alert, waiting for the next crisis to appear. Although Rae dreams of providing a better life for her four-year-old daughter, the odds are stacked against her to such an extent that she has almost no chance of achieving her modest goals.
Chapters 2-3 Analysis
Chapters 2 and 3 introduce us to Jennifer Hernandez and Rae McCormick, two single mothers trying to support themselves and their children. Although they both show a great willingness to work hard and improve their families’ lives, they experience one setback after another in their efforts to maintain a job and a roof over their heads. Throughout these chapters, one of the most salient takeaways is that the $2-a-day poor are not living on a level playing field. They are continuously at a disadvantage due to their circumstances, which of course makes it all the more difficult for them to pull themselves out of those circumstances.
People with middle-class jobs often get paid sick leave and a steady salary, in addition to other benefits. Yet when Jennifer became sick—due to her job, no less—the only thing she received was a drastic reduction in hours. If a salaried employee misses a day of work because of a problem with their car, it is unlikely they will lose their job. Yet Rae was fired on the spot. People living in poverty often lack laptops to submit job applications, they lack phone numbers for employers to call them, and they’re treated as more disposable than people with middle-class jobs. Everyone has to deal with unexpected events from time to time, whether it’s transportation issues or falling ill. Those problems are merely an inconvenience for many people, while for the poor they can be disastrous.
Being in $2-a-day poverty is not just about financial hardship. It takes a physical and psychological toll, and those consequences further contribute to the disadvantaged position that the poor tend to find themselves in. Jennifer lost most of her hours because of her illnesses, and her health problems will likely make it difficult for her to find and maintain her next job as well. Rae struggles to control her impulses and her anger—a result of the abuse and abandonment she has experienced throughout her life—and these problems sometimes emerged when she was working at Walmart. Traumatic experiences can happen to people of any socioeconomic background, but statistically it is the poor who suffer the most.
It is likely that growing up in poverty will affect the futures of Jennifer’s and Rae’s children as well. Rae’s daughter Azara has spent her entire life bouncing from one home to the next. She has a mother who loves her and wants to give her a better life, but she is nevertheless spending her childhood living in unsanitary and chaotic environments. People who find themselves in such circumstances—moving from house to house, forced to depend on other people, and emotionally affected by the instability in their lives—are also more vulnerable to abuse. Jennifer’s daughter Kaitlin has to live with the trauma of the sexual abuse she experienced while they were living with Jennifer’s uncle. The poor face an uphill battle in their attempts to climb out of poverty, and it is a battle that their children inherit.
