Getting Me Cheap: How Low-Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty
Amanda Freeman and Lisa Dodson
The New Press, 256 pages
Getting Me Cheap presents the stories and struggles of working women and mothers relegated to jobs on the labor market’s lowest rungs. Amanda Freeman, Professor of Sociology at the University of Hartford, researches motherhood and work. Lisa Dodson, Professor Emerita at Boston College, also wrote Don’t Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America (1998) and The Moral Underground (2009), which celebrates professionals who stick out their necks for the working poor.
We meet mothers who work long hours for low pay in big box stores, restaurants and in various care settings. They describe feelings of stagnation, with few opportunities for promotion, pay increases or continued education. They make sacrifices and endure economic hardship in the short term to focus on their kids while they are young.
Cynthia, a mom in Denver, tells the authors, “I ended up in the hospital with a three-day-old baby, worried about how I will pay rent.” According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in three professionals has access to some paid parental leave. Among low-wage workers, this rate drops to only 4%. Other moms share about the upheaval surrounding the birth of a child without maternity leave, income or accommodations to ease the transition home. One admits, “Child hiding often starts before you even have a job. It may start before the child is born.”
The authentic, unfiltered portraits of working mothers in America, Getting Me Cheap add necessary nuance to national issues like gender equality, equal pay and universal child care. According to the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), 93% of low-wage workers have no access to paid family leave for seriously ill or injured family members. Roughly 7 in 10 women in the lowest-paid positions in the United States are the breadwinners in their families, so time away often leads to periods of unemployment, and that loss may be catastrophic.
Serena, a college-educated mother and nanny in Connecticut, gave birth to her third child two months early, during the pandemic. Out of fear of losing her job, she returned to work for two families just days after being discharged from the hospital. She explained how it went when her employers found out she was pregnant, “They were really upset. They immediately tried to look for another nanny. I told them I’m gonna have my mom watch my baby, so you don’t have to worry about me being away for too long.” The authors wrote that casual replacement is the ultimate insecurity facing care workers employed privately by wealthy families.
The authentic, unfiltered portraits of working mothers in America, Getting Me Cheap add necessary nuance to national issues like gender equality, equal pay and universal child care. According to the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), 93% of low-wage workers have no access to paid family leave for seriously ill or injured family members. Roughly 7 in 10 women in the lowest-paid positions in the United States are the breadwinners in their families, so time away often leads to periods of unemployment, and that loss may be catastrophic.
Many of these women work in child care settings yet cannot find reasonable options for their little ones. Child care aid for low-income families includes income-eligibility vouchers, Head Start and pre-K programs. Most states serve 5%-25% of eligible families who qualify for child care subsidies. Only about 40% of eligible children get into Head Start and Early Head Start programs; thousands of families will remain on the waiting list until their children start kindergarten.
Getting Me Cheap argues that while there is public support for proposals on the local and national levels to expand public preschool options for three- and four-year-olds, there needs to be more conversation and support for developing opportunities and assistance for infant care. Jill, a mother in Boston, explains the low-cost neighborhood child care option, “It was super cheap and convenient.… She wasn’t teaching them anything. She’s just watching them, feeding them, making sure they don’t die.” It is not as if these parents don’t desire quality learning environments for their children; it’s just too expensive. “Sometimes it wasn’t worth it ‘cause I couldn’t pay my other bills,” Jill says.
According to the CLASP, families below the poverty line who pay privately for child care typically spend an average of 30% of their income on it. The cost strains the budgets of even middle-class parents. Of the limited preschool providers that accept vouchers, the Urban Institute uncovered lower teacher wages, higher teacher turnover and high student:teacher ratios.
Access to quality child care options compatible with nontraditional work hours is another barrier. Roughly 4 in 10 kids under 18 live in a household with a parent who works nontraditional hours, such as night shifts, evenings, weekends or rotating schedules. An Urban Institute study of nontraditional hours found these households were more likely to be low-income, single-parent-headed and minority.
The authors’ troubling thesis is that the work of these parents often eases the stress of higher-income families. “Affluent families routinely purchase labor in the form of au pairs, domestic services, child care, counseling, tutoring, eldercare and extracurricular programs,” they write. Most low-income mothers described no access to the resources required to make such decisions: “They were chronically time- and income-starved.”
Years of sacrifice in service to other families and still falling behind with your own have lasting and sometimes intergenerational effects. Decades of research show that low-income people suffer disproportionately from heart disease, diabetes, cancer, obesity and depression.
The difference in average life expectancy between wealthy and low-income people in the United States is now 15 years for men and 10 for women. Black mothers are three to four times more likely to die from complications stemming from pregnancy or childbirth than white mothers.
Such wide health disparities result from deep economic inequality and systemic racism.
“Alongside these sobering numbers are all of the children who lose parents or live with parents who have been profoundly compromised,” authors contend. “Early gendered obligations funneled women into poverty work. Poverty pay kept them from focusing on schooling, friendships, budding talents, extracurriculars, and most of all, just focusing on themselves.”
Freeman and Dodson wield their research expertise while honoring the voices of low-income women—voices often missing from popular public commentary and feminist discourse. They urge readers to “stop and imagine exactly what it is like for millions of mothers and fathers whose labor we rely on all the time.”
Mark Swartz writes for Early Learning Nation and the Stanford Center on Early Childhood about efforts to improve early care and education. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with his wife and two children.
